Since the Portland electronic duo’s 2017 release Reassemblage, Visible Cloaks’ Spencer Doran has kept busy. He composed the soundtrack for the 2023 adventure game SEASON: A letter to the future and curated the compilation Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990, earning a Grammy nomination for the latter. On their new album Paradessence, Doran and Visible Cloaks collaborator Ryan Carlisle delve into abstraction, sculpting sonic environments that challenge convention while remaining strikingly beautiful.
In this conversation, Doran reflects on the philosophical and aesthetic ideas behind Paradessence. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
MERCURY: How have your artistic priorities shifted since 2017’s Reassemblage? What kind of conversations were you and Ryan [Carlisle] having as this album came together?
Spencer Doran: Well, my shift has been away from the framing of ambient music as a genre, and toward thinking about things in terms of abstraction. I’ve read about the history of abstract art in the early 20th century, and how painting and music were intertwined—specifically around [Russian painter Wassily] Kandinsky. He had this envy of music as an art form that was able to convey abstract states. For me, that’s always been the real potential of electronic music, because you’re not working with sounds that exist in “reality.” [It’s kind of a] tragedy that the abstract potential of music has been… I don’t want to say lost, but not living up to its full potential.
It’s interesting to hear you talk about painting, because the language about this album feels visual. Listening to it, I thought about installation art—sound as a sort of place one can enter. The tracks aren’t quite atmospheric, though. They’re more like sound forms arranged in a space. Was there a conscious shift toward thinking of sound in more sculptural terms?
I’ve always been doing that to a certain degree. But in the last decade, I’ve learned more about the history of aesthetics and sculpture. The Russian composer Arthur Lourié had this piece—”Formes en l’air”—with musical shards or little clusters. The way that they’re written in the score is nonlinear. Tonally, it’s kind of different from what we do, but this idea of little objects that exist in an environment is a big part of the way that I conceptualize arrangement.
That ties into an idea I’ve referenced from the architectural theorist Christopher Alexander. He has this concept called positive space—instead of thinking about the void that exists around like an object, you think about it as something that you’re actively shaping by the creation of the object itself. It’s sort of like that famous “vase or two faces” puzzle.
There are many small moments of silence across the album. I wonder if that interplay of sound and silence touches on what you mean, with your interest in the object and the space around it.
Absolutely, that’s where I was going with this. Even before this record, we’ve treated silence as part of the compositional process. There’s a term from Gestalt psychology, “figure-ground.” The figure is the object, and the ground is the space around it. Satoshi Ashikawa—who was one of the conceptual theorists behind kankyō ongaku [Japanese environmental music]—had this whole reading of figure and ground in relation to the [John] Cagean notion of silence. He thought the foreground and background of a musical piece were kind of arbitrary. Whether the silence is the composition, or the sounds existing in the silence is the composition, is [also] kind of arbitrary. Everyone experiences music in some sort of environment.
This album has a precise, glossy quality interspersed with moments that ask for the listener’s attention. I wonder if it feels like a move away from electronic music as background sound—like those YouTube videos of “focus music for studying,” or whatever. Do you consciously push against that expectation?
It’s a little bleak to see music turn into this thing that helps you work. But I see all levels of engagement as being worthy of appreciation. Some of my favorite sounds are menu music, or the music that Ryuichi Sakamoto made for the Nokia ringtone, or Brian Eno’s Windows 95 startup sound. It is a little frustrating when that becomes the only way that people will engage with something—the playlistification of every form of music—or when an individual song becomes a way to develop a mood. For me, music is an end in itself. But any way that people can experience it is worthy of respecting. That kind of goes back to Brian Eno’s articulation about ambient music—”it’s as ignorable as it is interesting.”
That Brian Eno quote feels connected to the title of this album. The word “paradessence”—coined by novelist Alex Shakar—describes the paradoxical essence of a thing. If you were a new listener to Paradessence, what paradoxes might you pick up on?
The idea [for the album title] was originally sort of a joke, making fun of advertising. The schismatic core of the consumer product is something that’s in conflict with itself, and it’s that conflict that actually makes it desirable. In synthesis, two things that are different come together and become another thing. The elements in conflict continue to be in conflict—but that’s what makes it good.
On this album, the synthetic and the real are in conflict. There’s the idea of artistic beauty and more coarse listening experiences; pleasing, calm listening, and cerebral, difficult sound. We don’t fully work in either of those environments. Our music is maybe a little too prickly for [the background of a Netflix show], but we’ve also never totally clicked with the academic approach to sound. It’s like our music is too digestible, or calm, or beautiful for that sort of thing.
Visible Cloaks also describes this album as a “hyperreal rendering of the natural world.” What draws you to creating a mediated version of nature?
I’m really interested in approaches to field recording that don’t try to present things in an explicitly naturalistic way. In Season, the gameplay requires the player to make field recordings. In game audio design, you’re building the experience of what it feels like to be in an environment. You have to think about what feels real, what feels fake, and what exposes the seams of a constructed reality.
For that project, I ended up putting a lot of tiny sounds all over the environment. Instead of just hearing a bunch of trees in a forest, [the player] hears each individual leaf rustling at a different rate. So when you make the field recordings in the game, you’re recording a hyperreal environment. I got really into ambisonic recording—that’s when you record the sphere of sound around the microphone’s position. That turns sound into a 3D object you can manipulate. In ambisonic recordings, the listener position moves in ways that aren’t possible in reality. You’d have to be on an amusement park ride, or something, to get these kinds of perspectives. The other aspect was ultrasound—sounds that are outside of the human hearing range—pitched back down into the human hearing range.
The way that field recording is used in a lot of contemporary ambient music… well, it’s easy to just throw a pleasing environment into a musical composition and call it a day. We’re trying to play with the artifice of how that process works, and do things that aren’t necessarily possible in your everyday listening environment.
Paradessence is out on RVNG Intl. and available through Bandcamp on vinyl, compact disc, and as a digital download.
