Innesti 'Diaphanous' [CD]

Glass-mastered, silkscreen printed CD housed in a 6-panel, 300g satin cardstock Digipak. Clear cd tray. Numbered. Shrinkwrapped. Pressed and printed in Canada. Edition of 200.

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.”

Many of the uniquely naturalistic qualities of Diaphanous arise from Innesti’s use of their own hand-built electronic instruments, including Generations, which serves as a generative sample trigger and modulation source in the spirit of recent projects by ambient legend Brian Eno. Works composed in this mode, including the hypnotic “Dormire”, offer a particular glisten and ripple, something like a vicarious forest hike where you realize that your exact experience is only one of a vast number of possible iterations.

The very title, Diaphanous, suggests the scarcely seen, or the partially obscured; something that only comes into focus as you allow your eyes to adjust, or the veil between our biological perceptions and the infinity that exists just beyond them. Particularly embodying these qualities, “Hitherto” is one of the album’s most melancholy movements, featuring an ebb and flow of whispers and gentle synth harmonies that weave in and out of one another, each a ghost wandering the rooms of a vacant home.

The voices that come and go throughout the album are unburdened by language, yet they brim with serenity and hidden meaning – even the faint conversation under the gorgeous “A Half-Remembered Dream” conjures magic from the mundane, conveying the preciousness of all fleeting moments. The artist summarizes, “At their heart, these compositions are inspired by the human experience, what binds us together, and the way we understand the past as our lives develop – we are stories, and these are soundtracks for our narratives.”


Written, recorded, and produced by Innesti
Mastered at Ambient Mountain House by James Bernard
Photographs © Katia Chausheva. Used with permission.
Design and layout by zakè

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