The cover resembles weather attempting to become architecture. Blue, gray, violet and black washes spread across the surface without settling into recognizable walls, while small dark forms appear suspended inside the stains. The title floats above them in quiet lowercase letters, almost too delicate for the mass accumulating underneath. A cloister is normally an enclosed walkway surrounding an open courtyard, a protected space designed for repetition, contemplation and withdrawal from ordinary life. Minóy and PBK construct an acoustic version, but theirs has been damaged by transmission. The corridors are filled with shortwave interference, overloaded electronics, distant voices and reverberation so heavy that every sound appears to have wandered through several rooms before reaching the listener.
The date on this edition can be misleading. The CDr appeared in 2012, but the music was recorded and mixed by PBK in 1987, during the cassette underground that gave Minóy much of his strange international visibility. The later edition is therefore less a contemporary album than a doorway reopened. More than twenty years separate the original recording from its physical reappearance, and that temporal distance becomes part of the listening experience. The sounds do not arrive as clean archival evidence. They seem already haunted by the years they spent existing through tapes, partial circulation, private collections and memory.
Minóy, born Stanley Keith Bowsza, created an enormous body of work from Torrance, California, while participating in a worldwide mail-art and home-taping network. His recordings frequently transformed inexpensive electronics, radio material, loops, voices and excessive processing into environments that felt far larger than the domestic rooms where they were made. PBK, the project of Phillip B. Klingler, developed a related practice of intuitive collage, sustained electronics and unstable studio construction. Their collaboration does not sound like two separate artists politely contributing identifiable layers. It resembles one contaminated system in which individual ownership has been dissolved by repeated mixing and reverb.
This loss of clean authorship suits the title. Cloistered life traditionally minimizes personal display in favor of ritual, repetition and submission to a larger order. The individual voice remains present, but it is shaped by architecture and communal practice. Here Minóy’s voice repeatedly rises through PBK’s electronics, yet it never becomes the commanding center of the music. The surrounding sound bends, multiplies and partially erases it. He calls outward, but the cloister answers by returning an altered version of the call.
The thirty-one-minute title piece begins as a large, slow-moving field whose boundaries are difficult to locate. Keyboard-like tones, static, radio fragments and heavier electronic pressure overlap until foreground and background exchange positions. A sound that initially appears distant may gradually become the dominant surface without any obvious moment of arrival. Another layer can remain almost hidden for several minutes before the listener realizes it has been supporting everything above it. The piece develops through these perceptual changes rather than through conventional events.
This is “ambient” music only if ambient is permitted to remain uncomfortable. The work surrounds the listener, but it does not offer the smooth neutrality associated with decorative atmosphere. Its drones are corroded, crowded and slightly hostile to the space they occupy. Rust appears to have entered the electronics. The tones are sustained, yet their surfaces keep shedding particles. What seems still from a distance becomes busy and damaged under closer attention.
Minóy’s vocals are initially placed low enough in the mixture to behave almost subliminally. A howl may emerge as another frequency before its human source becomes apparent. This creates a peculiar emotional instability. The listener hears distress without immediately identifying a distressed person, then suddenly recognizes lungs and throat inside the machinery. The electronics have not merely accompanied the voice. They have disguised it as part of the weather.
That transformation prevents the vocal performance from becoming theatrical in the ordinary sense. Minóy’s cries can sound anguished, ecstatic, ridiculous and devotional within the same stretch of recording. These conditions do not cancel one another. The extremity of the treatment makes sincerity and absurdity difficult to separate. A voice drenched in cheap spring reverb can resemble a prophet inside a cavern, an amateur singer trapped in broken equipment, or a household ghost discovering that the walls answer back.
The famous Radio Shack mixer reverb is central to this architecture. Reverb normally supplies the illusion of a room after the original sound has been captured. Here the illusion becomes larger than the source. Every gesture produces a tail that overlaps with later gestures, causing the past to remain acoustically present. The recording continually accumulates its previous actions. The cloister is constructed from memory that refuses to decay at a normal rate.
This inexpensive effect also complicates ideas of professional sound. An expensive studio might have produced cleaner depth, but cleanliness would weaken the work’s personality. The spring reverb rattles, smears and gives the entire mix a metallic afterlife. Its limitations become compositional strengths. Rather than simulate a believable cathedral, it creates an impossible structure whose corridors bend back into the equipment.
Shortwave radio introduces another spatial contradiction. A cloister represents withdrawal from the world, while radio receives signals traveling across enormous distances. Voices and fragments from outside enter the enclosed environment without bringing complete information. Geography becomes audible but unreadable. A signal has crossed borders and atmosphere only to arrive as partial speech, static or electronic shadow.
