The new mini-album from the Portland, Ore., duo Visible Cloaks completes a three-part multimedia project which began with the full-length Reassemblage—a strikingly evocative, hard-to-classify synthesis of textures and tones pulled from ambient and Fourth World music and Japanese synth-pop—and a recent animated short with Brenna Murphy, “Permutate Lex,” which gives rippling, acid-bright visual expression to their uncanny aesthetic.
The six tracks that make up Lex feel more fragmented, unsettled, and inscrutable than the dreamy, glitch-dusted ambient moods of Reassemblage, and that’s intentional. Riffing on the word “lexicon”, Lex is based on a palette of voices created by feeding a chain of dialects and accents through language translation software to create a kind of incomprehensible “future dialect”—as if these garbled words were the endpoint of a drastically globalized future where all existing languages have dissolved into one.
The idea that a universal language could resolve conflict is an ancient one that has persisted. In the Bible, the story of the Tower of Babel tells us why humans are doomed to constant misunderstanding, the second of our original sins. Punishing humankind’s hubristic attempt to climb to Heaven, God knocks down the tower and scatters the builders to every corner of the Earth, destroying their shared language “so that they may not understand one another’s speech.” Later, philosophers Francis Bacon and Gottfried Leibniz proposed new written languages based on pictograms rather than words, while in the 19th century the Polish-Jewish doctor Ludovik Lazarus Zamenhof thought he could achieve world peace with the invention of a whole new language, Esperanto. Needless to say, none of these test-tube tongues caught on.
Lex’s “future dialect” is as utopian and, inevitably, as mystifying as its predecessors. The album opens with an undulating, almost baroque flute melody on “Wheel,” weaving through unintelligible crosstalk before unfurling into a soft lullaby. Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile fuse sounds from metallophones, wind instruments, and flickering synth pulses, though the sources are purposely obscured, adding a 21st-century digital-versus-acoustic complexity to the mix. On “Frame,” a similar palette, this time augmented with woody percussion and chimes, pops like fireworks, disjointed and disorienting, while “Transient” introduces Lex’s “future dialect” in full, latching glitched, faintly Germanic syllables onto sweeps of glowing choral tones that recall the emotional landscapes of William Basinski. The technique is repeated on “Keys,” cobbling broken speech onto stacks of toppling drum hits and queasy sliding synths; the parts are played together, rhythmically, so they arrive as a barrage of information that does indeed sound more like the patter of actual speech than any kind of melody.
Strangely, the concept is largely abandoned for the final two tracks, with “Lex” offering only faint vocal fragments among its alien ambience. “World” is an extended dive back into the textures of Reassemblage, with serene, sustained tones pricked by rustling and harp-like plucking. Stretching to almost a quarter of an hour, while every other track barely tops three minutes, “World” seems disconnected from the album’s conceptual framework, but it provides, at least, a soothing finale to a jarring experience. Though less memorable than its predecessor, Lex succeeds when it is heard as intended: as a conceptual companion to Reassemblage’s opaque experimentation, an appendix of utopian ideas that adds nuance and provocation to a seductive sound world where East meets West, and breath and circuitry are made one.
