Within the 9 years since Portland ambient duo Seen Cloaks launched Reassemblage, the worlds that document occupied, each actual and imagined, got here to an finish. When the album got here out, at first of the primary Trump presidency, there was a chill within the air, a grim understanding that one thing depraved was coming, its form to be decided. The anticipated techno-utopia promised within the ’90s, the globally related community of commerce and tradition that obliterated borders, rapidly soured, and a handful of coding-school barons descended to “disrupt” every thing we’d carried out to make life bearable. A lot digital music within the late aughts and 2010s predicted the approaching hangover, particularly vaporwave, which turned ’80s synth-pop samples and ’90s digital-keyboard sounds into uncanny critiques of capitalism’s impact on reminiscence. Reassemblage sits on the periphery of vaporwave, populated with cool-to-the-touch synths, nevertheless it’s additionally partially impressed by Japanese environmental music, which is extra about tapping into the second than steeping in bizarre nostalgia. (Spencer Doran, half of the duo alongside Ryan Carlile, curated the Grammy-nominated compilation Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990.) Woven via Seen Cloaks’ lovely, featherlight album was a hope for serenity, a need for peace that by no means got here to cross.
Now, after a worldwide pandemic, a genocide beamed into each pocket on the globe, and the introduction of “enshittification” to the lexicon, Seen Cloaks are again with Paradessence. It’s a becoming follow-up, increasing on the Reassemblage system whereas accounting for methods discovered from engaged on 2017’s electro-acoustic mini-album Lex and serenitatem, a 2019 collaboration with Japanese ambient auteurs Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano. This time, the duo is much more within the otherworldly interaction between the digital and the natural, rendering stringed devices and the human voice with the glassy sheen of digital synthesis. It’s not a darker album than Reassemblage, per se, nevertheless it’s definitely a extra unsettled one, as jittery noise and scraps of melodies construct into tightly-packed clusters, solely to disintegrate simply as rapidly. Paradessence doesn’t a lot envision a brand new world as react to our present one, a harrowing actuality the place persons are beginning to notice how a lot of their minds they’ve outsourced to addicting expertise.
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Not like Reassemblage, whose compositions felt like discrete however well-paced chapters of a specific story, Paradessence hangs collectively as one lengthy piece. It’s the form of document that advantages from listening in a single sitting, because it unfolds constantly, gathering upon itself like a blooming peony. Passages might really feel incongruous at occasions, producing themselves from unknown electrical triggers, however the stretches of silence Doran and Carlile weave all through act as a form of connective tissue. Because the album goes on, it’s as if we’re slowly zooming out, watching constellations of synapses firing in several parts of a mind. These silences will be jarring, snapping you out of your self and again into the current. In an interview with Willamette Week, Doran likened Seen Cloaks’ strategy to Brian Eno’s idea of ambient music being each ignorable and attention-grabbing, holding one’s consideration by not holding it in any respect. We get used to a certain quantity of perpetual noise, dissociating to the ever-present hum of a metropolis or the glazed-over social media scroll, however as soon as that noise cuts out, we’re capable of take inventory of the place we’re, alter our posture, rub our eyes, and reset.
