'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 “paradoxical” and “essence,” reflects these tensions directly: the paradessence of consumer product is the “schismatic core” that gives rise to its 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 “positive space,” 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 the same song, protruding, receding, and transforming over the course of several minutes. “Instead of creating pieces that function horizontally as environments,” says Doran, “we wanted to conceptualize them as living material changing in space, continually in flux.” Song-forms steer away from ambience towards pure abstraction. Utopianism hovers at the edges; a relationship to imagined futures which is neither naïve, cynical, nor nostalgic.

The world Visible Cloaks have built over time is often rendered physical by collaborators, a familiar cast of whom return for 'Paradessence'. Motion Graphics (Joe Williams) makes an appearance on “synthetic woodwinds” and also co-mixed the album, contouring its shapes with his signature sheen. Interlinked pieces 'Shapes' and 'Thinking' were developed with environmental music innovators Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano, who also worked with the duo on the intergenerational FRKWYS collaboration serenitatem. The latter piece features a spoken text written by Ojima, read in Japanese by Shibano and in French by composer and longtime friend Félicia Atkinson.

Componium Ensemble, Doran’s “indeterminate chamber music” project of self-playing software instruments, provides the infrastructure for 'System' in a moment of Pessoa-ian heteronymity. The album also features Ioana Șelaru, a Romanian composer and violinist who lends her voice and string playing to 'Intarsia'. Doran describes their collaboration as “an exercise in illusionary presence” which they jointly developed from “the idea of juxtaposing her real instrument playing with virtual instruments to blur the boundaries between synthetic string instruments and those existing in reality.”

Șelaru’s charged performance on 'Intarsia' is a clear demonstration of the dramatic core of 'Paradessence': an urgent sculptural undertaking, an instrument and a human voice modulated by a sea of synthetic growth. Doran describes how for him “this slippage between the real and the virtual captures something else entirely, something strange and ineffable that is an inherent aspect of life in digital modernity, both online and in real life.” It is electronic music which not only conjures an abstract representation of our current dream reality through its shifting forms but builds imagined spaces which are emotionally nuanced and rise to moments of grace.

TRACK LISTING

1. Apsis
2. Skylight
3. Disque (ft. Motion Graphics)
4. Balloon
5. Slippage
6. Zinna
7. Telescoping (Lockgroove Version)
8. Shapes (ft. Yoshio Ojima And Satsuki Shibano)
9. Thinking (ft. Félicia Atkinson, Yoshio Ojima And Satsuki Shibano)
10. Swirl
11. Steel
12. Intarsia (ft. Ioana Șelaru)
13. System (ft. Componium Ensemble)

In 'Osni the Flare', the second chapter of Tristan Allen’s mythic trilogy, finds the composer, producer, and puppeteer following a mortal’s transformation into deity through the discovery of fire. Recorded over four years using wordless vocals, organs, ocarinas, an arsenal of toy instruments, and intricate sound design, 'Osni the Flare' unfolds the origins of flame and temporality across four sonically and visually compelling acts. Weaving a creation myth that shifts between beauty, shadow, and wistful embers, Allen provides a portal to meticulously crafted, emotionally potent sound and story that echo through a fantastical realm.

Born in Saratoga Springs, New York, with early childhood memories from his family’s tenure in Japan, Allen’s path wound through formative encounters including teacher Andy Iorio, who encouraged improvisational techniques in the young musician’s burgeoning interest and prowess at the piano, and Amanda Palmer, who discovered them at 16 during a Berklee summer program and crowdfunded their first release. After studying piano at Berklee, co-founding the live-electronics collective Nue, touring China with metal band Dent, and releasing two solo-piano EPs, Allen fled Boston for Brooklyn in 2018.

A Craigslist ad led to puppetry training under Mike Leach, who spent six months teaching them to properly walk a marionette, leading to a position as a performer at the vaunted Puppetworks Theater. This rigorous work, combined with exposure to their father’s Bread and Puppet Theater artifacts and Balinese shadow puppetry, led Allen to their creative practice: composing for acoustic instruments, arranging electronically, and performing through puppetry.

