Thursday, June 4, 2026 at 8:00 PM to 11:00 PM
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
Portland's Visible Cloaks visits the 2220 theater to celebrate their new release on RVNG: *Paradessence*. Local computer music artist and composer Ellen Phan opens the night. ∆ Since transforming from Cloaks to Visible Cloaks in 2014, Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile have mapped a complex matrix of oppositional concepts: organic and artificial, chance and deliberate, authentic and replicated. The title of their new album itself, drawn from author Alex Shakar’s satirical portmanteau of “paradoxical” and “essence,” reflects these tensions directly: the *paradessence* of consumer product is the “schismatic core” that gives rise to its desirability (in Shakar’s example, coffee is desired because it is both relaxing and stimulating simultaneously). The balancing act of *Paradessence* brings these strains into greater urgency as life in the 21st century is reordered by these same tensions. ~ Ellen Phan is a computer music artist working at the intersection of psychoacoustics, perception, and the subconscious. Her compositions draw from therapeutic methodologies as generative frameworks, transformed through synthesis and signal processing into immersive auditory environments. Her work explores sound as a site of internal modulation—where perception destabilizes and latent psychological structures surface. Through subtle shifts in frequency, phase, and repetition, she constructs hallucinatory fields that operate below the threshold of conscious cognition. Phan has presented work at CCRMA (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics) at Stanford University, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Lampo, Hangar, Indexical, and festivals including Desert Daze Festival and Corridor Festival. Her recordings have been released on Bánh Mì Verlag, Anòmia, Nada Recs, and Rope Editions.