Visible Cloaks

The electronic music that Ryan Carlile and Spencer Doran make as Visible Cloaks brims with a sense of impossible and contradictory illusion, much like the name suggests—like a flower that blooms and withers and blooms again, a circuit that is fried but comes back to life, an empty glass that refills itself. It is blissful but unsettling music, fractured but whole. Carlile and Doran grew up in Northern California before reconnecting in Portland, Ore., where rent was cheap and collaborative opportunities were abundant. Their exacting productions flourished on their 2017 breakthrough for RVNG Intl., Reassemblage, an inquisitive and exquisite LP where choirs and strings breathed and moaned through electronic glissandi and percussive sound design and roboticized vocals converged like the sky and sun at dawn. During the next decade, the pair collaborated with Japanese experimental godhead Yoshio Ojima while Doran compiled the Grammy-nominated set Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990.

Visible Cloaks returned in 2026 with Paradessence, a seamless, beatless, and detail-rich 42-minute wonder that responds gracefully but honestly to sociopolitical darkness, to the sense that all of our technology cannot heal us. “Paradessence doesn’t so much envision a new world as react to our current one,” Pitchfork rightly noted, “a harrowing reality where people are starting to realize how much of their minds they’ve outsourced to addicting technology.” Saxophones try to squeeze through rhythmic rests during “Steel,” spiraling as if in search of an escape. Sounds seem to run in reverse during “Telescoping,” all attack suddenly in retreat. And “Capgras” lingers in a resigned haze, the drone almost smiling in admission that it’s run out of other options. Still, through all these sounds that exhale and collapse and swallow themselves like an ouroboros, Visible Cloaks’ vivid ambient music still blooms—and withers and, inevitably and irresistibly, blooms again.