'Osni the Flare' traces a creation myth following the titular character who awakens in a garden and picks apples from a tree. Beckoned by a Loon, Osni sets forth to safeguard the tree from winter’s chill. When the Loon is devoured by a Dragon, Osni ventures into its belly and discovers embers. In offering these embers to the tree, it catches flame—the origin of fire itself. Iso, god of the sea, intervenes with a flood that drowns Osni’s garden. In death, Osni’s soul enters the shadow realm to join Tin and Iso, becoming the deity of fire—'Osni the Flare'.

The album sounds more human and childlike than its predecessor, 'Tin Iso and The Dawn', shifting from the overseer perspective of deities to follow the first mortal character in Allen’s world. Underpinned by new love, the project channels feelings into music that becomes an enchantment all its own. Like Tin Iso, the album opens and closes with piano as a portal representing home, as Osni embarks across three realms: the land of the living, the in-between, and the beyond.

Recorded almost entirely with an Aston condenser mic in Allen’s Brooklyn apartment overlooking the Cypress Hills Cemetery, 'Osni the Flare' was built from toy piano and flutes, ocarinas, harmonium, pump organ, electric and upright bass, gadgets, and extensive collections of music boxes and bells. The vocal melody— inspired by partner Virginia Garcia Ruiz’s humming evoking Pan’s Labyrinth—was Allen’s first foray into voice, using wordless melody to allow listeners to remain protagonists. Flutes were meticulously recorded note by note from Balinese sulings, Chinese souvenir shop finds, and bird-shaped ocarinas. Music boxes were wound slowly, sampled individually, then rearranged and tuned to double Virginia’s humming. A dying Casio SK-1 with a blown-out speaker is paired with a harmonium to form chordal textures.

TRACK LISTING

1. Osni Opening
2. Act I: Garden
3. Act I: Loon
4. Act II: Dragon
5. Act II: Pyre
6. Act III: Umbra
7. Act III: Rite
8. Act IV: Flood
9. Act IV: Everglow
10. Osni Closing

Tender / Wading finds Matthew Sage, aka M. Sage, in the foothills and pastures of Colorado, writing, recording, and returning to a patch of his homeland and identity, one act of sympathetic care informing the next. Constructed primarily on piano and clarinet, and then embellished with guitar, modular synthesizer, percussion, and field recordings captured around the perimeter of his home, the album is a sweeping, serene vision of vitality, radical softness, and the reassuring sense of coming home, even if home has changed. Since the early 2010s, Sage has assembled an idiosyncratic catalog of music that sprawls in various sound directions, manifesting with releases on Geographic North, Orange Milk, and Moon Glyph, and garnering both critical attention and a loyal listenership present for each new turn. In 2023, Sage debuted on RVNG Intl. with Paradise Crick, which coincided with his ongoing output within the improvisatory ambient jazz quartet, Fuubutsushi, and he now delivers his next solo endeavor and direction. Tender / Wading follows Sage’s return to Colorado after nearly a decade in Chicago, now nurturing a couple acres of neglected space with his young family thirty miles outside his hometown. In a holistic contrast to Crick’s synthetic sound-world, Sage renders art from the act of stewarding new growth, questioning constructs of domestic life, and understanding the footsteps of his former self through the dirt-smeared, sweat-fogged lens of the present. The yield is his most autobiographical material to date, marked by time and changes in perception and meaningful details from Sage’s psychic search.

Sage likens the sensation of seeing different versions of yourself to the famous rabbit-duck theory from philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. “It’s the same drawing, but depending on who you are, where you are, and when you are, some people see a rabbit and some people see a duck, or both,” Sage explains. Here is the subject and viewer, back in familiar landscapes, a partner and parent, cutting back brush, humbled by invasives, infestations, and compacted clay soil, his priorities vastly changed. And still, that other self is there too; a wily academic who often thinks in memes and feels the tug of a cell phone in his pocket. “This album is about feeling out those perception changes, giving them room to do both: to hop and quack.” It is an inner child that leads Sage’s intermedia practice in his studio, a pole barn converted during home-wide DIY renovations after the big move in 2022. Inside, poems become drawings become backyard sculptures and beyond, and silly excursions into birdsong or enjoying the challenge of learning the clarinet give way to serious music. “I think what I’ve discovered is that there are these lines that tie it all together,” he says. “And for this album, there’s a lot of stubborn optimism and hope in it, but also being present with this late-stage moment that we’re in and trying to deal with the rhetoric of it.”

