released October 16, 2024
Innesti – Diaphanous (Past Inside the Present, 2024)
The work of Illinois-based Innesti overflows with organic grace and soft-focus bliss, and after nearly a dozen self-released collections, they join Past Inside the Present’s evolving roster with Diaphanous. Minimal in layers, and complemented by carefully selected field recordings, each of its fourteen pieces is crafted to be, according to the artist, “weightless and fragile, with a subtle slant toward the nostalgic.”
Opening piece, “We Turn Into Stories”, sets the tone beautifully with the pace of slow breath and vaporous clouds of treated voices, expanding to take the shape of wherever they are heard. As with many tracks on the album, its background drones seem to appear from behind a mountain, conveying a humbling sense of scale as they sweep across the glacial valley in between sonic swells. “Souvire” follows with a tantalizing hush of sun-dappled drone, and a distant, breathy incantation hovering at the periphery, just out of reach.
Compositions like “Maybe Never” and “Our Shadows Are Longer Here” elaborate on Innesti’s textural bases with thumb piano and crystalline flickers, approximating some psychic communication between nebulas, impossibly far away and millions of years in the past. This careful balance between macro and micro elements is one of the album’s many charms, and fittingly, the artist “want[s] to create an impression of mystery and wonder – the sense that our lives, experiences, and memories are connected in ways that we have yet to fully appreciate.”
“Diaphanous gives me a sense of looking through an old 18th century wavy glass window that’s aged to a point of abstraction; You can still make out shapes and colors, but it’s partly obscured and without sharp, well-defined edges, creating a rich and impressionistic soundscape that evokes a peaceful, floating gaze. This is something not lost on the author of the PR write-up, as they mention: “The very title, Diaphanous, suggests the scarcely seen, or the partially obscured…” I can’t say enough great things about this body of work.”
–Ambient Soundbath