This was one of cassette culture’s central experiences. Artists could be physically isolated while participating in an international network of recordings, letters and collaborations. The tape itself became a small architectural enclosure containing distant people. Someone working privately in California could send sound outward and receive transformed material from another location. Solitude and community were no longer opposites. The cloister had acquired a postal system.
“In Shadow” intensifies the ritual character while revealing the collaboration’s peculiar humor. For much of its duration, the track appears to be another cavernous industrial invocation. Minóy’s voice struggles with a dense field of reverberant electronics, and repeated calls seem directed toward some absent god or unseen authority. Eventually the performance reveals itself as a mangled treatment of the old popular song “Me and My Shadow.”
That revelation changes everything heard before it. What seemed like original ceremonial language becomes a standard song stretched beyond social recognition. The familiar image of a person walking with his shadow is already appropriate for this collaboration. A shadow follows the body while remaining a separate, distorted likeness determined by light and surface. PBK’s electronics act as Minóy’s shadow, but Minóy’s voice also shadows the electronics. Neither can be considered the original object once the mix has folded them together.
The choice of an old standard is not merely comic vandalism. Popular songs survive through recognition, repetition and stable melodic identity. Minóy attacks that stability while preserving enough residue for the song to return unexpectedly. Memory is placed under pressure. The listener may recognize a phrase, lose it beneath noise, then hear it reappear as though an old broadcast has broken through the wall.
There is tenderness hidden inside this damage. “Me and My Shadow” concerns companionship reduced to its most minimal form: even when alone, the singer remains accompanied by the dark outline produced by his own body. Minóy’s treatment turns that companionship into something less reassuring. The shadow may be loyal, but it is also inescapable. It repeats every movement without sharing consciousness. Inside the massive reverb, singer and shadow become trapped in an endless delayed response.
The music’s humor matters because it prevents the album from hardening into self-important darkness. Minóy could create genuinely disturbing atmospheres while remaining willing to howl a sentimental standard through malfunctioning electronics. The absurdity does not destroy the seriousness. It reveals that solemnity is another effect, one that can be generated, overloaded and made unstable like any other signal.
“Endgame” is the shortest piece, though at more than ten minutes it still has enough space to establish its own pressure system. The title suggests a final phase in which possibilities have narrowed and every remaining action carries consequence. Yet the music does not sound like a clean conclusion. It vibrates, surges and continues producing residue, as though the system has been told to end but lacks a mechanism for shutting down.
The electronics feel more concentrated here. Sustained tones and dense reverberation create a fundamental trembling, while Minóy’s voice returns as an intermittent disturbance within the larger field. The composition seems less interested in reaching a destination than in studying what remains after development has been exhausted. Endgame is not silence following destruction. It is machinery continuing after its original purpose has disappeared.
Across the three pieces, PBK and Minóy develop what PBK later called “noise ambient,” a useful term because neither half can comfortably dominate the other. Noise supplies friction, instability and damaged information. Ambient supplies duration, space and immersion. The music is neither a series of attacks nor a passive background. It creates environments whose atmosphere is itself abrasive.
This approach anticipated a great deal of later dark ambient, drone and industrial collage without sounding neatly absorbed into any of those categories. Its loops remain too awkward, its voice too exposed and its surfaces too materially strange for genre polish. The work retains the feeling of discovery, of artists learning what happens when available technology is pushed into a relationship it was not designed to support.
The 2012 CDr gives this unstable cassette-era material another physical body. A recordable compact disc occupies an intermediate historical position: more digitally precise than a home-dubbed tape, but still capable of being made and circulated in small quantities outside industrial manufacturing. It preserves the music while retaining the handmade, limited character of the network from which the music emerged.
The remaster cannot return the listener to 1987, nor should it try. Every reissue changes the artifact it carries. Tape saturation, equipment noise and crude processing become newly visible through digital playback. What once sounded like a contemporary experiment now also sounds like evidence of obsolete machines and vanished methods of circulation. The recording gains history without losing its capacity to overwhelm.
That balance is the achievement of Cloisters. It is old music that does not behave politely as an archive. Its walls still move. Its voices still fail to remain human. Its radio signals still arrive without explanations, and its spring reverb continues manufacturing rooms that never physically existed.
Anyone who received the original cassette, corresponded with either artist, or knows more about the exact exchange and assembly of these recordings could add valuable details. The official credits establish who performed, recorded and remastered the work, but cassette culture often stored its most important history in letters, package inserts and personal memory. Cloisters survives as a large enclosed sound, but its doors remain open to anyone who can describe how it first traveled through the world.
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