For Tender / Wading, Sage deploys a distinct sound: a pastoral kind of folk Kosmiche, contemplative electro-acoustic barn jazz for the Front Range, brimming with pale puddle blues and rusted oil drum reds. Most songs began on a 1910 Hamilton upright piano, curiously built in Chicago, left behind by the previous owners and inhabited by mice. The chance encounter with the instrument felt cosmic, not just for its link to the Windy City, but also given Sage’s evolving approach to songwriting after Fuubutsushi. He’s become more comfortable behind the keys and getting back behind the drum kit (his teenage love), and within a fittingly woodwind space, embracing the elemental and intentional, giving the music more structural heft and warmth from the onset. Tender’s M. Sage synthesizes the studio experimentation and improvisation of his past with a sharpened ear for melodic phrasings and chord changes, culling his usual bounty of demos down to a tight final nine. His world-building signatures remain, from woodhouse toads swimming in static to rustling grass and rain piddling in the gutters to waltzing constellations under the moonlight. Where Crick’s universe was born from magical realism and digital fantasy, Tender / Wading cuts from the human experience more directly. He’s quick to push back on notions of it being a highly conceptual record; “I’m just making the music that I would want to be playing in my headphones while weeding or whatever.” It could be both, as the rabbit and duck would assert, deeply personal and abstract, a fascinating and natural turn from a twenty-first-century experimental artist whose legacy continues to shape and grow in real-time

TRACK LISTING

A1. The Garden Spot
A2. Witch Grass
A3. Chinook
A4. Wading The Plain
A5. Open Space Properties
B1. Telegraph Weed Waltz
B2. Fracking Starlite
B3. Field House Deer (Mice)
B4. Tender Of Land

'Taba' voices a subtle yet surprising shift for the Japanese musician and producer Satomimagae. Observing and absorbing the fleeting scenes and sounds of life flowing outside of her home studio, 'Taba' unfolds as a series of vignettes that document the personal and the universal. Satomi sings beyond herself in an orbit of souls and systems known and unknown, seen and unseen, in the present and in the strange flux of memory, leaving linear songwriting to rest for circuitous stories expanded and expansive in tone and texture

Following the logic of 'Taba', a Japanese term for a bunch, bundle or grouping together of different things, the album is assembled as a loose collection of short stories. Shapeshifting into something like a poet-narrator, Satomi casts her writer’s eye to the often perplexing shapes that form from quotidian events and exchanges defining our increasingly alienated age. Where Satomi’s last full-length, 2021’s, bloomed from the lush soil of a private inner sphere, the bird’s eye of Tabasearches to place the artist—somewhere, somehow—within a wider, wilder world.“I was thinking about how we see people as a group and individuals within a group,” Satomi says.“How groups are connected and how borders exist. The awareness that we are just one element in the collective (taba) and yet each individual’s invisible experiences and memories remain somewhere, influencing us, or society, without realizing it. We are small dots within a mass.

The first murmurs of Tabacan be heard surrounding Satomi’s song 'Dots', one of many shimmering points mapping the constellation of 2021’s 'Salutations' compilation on RVNG Intl. Drawn from a deep well of drafts that Satomi recorded to her iPhone during the early pandemic, 'Dots' was a wordless inner guide, ushering her down a shadowy yet still inviting path. Intrigued and inspired, Satomi held this feeling close, experimenting with new chords, rhythms, and tempos within these new creative surroundings. But it was another exchange with sound artistduenn, transmittedon their collaborative albumKyokai, that conjured the spirit of 'Taba'.

