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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 InchparadoxicalInch and Inchessence,Inch reflects these tensions directly the paradessence of consumer product is the Inchschismatic coreInch 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 Inchpositive space,Inch 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
