Visible Cloaks: Paradessence

Spencer Doran of the experimental ambient duo on their sculptural approach to music, the concept of "positive space", and Utopianism

The title of Visible Cloaks’ new album is a portmanteau of “paradox” and “essence”, coined by the American writer Alex Shakar: Paradessence.

Shakar cites the example of coffee, a product that is coveted not in spite of, but precisely because of having multiple effects: it’s both stimulating and relaxing – a contradiction at the “schismatic core” (Shakar) of its desirability.

Maybe I’m oversimplifying things here, but isn’t life in the 2020s just one big paradessence? All these conflicting emotions – nothing is black or white, right or wrong anymore, whether in political discussions or individual lifestyle decisions.

Complex problems require nuanced thinking, rather than jumping to quick conclusions, yet people seem to retain this natural tendency to seek simple solutions. “Both can be true” is a phrase that can actually drive people on social media mad.

Visible Cloaks’ music is a product of its time, as it explores how one can be different, seemingly conflicting things at the same time: sound and silence, presence and absence, energy and void, movement and stillness.

In the mid-2010s, the Portland, Oregon-based duo of Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile released two albums – their self-titled debut and their lauded sophomore album Reassemblage – which defined their sound as a unique interpretation of ambient music, a mix of influences from Japanese environmental music and Italian minimalism.

Doran also curated the most important compilation of Kankyō Ongaku, the ambient and New Age music of 1980s Japan, which became popular in the West around a decade ago, when streaming algorithms started marketing it to insular laptop workers.

The term “environmental music” was largely misunderstood in the West, or at least reduced to another simplification, often disregarding the architectural dimension of the music itself. At the same time, the pejorative use of the “background music” category suggested that this was, by its very nature, music of lesser value and artistic merit.

However, those Japanese composers did not see their craft in this light. It was certainly not intended for the mass market upon creation, but decades later, it suddenly became popular among a large group of people due to a shift in technology and lifestyle – namely, the ubiquity of streaming and Wi-Fi combined with the music tech industry’s push to “soundtrack your life.”

Visible Cloaks’ new album seems to actively reject the idea of being used as background music, perhaps even as a reaction to how ambient and New Age have been exploited as “capitalist productivity music” (Huerco S.) in the streaming era. It is fair to say that while Paradessence is probably not the most accessible, it is definitely one of the most alluring works of experimental electronic music released so far this year.

Two tracks on the record were created in collaboration with environmental music pioneers Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano. Visible Cloaks had previously released a joint album with them as part of the FRKWYS series on RVNG. The album features a spoken-word poem written by Ojima, recited in Japanese by Shibano and in French by composer and longtime friend Félicia Atkinson, as well as a contribution by Romanian composer and violinist Ioana Șelaru.

After listening to Paradessence many times, mostly at night and on noise-canceling headphones, a number of questions for the artists arose, and Spencer from the group tried to answer some of them for me. Find our emailed exchange below.

Visible Cloaks, photo: Jonathan Sielaff

I tend to listen to the tracks on Paradessence not as narrative songs, but more as sound sculptures – organisms that come into being, morph and then float or fade away… Is there a visual element to the sound design? Do you regularly have landscapes or objects in mind when creating these tracks?

Spencer Doran: There is certainly a sculptural approach to the way that we work with sound, but it never really comes from a place of trying to capture or recreate an external object… it has more to do with molding and contouring shapes as they arise – usually through some sort of external process –, as opposed to having a mental model of something that you are trying to capture the essence of. I find that having this distinctly non-representational approach allows the listener to draw their own associations more freely, to imagine them as impossible shapes.

There’s a Alexandre Kojève essay where he talks about this in relation to abstract painting – that it can be possible to create beauty in a way that isn’t just replicating what is seen in the world, and that this beauty is perhaps more absolute in form because it exists outside of reality. I find this idea very inspiring, even if it seems beyond my ability to achieve. Music – especially electronic music – is able to work non-representationally with much greater ease than painting, and one of the things that draws me to something like FM synthesis is that in its purest form it doesn’t really point clearly to sounds that exist in reality. Certainly you can try to shape it to resemble, say, a flute or a piano, but at its core it feels deeply unnatural and distinctly digital, in a way that feels liberating.

Do you ever work with samples, or is every sound generated through synthesis? Is it a mix of both?

Certainly a mix of both, although I suppose it depends what you mean by samples. We do use consumer-grade virtual instruments that work by stitching together detailed recordings of actual instrumental performance, which are often framed as being “sample-based” (although not in the, say, Bomb Squad sense of the term). But we also use “physically modeled” instruments that work using synthesis (digital waveguide, karplus-strong, etc.) and thus all of their different properties are much more deeply malleable.

Sample-based instruments can have a much more direct, comfortable realism to them, but they don’t offer the same kind of “extended technique” possibilities that physically modeled instruments do. It’s a bit like the differences between photographic collage and CGI graphics, each has its own set of artistic potency, each can be bent in a different direction.

