Visible Cloaks Details

Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile make no secret of their influences, having laid them out in a series of online mixes over the past seven years. The first was 2010’s Fairlights, Mallets and Bamboo, made up of an array of Japanese electronic and ambient music from the 1980s. The set became something of a word-of-mouth sensation, and has picked up nearly 50,000 plays on SoundCloud—not bad for a spacey 65-minute soundscape full of chimes and vaporous synthesizers. Music Interiors and Fairlights, Mallets and Bamboo, Vol. 2 followed in 2013 and 2014, channeling hyperreal rainforest chirps and oddball synth pop; with last year’s Music Interiors Vol. 2: Interni Italiani, they picked up the thread in ’80s Italy, where Japanese exotica found itself mirrored in Mediterranean post-minimalism.

The mixes serve as a roadmap to their own productions, which emphasize a similar palette: gauzy digital synths, warbling wind instruments, wooden vibraphones. Yet as much as their inspirations may lie on the surface, something about the duo’s excellent new album Reassemblage resists scrutiny and always seems to be slipping out of view. That elusiveness is on purpose.