When you hear that a band or project has a new album out, feel glad there is something to listen to again, and only then realise that the previous record came nine years earlier, that actually speaks well of the band. Simply because the music has stayed in such good memory that one has quite forgotten how much time has passed. It may also have something to do with the pandemic in between, but that is not the subject here.
In any case, Visible Cloaks are back, and with their old strength intact. Which means they have remained faithful to their approach of combining or setting »natural« and »artificial« sounds against one another in such a way that something shimmering and hybrid emerges. The musicians Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano, with whom they have already recorded a full album, return this time as occasional guests, joined once again by Motion Graphics and, as a new collaborator, Félicia Atkinson, who enters into dialogue with a computer voice.
What makes Visible Cloaks’ music so compelling on Paradessence, too, is the clear, almost brittle Spartan sound, which on the other hand feels so strange in itself that it can at times seem compressed. One might call it sounding lasers, from which a plucked instrument like a harp flickers here, or a discreetly clattering prepared piano there. And are those water sounds in between, or has a clarinet been processed? Stimulatingly confusing, all of it.
