Paradessence

Paradessence, Visible Cloaks’ third full length, is a work of emergence and illusion. The album’s fourteen songs shift, heave, and shimmer against a faintly luminous backdrop of night, a cavernous space shaped by sparse hyperreal representations of the natural world. The arrangements are simultaneously grandiose and fragile, both an inversion and culmination of what came before and as adventurous as anything they’ve produced so far. Since transforming from Cloaks to Visible Cloaks in 2014, Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile have mapped a complex matrix of oppositional concepts: organic and artificial, chance and deliberate, authentic and replicated. The album title itself, drawn from author Alex Shakar’s satirical portmanteau of “paradoxical” and “essence,” reflects these tensions directly: the paradessence of consumer product is the “schismatic core” that gives rise to its desirability (in Shakar’s example, coffee is desired because it is both relaxing and stimulating simultaneously). The balancing act of Paradessence brings these strains into greater urgency as life in the 21st century is reordered by these same tensions.