One technique which appears in a few points on the new record involves placing all of the different parameters of a physically modeled instrument in flux so the tonality is continuously contouring and morphing while being played – imagine a piano whose strings, soundboard and hammers are all shrinking and growing at different rates. This isn’t possible with sample-based instruments in the same way, let alone instruments in reality.

The music on Paradessence has a dream-like quality to it – do you follow a practice of capturing dreams, similar to the dreamwork in Pauline Oliveros’ deep listening practice?

Lately I’ve been keeping a log of my dreams with the note-taking software Obsidian, which allows you to connect different fragments and concepts as nodes that can be connected to one another rhizomatically. It isn’t very useful at the moment but I’m hoping with enough dreams logged I can start to connect different recurring themes and objects/spaces that arise frequently in different dreams to try to better analyse them.

I don’t really have a deep enough relationship with dreamwork to pretend like I can usefully draw direct creative impulses from dreams and I don’t have a dream connection to a listening practice like Oliveros, but I do find adjacent Theta brainwave states to be a very potent idea source, and we do work within a highly abstract musical space that is probably closer to the dream world than waking life.

Visible Cloaks, photo: Jonathan Sielaff

You took influence from architectural theorist Christopher Alexander’s concept of ‘positive space’, the idea that the same degree of care can be given to the shape of the void around an object as the construction of the object itself. Is this a counterproposal to the idea of negative space in dub? Can you explain how you actually shape the void, that silence around sounds?

The idea is that when you are creating an object, you are not just shaping the object itself but you are also in turn shaping the contours of the space around it, that this space can become beautiful in the same way the object does, or even that both become beautiful because of each other in a way that is deeply linked.

For example, looking at Giambattista Nolli’s map of Rome, you can see that the public interior spaces are created by the buildings themselves, these spaces arise from the organic growth of the city and they are not simply negative inversions of the built structures. These spaces feel alive and beautiful because they hold such a deeply causal relationship with the buildings… one shapes the other.

In relation to dub, if you think of Ruddy Redwood going into Duke Reid’s studio and coming out with a vocalless mix of “On the Beach”, the musical space that would normally be occupied by the vocals is suddenly freed up. In dub this also became a possibility space, that this openness allowed a space for the DJ to talk over the track and toasting to emerge, for reverb and delay trails to decay within, all the living potential that a dub mix affords. Suddenly, a very different musical structure becomes possible.

So when you start thinking about this in terms of creating a potentiality in a piece of music, you can actually apply something very similar when you think about it existing within a space - an “environmental” way of listening. Satoshi Ashikawa had a very similar idea in regards to what he thought of as the “figure and ground” relationship between a composition and the environment it is experienced in. The notion of what would usually be considered “empty” space in a piece radically changes when you listen to the environment in the same way that you do the composition – he was coming from this very post-Cagian mode of thinking about silence, what is and isn’t music, et cetera. The relationship between the composition and the environment around it becomes ambiguous, it just as easily becomes inverted in the same way that the two faces become a candlestick in a Rubin vase. For me, this was a really profound and useful insight.

I am also interested in the inherent Utopianism of the music. The press text says that what “hovers at the edges” of this music is “a relationship to imagined futures which is neither naive, cynical, nor nostalgic”. Instead of describing what it isn’t, could you try to explain what it actually is – that relationship, how you are thinking about imagined futures, and how this is reflected in the music?

Reassemblage was in part an album dealing more directly with this, especially in relation to the unrealized potential of the concept of “fourth world” music, something that at the time was being revived in relation to a bunch of aesthetic signifiers that had more to do with it as an ex post facto categorization by record collectors and music writers. There is a real sense of utopian thinking at the core of the idea that I was interested in playing around with conceptually, given that historically it wasn’t really successful and became this very homogenized notion in the 1990s. I’m very interested in the borders of that transition, especially in places outside of my own country… I didn’t write the press text but I do still feel that at the edges of our music.

Also, it is an increasingly difficult position to hold but I am still very open to the radical potentiality of technology (in spite of the general trajectory of the “big tech” sphere) which itself holds some relationship to the future.

What are you currently reading, listening to, and watching?

Well, speaking of technology, I’m currently working my way through Summa Technologiae, which is a book of more philosophical texts that Polish author Stanisław Lem wrote. It was written in the 1960s but it touches on a lot of debates that are currently happening, especially around artificial intelligence, much like his more sci-fi texts like Imaginary Magnitude.

Thanks to a friend in Estonia I’ve been getting more familiar with Baltic post-minimalist composers like Bronius Kutavičius, Lepo Sumera, etc. I also really have been enjoying Giorgi Koberidze’s record from last year, which is connected to his brother Alexandre Koberidze’s film Dry Leaf.

Visible Cloaks’ new album Paradessence is out now.