Next up on the excellent New York-based RVNG Intl, the duo of Visible Cloaks will release a debut album in the form of Reassemblage, comprising new age and Japanese ambient influences, and standing out as one of 2017’s most delicate and gorgeous album releases thus far.
Above is the video for ‘Neume’, which adds trippy accompaniment to the track’s vocal contortions and synthesised manipulations, the visuals warping according to their corresponding sounds. The video has been put together by Brenna Murphy of art duo MSHR.
Visible Cloaks is the duo of Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile, formed from a mixtape produced by Doran in 2010 called ‘Fairlights, Mallets, and Bamboo’, billed as "an investigation into fourth-world undercurrents in Japanese ambient and pop music, years 1980 – 1986". You can hear that here.
On Reassemblage, the duo evoke much of the sounds explored across that mix and the second volume that followed it, including the curious solo projects of members of Yellow Magic Orchestra and many others. The album takes its name from a film essay by Trin T Minha-ha, which looks at the impossibility of assigning meaning to ethnographic images by which the writer aims to “speak nearby” rather than “speak about the subject.
Reassemblage is out on February 17. You can pre-order it here.
