Visible Cloaks album, Reassemblage, coming out on RVNG

How did you guys meet and become Visible Cloaks? Ryan and I met when I was in high school and he was in college and was running an all-ages music venue. Visible Cloaks used to be just "Cloaks" before we switched the name to avoid confusion with another group. It was my solo project for a spell before Ryan joined as the second member. What links are there between Fairlights, Mallets & Bamboo and this album? Japanese music from that era is certainly an influence, albeit an abstract one. I was first drawn to all that stuff because it sounded so contemporary—it felt like a giant cache of approaches and ideas that electronic music still hadn't caught up with. I suppose the fact that it was so tough for westerners to access and parse may have helped to preserve its vitality, but either way it's music that reaches for a futuristic vision that still feels advanced. We're more interested in fusing these ideas and sound palates with modern studio technology/sound design in an effort to advance our own voice—we have no desire to make straight anachronistic music. Having a deeply indexed sense of history helps you to move forward, I suppose, if you resist the pull to draw you back. Tell us the story behind seeking out Miyako Koda as a collaborator. I was doing some experiments turning human speech into MIDI information as an extension of the concept of "translation," trying to extract some sort of translingual information from the human voice. One thing I was playing around with was a sample of Miyako's voice from her '90s album Jupiter (at the time, I had no idea that Tatsuji & Miyako were planning a reissue of the album, or that someone else was working on a track with the same sample) of her reading a poem in Japanese and English, mapping the MIDI data onto to stacks of virtual instruments. Matt from RVNG had been in touch with Tatsuji already and he sent them what I had done—and he came up with the idea of the "Revisited" version of the track, which Tatsuji and I worked together (over email) with Miyako adding a new vocal take and lyrics. The whole thing was very surreal, I never could have imagined it honestly...