Following her debut LP (KRAAK, 2018) and a string of tapes and 7-inches, Red Brut drops her second album, Cloaked Travels. It is a joint release by the Finnish labels Ikuisuus and Lal Lal Lal. In many aspects, Cloaked Travels is an amazing realisation of what Red Brut does best: molding the absurd, the amateurish, and the crude into beautiful and elegant sound pieces. These eight “songs”, organised in two suites, dwell between abstract avant-garde and pop sensibility. Working with cassette tapes, Red Brut enhances the ambiguous qualities of her sounds with the warm distortion and background hiss typical of the medium. The music leaves the listener to him- or herself, happily lost in small universes that contain many layers of beauty, discomfort, and intimacy. Susan Sontag once claimed that diaries, despite secretly kept by the author, are meant to be read by others. Red Brut’s intimate and highly personal take on musique concrète is characterised by a homely feeling: sounds of doors, kids outside her house, a synth that sounds like a house pet, muffled whispers of her voice. Her compositions sound like you are secretly reading her diary. You are in the uncomfortable position of watching someone chasing her own tail, unaware of the fact that she is being the object of our gaze. Unaware? Cloaked Travels displays on a certain point the sound of a squeaking door. Over and over until it starts sounding like a wild free jazz solo. Is Verbiesen playing tricks on our minds? Is she actually the Unconsciously Watched? Or is she cloaked as that character, and in fact very well aware that we are peeping into her inner emotional universe; maybe she is even projecting a fake version of what sounds like here day-to-day, intimate environment — making us conscious of our own gaze? Again Sontag comes to mind: she deliberately projected a well-constructed character in both her diaries as in public life. Cloaked Travels contains distinct and carefully composed pieces that play upon the tension between the concrete and the abstract. Every song acts like a Cave of Plato: we are unable to see what is actually happening, we only see the shadows of a door moving or the sounds of someone gurgling. The album suggests some fundamental questions: is what we conceive as reality nothing but a derivative of the Ideal? Is there really something behind the shadow, or is the shadow the actual reality? --- Released July 2020, Ikuisuus and Lal Lal Lal.

"In May 2017 I went on a madly anticipated trip to Japan. Being an anime and manga nerd for years and a big fan of the Japanese kitchen, it truly was a dream come true. I played 12 shows there as red brut in about three weeks, with spare time in Tokyo, Kyoto, Kanazawa and even the sunny beaches of Okinawa. It was one of the best travels I ever did and upon arrival back home I immediately knew I wanted to go back as fast as possible. Then of course life got in the way, but when I finished the material for my second lp in december 2019 I knew the time had come to start planning my return to Japan. My second record is scheduled for July 3rd on Ikuisuus and Lal Lal Lal and the idea was to tour Japan in October. Then in March 2020 just as I was writing my first e-mails to my friends in Japan covid-19 struck the world and after some weeks of fearing and not knowing what to do I decided to postpone the tour to yet unknown dates somewhere in 2021 or 2022. When I made this decision my partner Michiel (also part of Goldblum and Sweat Tongue) started digging through the live recordings of my performances he made during the tour 2017 tour in Japan. We never listened back to these recordings. actually, I never listen back to these kind of live recordings and even while working on my albums I find it a struggle to listen back to the recordings I made myself in my homestudio. Michiel is better at this and he found beautiful passages tucked away in these live sets. during that tour I was working with the material that ended up on my first record, the one that came out on Kraak in 2018, and I was still figuring out different combinations of tapes, sound-wise energy-wise, sometimes with good, sometimes with bad results. “Not live in Japan" is a montage Michiel created out of live recordings made in Nagoya, Matsumoto, Oita and Kanazawa. It's not a live registration, but a new entity, a distorted memory if you will, but also a gaze into the future, in anticipation of my return to my beloved Japan."- Red Brut Cover design and mastered by Oliver Barrett.