Kyokai’s theme of “something more than haiku but less than music” gave words to feeling, and activated an understanding that the sonic fragments Satomi was documenting were not simply unfinished sketches but potent formations. Setting aside her traditional folk song approach, and doing away with demos altogether, Satomi’s songwriting evolved into something closer to puzzling or patchworking with her cornerstone acoustic guitar and vocals connecting the pieces together into the imaginative arrangements heard throughout 'Taba'. Collaborations with other artists and musicians close to Satomi’s universe further elevate the sweeping sonics. Synthesizer lines from Norio, who also helps define the album’s visual identity through photo and video, enliven the tender ballad 'Kodama'.The bell-like Rhodes piano ringing in and around Satomi’s guitar on 'Dottsu' is played by Akhira Sano, who created the cover art for her 2021 'Colloid' EP.

TRACK LISTING

1. Ishi
2. Many
3. Tonbo
4. Horo Horo
5. Mushi Dance
6. Spells
7. Nami
8. Wakaranai
9. Dottsu
10. Kodama
11. Tent
12. Metallic Gold
13. Omajinai
14. Ghost

Followers of Self’s work will still find familiar sonic forms on 'r∞L4nGc', from galvanizing electronic experimentations to Self’s lofty, soaring voice, undiminished after years of relative silence. 'Busy Walks Into the Memory Palace' is assthrowing dance music for corporeal forms that don’t yet exist, making Self a different kind of time traveller, the track primed to be played thousands of years hence. On 'Dissumlato', it sounds as if Self has been sealed into a wayward spacecraft, a synthesizer and their voice their only company, performing for themselves and whomever else in the beyond might be listening to them. Attending to more earthly concerns, and the fraying queer communities that Self has nourished for many years, 'Gajo' deploys a 2-step beat, interweaving chamber orchestral manoeuvres and electronic vocal modulation. As they sing, “Something calling out to me from the other side/It’s my own choice to make within this life,” you hear Self contemplate the ecstatic terror of reaching into the unknown in one another, no space to shapeshift without letting down the barriers separating ourselves from one another in the first place.

'∞', the album’s closing track, a nearly 11-minute suite (also released as lemniscate, a four-track EP to introduce Colin’s new music), is central to the album’s thematic core. The lemniscate, the formal name for the mathematical sign most of us know as the infinity symbol, has guided Self backwards and forwards through the endless quest to carry meaning from one realm to another. It’s a looping journey that requires immense humility and a willingness to shed the stability of the bounded self, instead opening to voices that cry out from a darkened corner, still too vulnerable to emerge in daylight.

“The lemniscate begins with a prayer and darkness being pulled into a portal in which I have to sort of face death, or face loss and grief and sadness, to then kind of come out on the other side with some clarity,” Self says. “Instead of thinking of the darkness being this place of fear, it’s often in the shadows where the important things are happening. We can’t know [these spirits], or we can’t see them, but we have to believe that they exist.” Many spirits present themselves on the album, and while Self’s rapturous singing ability is the medium for these transmissions, listen closely and you might meet someone you never knew existed.

TRACK LISTING

1. Respite For The Tulpamancer
2. Gajo
3. Doll Park Doll Park
4. Dissimulato
5. Losing Faith
6. {Canting}
7. Busy Walks Into The Memory Palace
8. Paraphrase Of A Shadow
9. Riddlecraft
10. Gaolbreaker’s Dream
11. Tip The Ivy
12. ∞

soaring wayne phoenix story the earth and sky is the debut album from multi-disciplinary British artist Wayne Phoenix. Originally conceived over a decade ago as one part of an elaborate project encompassing music, film, and performance, story the earth and sky is not only a profoundly personal and vulnerable expression unbound by Phoenix’s exploration of creative potential and mystery, but a bridge beyond the artificial boundaries that separate us all from an unfiltered voice within us all.

The impetus of this album formed around a musical improvisation that occurred in 2009 between Phoenix and Richard, a man who he was working with as a support client. Richard suffered from severe autism, and had been labeled as non-verbal. But as Wayne sat down to play the piano one day with Richard in the room, he was met with some surprising behavior. Richard began uttering some simple phrases over Wayne’s piano, his speech interplaying with the melancholic chords.

Moved, if not transformed, by the event, Phoenix began developing a vocal style in tune with our natural, unmanufactured voice as a means to accomplish boundless interconnectivity. He searched for “the voice of the child within, which has no concept of the world it inhabits, nor any means to navigate that world.”

