Visible Cloaks- 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 it's 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.Silence is an important character in Paradessence, felt not only in the sculpting of sound but in the pressure it exerts on everything and what emerges. The group took influence from architectural theorist Christopher Alexander's concept of "positive space," an 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. We hear how sounds carry their own silence, oscillating in and out of existence, running through life cycles like a microorganism.There is a collectivity to the instruments that underpin Paradessence. They move like a herd, as when wind drifts over a field of leaves and the air becomes visible in the absence of motion; multiple species cohabit the same song, protruding, receding, and transforming over the course of several minutes. "Instead of creating pieces that function horizontally as environments," says Doran, "we wanted to conceptualize them as living material changing in space, continually in flux." Song-forms steer away from ambience towards pure abstraction. Utopianism hovers at the edges; a relationship to imagined futures which is neither naïve, cynical, nor nostalgic.
Tracklist:
- Apsis
- Skylight
- Disque Motion Graphics
- Balloon
- Slippage
- Zinna
- Telescoping
- Steel
- Shapes Yoshio Ojima, Satsuki Shibano
- Thinking Félicia Atkinson, Yoshio Ojima, Satsuki Shibano
- Swirl
- Intarsia Ioana Selaru
- System Componium Ensemble
UPC > 747742387685
Format > New Vinyl
Label > Rvng Int'l
Shop online at Darkside Records.
Follow us on Instagram.
> Due to the current limited nature of music titles, ALL CD & Vinyl purchases are limited to FOUR copies per customer, per item. If you place multiple orders for multiples of the same title, your subsequent orders will be canceled.
Visible Cloaks- Paradessence
- Unit price
- per
Release Date: 05.21.2026
🩷 Open My Records To Avoid Seam Splitting
In order to ship your records to you in the safest way possible, and to avoid seam splits, we recommend removing the record from the jacket when shipping. That said, we will never open sealed records and do this without your permission. If you would like your records shipped to you this way, please add Open My Records to your cart.
We will place your jacket and record inside a FREE protective poly with all shrink and hype stickers intact.
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 it's 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.Silence is an important character in Paradessence, felt not only in the sculpting of sound but in the pressure it exerts on everything and what emerges. The group took influence from architectural theorist Christopher Alexander's concept of "positive space," an 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. We hear how sounds carry their own silence, oscillating in and out of existence, running through life cycles like a microorganism.There is a collectivity to the instruments that underpin Paradessence. They move like a herd, as when wind drifts over a field of leaves and the air becomes visible in the absence of motion; multiple species cohabit the same song, protruding, receding, and transforming over the course of several minutes. "Instead of creating pieces that function horizontally as environments," says Doran, "we wanted to conceptualize them as living material changing in space, continually in flux." Song-forms steer away from ambience towards pure abstraction. Utopianism hovers at the edges; a relationship to imagined futures which is neither naïve, cynical, nor nostalgic.
Tracklist:
- Apsis
- Skylight
- Disque Motion Graphics
- Balloon
- Slippage
- Zinna
- Telescoping
- Steel
- Shapes Yoshio Ojima, Satsuki Shibano
- Thinking Félicia Atkinson, Yoshio Ojima, Satsuki Shibano
- Swirl
- Intarsia Ioana Selaru
- System Componium Ensemble
UPC > 747742387685
Format > New Vinyl
Label > Rvng Int'l
Shop online at Darkside Records.
Follow us on Instagram.
> Due to the current limited nature of music titles, ALL CD & Vinyl purchases are limited to FOUR copies per customer, per item. If you place multiple orders for multiples of the same title, your subsequent orders will be canceled.