Visible Cloaks - Lex

A Closer Listen

The rainbow notes of Lex are as colourful as a bag of opened Skittles, spilling out vivid, strong-and-yet-gentle primary colours and inhabiting a sparklingly-clean, tidy space somewhere in the not-too-distant future.

Somewhere around the year 2020, the music showers itself in bright hopes and brighter flavours, the melodies living under an azure sky rather than being etched in the crimson of bloodshot and irradiated eyes following a nuclear detonation and the dawning of the subsequent apocalypse.

September trees rustle, shaking off their own reds and oranges as the leaves tumble, mirroring that hydrogen bomb’s aftertaste and its sharp, mushrooming tongue of fire and death, and maybe, in another dimension, things go boom.

Not here, though.

Rainbow Dash isn’t hopping around, but the world of Lex is still a promising place, free from orange-haired maniacs and insecure, infantile Twitter rants. Long-eared bunnies and smiling sunflowers are spread out over these jewel-bright melodies and interplaying tones – a strange world, but a peaceful one, and that’s more than can be said of this one.

Lex‘s speech and synth-work go hand-in-hand, conjuring up a selection of subliminal messages while creating music fit for paradise. Glowing in pools of warm colours, its dreamy aura strays close to Vaporwave territory, but the music returns from the future instead of rising up from the decaying spools of the past. Stilted, robotic vocals are able to transmit the warmth of a pale angel, but its programmed tongue will always be artificial, no matter how life-like it appears to be.  Because of this, Lex drips with a faux humanity, but its bright, effervescent melodies are more hopeful than many a human being.

Do androids dream of love?

A silver sheen would give it a frosty, metallic pallor, but things are extremely colourful here, dazzling in their brightness. Sunshine sounds fill the space. Vocal echoes drift down office corridors. Prisms of light kiss glassy structures and infiltrate the speakers of clean, modern homes. Suburbia is singing: the melody grows like a bonsai tree. Like a vampire sucking on the chilled lifeblood of the music, the skittering notes should drain the ambient mood, but the notes were born ambient and they’re never at risk of falling away. Taste the rainbow. (James Catchpole)

Release Date: December 8

Available here

Pitchfork 71

Augmenting electro-acoustic fusions with speech synthesis and language translation software, Visible Cloaks invoke mystifying new form of dialects and communication on their mini-LP.