This realization spurred a deeply creative period for the artist, spanning nearly fourteen years to date. Originally conceived as one part of a multimedia project, soaring wayne phoenix story the earth and sky, communicates the core of the artist’s creative intentions. Phoenix says that “all these works to date are the by-product of something else, which has manifested as music and has been spread over various artistic formats, not limited to any one specific discipline.”

Phoenix perpetuates this hazy aura of his work, stating “if it came to finding the converging principle that ties it all together, one could find oneself in a position similar to Rumi’s story of the elephant in the dark, in which each person felt a different part of the elephant and considered it to be the whole”

Mirroring this theme of subjectivity, the first half of story the earth and sky starts in abstract, words and thoughts left hanging in the ether. Phoenix’s broken, spoken word obscures itself in melodic white noise and distortion. As we reach the middle of the record, the smoky sound of the opening pieces begins to clear, making space for a melancholic yet musical manifestation of Phoenix’s work, that while still somewhat disarming, soars to higher heights. soaring wayne phoenix story the earth and sky focuses on the artist’s internal search and dissolves in the surrounding ambiance before eventually, and undeniably, arriving outside and beyond itself. A powerful, intentional debut from an artist determined to find and define a new form of expression.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Mood
A2. Alone
A3. Place
A4. Home
A5. ...and Sleepless Skies
A6. Burn False Messages
A7. I Gave You Power
A8. Reserve
A9. Death Is Pure Objectivity
B1. Latika’s Grace (it’s Not What You Go Through, It’s How You Go Through It)
B2. Gate
B3. Nightswim Feat. Run Rivers
B4. Cygnet
B5. The Light The Lamb
B6. One Man Island Feat. CrystalXulu

Mikael Seifu’s 'Zelalem' is an ode to - and a fearless break from - the storied lineage of Ethiopian music. The literal Amharic translation of Zelalem is “eternity,” and through Seifu’s conceptual frame it becomes a “vector of light.” Seifu shines this light on the music of his home country while guiding us through an uncharted “Ethiopiyawi Electronic” - a coinage Seifu uses to describe the music he and his peers are producing in Ethiopia’s capital city of Addis-Ababa.

Illuminating the rich sounds of Addis-Ababa’s azmaris, Seifu’s music becomes a “dream brew” in which these traditional musicians collaborate and contribute vocals and lead voicings from folk instruments such as the Masenko and the Krar. Seifu was educated at the Lycée Guebre-Mariam in Addis-Ababa. The French academy’s international group of students was Seifu’s first exposure to a world outside Ethiopia; his second was at Ramapo College in suburban New Jersey.

Here Seifu met a mentor in Ben Neill, the composer and music technologist who trained with La Monte Young. Seifu was inspired by Neil to take serious his calling in music. A calling of a different, spiritual nature brought Mikael back to Ethiopia. As a repatriated young man in Addis-Ababa, Seifu felt a renewed sense of allegiance to his home country and allowed its ubiquitous music to guide his creations. Seifu’s early work was shared across a string of EPs for stalwart Washington DC imprint 1432 R, demonstrating an interplay of regional folk music and international electronic music. Mikael’s music does not westernize or electronicize extant Ethiopian music. Instead, Seifu uses Ethio-jazz’s spirit of brewing estranged styles for his own musical tincturing. Seifu’s passion above all else is to create something befitting of its time, yet “eternally Ethiopian.” The latter phrase was the mantra guiding Seifu through the creation of Zelalem, and a source of inspiration for the cover artwork. Zelalem spotlights the music of Ethiopia’s past as well its future. Mikael Seifu illustrates the potential for reinterpreting sacred and proud sources through energized palettes. His latest effort heralds the future of this new music and signals the genesis of Ethiopian Electronic, where the known and unknown commune.

TRACK LISTING

1.The Protectors
2.The Solipsist
3. Soul Manifest (Mikael Seifu Feat. LA)
4. How To Save A Life (Vector Of Eternity)
5. ዘላለም (Vector Of Light)