Bowerbird is excited to present a night of electronic and experimental music inside the Philadelphia Insectarium’s 7,000 square foot Butterfly Pavilion.  

Portland, Oregon-based duo of Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile are the open-source musical entity known as Visible Cloaks, whose debut album Reassemblage and affiliated mini-album Lex both beamed to the world via RVNG last year.

The Chrysalis Ensemble (Ben Warfield, Jesse Sparhawk, and Laura Baird) will perform a sonic and visual dreamscape as illustrator/author Allen Crawford reads selections from his novel-in-progress. Tentatively titled The Chrysalis Bells, Crawford’s fantastical tale deals with mutation, pupation, and humanity’s relationship with the living world.

MORE ABOUT VISIBLE CLOAKS

Reassemblage finds Doran and Carlile incorporating an international array of virtual instruments to advance the idea of pan-globalism through digital simulation, with tones and colours cohering into a living, breathing pool of sensorial experience. With the “Fourth World” leanings of 80s Japanese ambient and pop (as explored by Spencer on his radiant ‘Fairlights, Mallets, and Bamboo‘ mixes) a crucial touchstone amidst a breadth of worldly musical influences, Visible Cloaks filter and form source material to become young again. Often the duo strip tonal elements of their specificity or randomize melodies so they become stirring and lucid. Essential patterns emerge, conscious experience heightens. In these moments, the musical language of Reassemblage finds unlimited resonance and presents a path to uninhabited realities.

Lex is the next look into Visible Cloaks’ enduring environment design through limitless sound. On Lex, speech centralizes and synthesizes as multiversal melody embedded across generative landscapes under open liquid skies. A hopeful glimpse into the future inter-being of human and post-human inhabitants.

Live, this becomes an inviting and immersive multi-sensual feast, with the pitch-perfect visual aesthetic of digital and installation artist Brenna Murphy (also responsible for the  Reassamblage artwork and accompanying videos, including the short film ) extending the album’s exploration of global headspace into a visual, visceral reality.

PHOTOS FROM THE EVENT