Before RVNG Intl.’s acclaimed 2017 Reassemblage album, before 2018’s follow-up Lex, Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile’s beloved Visible Cloaks project (formerly Cloaks) impressed itself most on listeners in a live setting, within the lush community of Portland, Oregon (their remote reach to Japan however, strong).

Musique Plastique released this self-titled album on vinyl after sensitive-ears and reaching-hearts Sun Ark put part of its contents to tape in 2014. The album forecast the showers of contemporary fourth world ambience to come, gently launching future-visions with references to Italian minimalist spirituality, anthropological mysticism, Indonesian gamelan pondering and of course mid-80s Japanese philosophical sophistication. These influences were lovingly laid bare in first volume of Fairlights, Mallets, and Bamboo, a mixtape indicated by Doran as “an investigation into fourth-world undercurrents in Japanese ambient and pop music, years 1980 – 1986”; and Music Interiors Vol. 2: Interni Italiani, a mix for Root Strata “a DJ mix of Italian ambient/minimalist/avant-garde music...ethnographic plunderphonics, post-Battiato spiritual minimalism and hypnotic FM patterns (plus Mediterranean fourth world currents throughout).”