Nude Cloak

Transcendental is a word that evokes something beyond the human comprehension, something that touches a spiritual realm. I do not use this word lightly. What we do with Nude Cloak is to tempt the listener to venture into a new domain. But it is not an easy trip, one must work hard to get there.

This is why we intentionally keep some imperfections on our album, and this is why we subtly tweak these ancient and majestic instruments with electronics. It is not to fake a different setting, like a church or a club, but to spark the listener’s curiosity and awareness. Something internal; be it intellectual or spiritual.

Yes, we hope our listeners ultimately have a good time, and we dare them to open and use their own minds.

We got the opportunity to have Eidsfoss church for ourselves for four days. It was a chance to unleash our creativity and explore the depths of the room and its organ, something we could never do in our usual time constraints. In the end, the most opulent thing we did was to put a couple of microphones inside the organ. But the result was nothing short of magical – every creak and puff was amplified, and we could add effects to the sound without any feedback. Our goal was not to replicate the grandeur of a cathedral, but to create something unexpected and beautiful for our audience.

Although the organ is not part of this particular segment, we still manage to create a something special. Einar live-sampled the piano to produce dreamy and not-so-dreamy soundscapes, while Andreas used his effect machine to chop the audio and send it around the room. These unpredictable effects play into our love for controlled chaos, where we prefer to improvise rather than have everything laid out before us. We want our audience to listen, but we must listen as well. After all, music is a conversation between the performer and the listener.

We will post something featuring the organ some other time. It sounds great.

The last weeks we have mounted our equipment and methodically made every mistake in the book. The emphasis has (naturally) been on learning the equipment; not sitting at the live show wondering why there is no sound.

But there also are all kinds of sounds and techniques (musical or not) that pops up that can be leveraged for unusual and/or pretty musical experiences of the kind we’re chasing. And there has been room for some hours of play(ing).

It can be hard to prioritize time for this kind of base experimenting. But it can be a way to break musical barriers, and it will hopefully save us much frustration when the live gigs arrives later this spring.

So we finally released our new single. I took upon myself the task of creating a video, a new experience for me.

Entering can be an intense experience. As we had scant little video material of ourselves, I wanted to create a more general piece and try to convey the general mood of the music.

We went for something vaguely disturbing. We cloak the facade, and thus expose it as just that; a facade. To find meaning we have to dig deeper.

In Blender i made an ocean waves animation that i used as an overlay on a movie from the Prelinger Archives and some stock static noise footage. The movie was never meant to be the focus, it was made as vague as possible to underscore the general mood of the music.

The result can be seen above.

You are welcome to let us know what you think about the music or the video.

Love

E

Or: We will not hold your hand.

We make abstract music. There are themes, but they are either expressed a few times over the span of an whole album, or repeated at length until your brain might forget it’s even there.

I like polish. I love music that floats, one idea seamlessly blending into the next. Elegance hidden in plain sight. I do, but on If You Would… we have worked hard to never let you really sleep on the material. It needs to be relevant to you, and we hope that the listener will discover new things as they listen more than once, both on the micro- and macro-scale of the music.

We’ve intentionally left many imperfections for you to ponder on. There are clicks and pops. There are imperfect loops. There are sudden endings or variations in volume. You will wonder How did they do that? And you are welcome to. You will probably wonder about the quality of the music; if you like it or not. You are welcome to. You are meant to. We have done our part. Now we hope to provoke you to think about music, maybe even in a new way.

We will not hold your hand. We will not demand that you like what we do.

But we hope you will listen.

For the moment, if you search the internet for the phrase Nude Cloak, you´ll risk getting results more biased towards nudity than music. We hope to change that.

But I stand by the name. Andreas and I have many times argued over the basic feel of the music we make. I want it swamped with reverb and echoes, he has a love for the bone dry, unprocessed, natural sound.

Over time we have grown into celebrating this duality: Andreas wants it dry, or “nude,” I want it swamped, or “cloaked.”

Hence the band name:

Nude Cloak

E