Inquiri - See You Someday (2024)

Inquiri – See You Someday (Past Inside the Present, 2024)

On See You Someday, Los Angeles-based Inquiri (aka Lacey Harris) creates an emotional fantasia that ties together threads of choral, orchestral, IDM, glitch and ambient music, all backed by silken vocals and diaristic field recordings. The result is a powerfully personal reckoning with grief, loss, and the complicated task of finding a place in the universe as an individual. Each meticulously constructed piece incorporates Harris’s ambient prowess (as heard on the 2023 bvdub collaboration, Destroyesterday) into a realm of experimental songcraft that finds quiet intensity in its use of soft distortion, sample-based polyrhythms, and heavily layered voices.

“My Eyes Opened” emerges from a liminal haze worthy of a Dali dream sequence, unraveling with delay-steeped electronics and rapturous mystery. The propulsive, vocal-heavy standout “Be The Hero” follows, introducing many of the album’s core themes of love and lament, and of seeking courage in the expanse of the cosmos. Here, a nimble bass line backs intricate rhythm programming, and a rush of rich textures nests Harris’s main vocal in a colorful sonic galaxy that rewards a headphone experience.

The driving element of “They Come Around” is a reversed synth line placed under complex, glitchy beats and bubbling melodies that crisscross the stereo field, creating a controlled environment where entropy and turmoil still play their inevitable roles. Harris sings, as if in a trance, “When they come around / I draw / Draw another circle / When it comes around / I follow / Follow it until I understand.” As with every chapter of See You Someday, there is a vibrant human core around which birds glide, waters eddy and moon phases come and go with organic grace.

“Our Souls Kissed” incorporates the angelic voice of Past Inside the Present veteran marine eyes (aka Cynthia Bernard) into a sprawling calm that’s as enchanting as anything in her catalog. Spacious percussion skitters across a weighty low-end bed, as a cyclone of sound evokes the paralyzing magic of love’s first moments when, against all logic, it seems that such a feeling might just last forever. By Harris’s account, it was “by far the most difficult piece to finish on the album, as it is the oldest, the most emotionally-charged, and one of the most important stories I wanted to get right.”

This fact hints at the time frame of See You Someday, which was composed over a span of ten years that included the death of the artist’s father, as well as several geographical and personal upheavals. Harris notes that many tracks “never felt quite ready to share on their own, until they were finally placed alongside the others; once I began arranging them into a specific order, I started to see that they were telling a very specific story.”

This sense of personal inventory carries across “Then Heaven Fell” and “Which Way Home”, where heartbreaking, disembodied voices and haunting strings loop across carefully arranged patterns, forming a kinetic interplay of elements both loose and taut. Title track, “See You Someday”, is a masterfully layered, beatless soundscape whose low-mid rumble, echoing whispers and fibrous flickers weave through the stereo field, returning to the dream space from which the album materialized.

“They’re Gone Forever” draws open the curtains on a bright vista, with delayed piano plinks bouncing between the channels and sparse, sampled programming that mimics an insect colony dismantling a fallen tree. As an arrangement of melancholy strings and humming bass gathers, Harris plays her final card: a field recording from the location of her father’s ashes, underscoring a spoken word passage of her mother talking about him, all veiled in effects that simulate a memory vanishing beyond reach. It is a compelling moment, perfectly chosen to close an album full of them.

She summarizes: “As I tried to heal mentally and physically from [my father’s] loss, I was grasping everywhere I could to find some sense of belonging – who I was at my core, what that meant, whether what I did mattered, all sorts of questions that may arise with our first real experience of profound grief and loss. This record documents my experience of slowly finding answers, healing emotional and physical trauma, learning what love actually means, and finding my voice in the world.”