Lex is a mini-album and partial soundtrack by Portland, Oregon duo Visible Cloaks, consisting of Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile. Continuing the experimental electronic music stylings and East and West relationship ideas of their previous work Reassemblage (2017), the album takes place in a future utopian world with aliens talking in a hybrid of several languages to the point of speaking a "non-language." The speech sounds on the album were made by Doran feeding dialects and accents to the language translation program Infovox Voice Manager. The first five tracks of Lex soundtrack a short film the duo and artist Brenna Murphy did titled Permutate Lex (2017), and the closing track "World," according to RVNG Intl.'s press release, is a "fixed" version of a piece the duo and Murphy previously originally did for an unspecified art installation. The film was released by Kabinett on October 12, 2017, the album issued by RVNG Intl. on December 8 to favorable reviews from music writers. Production The making of Lex began with Spencer Doran and his friend Brenna Murphy, who does artwork and videos for Visible Cloaks' music, being "commissioned" to produce a fifteen-minute short film; he said this in an interview with The Quietus, though he did not specify who commissioned the two to make the film. Doran conceived the idea of having a speech synthesizer to serve as dialogue for the film. Doran produced the speeches by having the language translation program Infovox Voice Manager speak various dialects and accents into other languages. Visible Cloaks and Murphy titled the short film Permutate Lex, and its audio also served as the first five tracks for a Visible Cloaks mini-album titled Lex. The word "Lex" in both titles derived from the speeches being spoken in a "lexical permutation." Composition and concept Lex continues the experimental musical style, 1980s Japanese electronic music influences, and East and West relationship concept of Visible Cloaks' previous album Reassemblage (2017). According to RVNG Intl.'s press releases, Lex takes place in a future utopia, "a limitless, delicate space developed by fluid musical techniques and subconscious voices," with "mysteries" told via an "unknown but imaginable melodic language." Doran stated that the album is trying to present a future vision of the world that can't be determined currently, and thus it seems "only surreal and inscrutable" to most people. Also like Reassemblage, Lex takes sounds of metallophones, woodwinds, and synthesizers and makes