Visible Cloaks’ First Album in Nine Years Feels Like a Garden of Sound

Visible Cloaks have released ‘Paradessence,’ their first studio album since 2015’s ‘Reassemblage.’ The nine-year gap held EPs, collaborative records, and a video game score by Spencer Doran, but the new full-length marks a deliberate return to the duo’s core language.

Each fragment of sound feels chiseled, the compositions wandering and morphing across the stereo field. The music is sleek and silvery, but the record never turns cold. It stays warming, open, almost bucolic. The surface repetition only deepens the reward when you lean in and listen to how tones twist and roam.

Speaking over video call, Doran traced the group’s beginnings to what he loosely called the Portland noise scene. They lived with the Oregon Painting Society collective, where artist Brenna Murphy designed the art for ‘Reassemblage’ and ‘Lex,’ and where collaborator Matt Carlson remained a constant. That environment still feeds their process, even as they’ve dipped in and out of a local scene with its own ebb and flow. Portland, he said, is part of their identity as music makers, a physical place to exist within while thinking through the work.

The duo’s approach to field recording leans post-modern rather than naturalistic, revealing artifice over atmosphere. It’s a fitting philosophy for a record that sounds like a garden of digital sprites, stitched back together after years of quiet.