"Visible Cloaks meet two of their influences, Yoshio Ojima & Satsuki Shibano, in a beautiful effort to expand and refine their ambient-environmental gestures with firmer architectural underpinnings, giving bitrh to the most sublime episode in RVNG Intl.’s intergenerational ‘FRKWYS’ series so far.
Between them, Yoshio Ojima & Satsuki Shibano are part responsible for a lot of music that prompted Visible Cloaks to life. Yoshio Ojima is a composer of environmental and ambient music, with a bias toward the possibilities of generative software. Together with pianist Satsuki Shibano, known for his renditions of Debussy and Satie, they programmed influential radio experiment St. Giga’s constant stream of field recordings, sound collage and readings of Japanese poetry, often read by Satsuki.
Recordings of St. Giga was a big inspiration for Visible Cloaks first records, so its a natural conclusion for them to work together, and the results are divine. Pursuing mutual passions for St. Giga’s remit, as well as the Lovely Music, Ltd. catalogue and the British avant-garde, they arrived at a number of creative strategies for the creation of Serenitatem in Tokyo, late 2017. From MIDI randomisation to text-to-MIDI generative software, the process lends a variable to their music which sweetly blurs distinctions between the programmed and the serendipitous, making their music simultaneously timeless and futuristic, and most of all optimistically utopian.
In effect, they’ve conjured a modern echo of St, Giga, opening a place where sounds illusively occur, emerging form the minimalist but detailed matrix only to metamorphose on sight, and drift back into the parallel dimension whence they came, implying that we’re only teasingly hearing aspects of a greater shape which they’re so carefully describing." - Boomkat