Visible Cloaks have long thrived on contradiction, and their third album, Paradessence, announced this week alongside lead single and video Disque featuring Motion Graphics (the musical alias of Joe Williams), finds that tension more urgent than ever.
Since rebranding from Cloaks to Visible Cloaks in 2014, Portland-based duo Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile have built a body of work that holds opposing forces in productive tension — organic and artificial, chance and deliberate, authentic and replicated. Their 2017 album Reassemblage remains a landmark of that approach, its hyper-detailed textures and global instrumentation conjuring an imagined acoustic world of startling density. It was followed by serenitatem in 2019, a collaboration with ambient pioneers Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano. In the years between, Doran compiled the Grammy-nominated Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990, and later scored the meditative exploration game SEASON: A Letter to the Future.
Paradessence takes its title from author Alex Shakar‘s satirical portmanteau of “paradoxical” and “essence” — a term for the schismatic core that makes something desirable precisely because it embodies contradictory qualities simultaneously (in Shakar’s example, coffee is desired because it is both relaxing and stimulating simultaneously). It’s a framework that suits Visible Cloaks well, and one that, the duo suggests, grows more urgent as 21st-century life becomes increasingly defined by the same tensions.
Lead single Disque is a fine introduction to the album’s logic. Featuring Motion Graphics, the track builds through what the press materials describe as “a series of increasingly beautiful exhalations” — spindles of sound expanding outward, ascending piano lines stitching the arrangement together before allowing it to quietly dissolve. Its accompanying video, directed by Doran in collaboration with UK-based photogrammetrist Grade Eterna, navigates a point cloud of a London greenhouse, turning the physical environment into a malleable virtual model rendered within game engine software. The result is as eerie and precise as the music it accompanies.
“I never have a specific vision of a completed song which we’re trying to enact as faithfully as possible in the studio,” says Doran. “It is more setting up various conditions in which ideas emerge.”
Paradessence is forthcoming on RVNG Intl. Visible Cloaks perform in Portland and Seattle this week as part of the Age of Reflections event series.
02/20/26 – Portland, OR @ First UCC Church w/ Omari Jazz
02/21/26 – Seattle, WA @ First Baptist Church w/ Saloli
Visible Cloaks’ Paradessence will be released on May 22, 2026, on RVNG Intl. in vinyl, CD, and digital editions.