Inquiri
'See You Someday'
'See You Someday'
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PITP50 |
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ARTIST:
Inquiri ALBUM NAME: See You Someday CATALOGUE NUMBER: PITP50 RELEASED ON: July 10, 2024 PUBLISHING: © 2024 Past Inside the Present ℗ 2024 Past Inside the Present Publishing (BMI) |
FORMAT:
Numbered 4-Panel Digipak CD + download code Digital Download [at] pitp.bandcamp.com Streaming through all major digital streaming platforms DISTRIBUTION: Past Inside the Present Bandcamp, PITP.US, Inner Ocean Records (CAN), Juno Records (UK), Phonica (UK), HHV (DE), Soundohm (IT), Tobira Records (JP), Linus Records (JP), Redeye (UK), A Thousand Arms (US), and others CREDITS: All songs written, recorded, and produced by Inquiri (Lacey Harris) Additional vocals and textures on Our Souls Kissed by marine eyes (Cynthia Bernard) Mastered by Brock Van Wey Photography by Lacey Harris Design and layout by zakè |
about
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.”
"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.”
biography
Los Angeles-based Lacey IQ (born Lacey Harris) is an electronic music obsessive who produces, remixes, and DJs a vast array of styles that engage the mind and body in equal measure. Having come of age at the cultural nexus of analog and digital, her cross-pollination of genres and textures arises from a deep-seated reverence for both the organic and the mechanical.
Throughout Lacey’s childhood in Texas, her mother was always singing – a habit the artist herself naturally adopted – and, raised on her parents’ vast LP and cassette collection, she embraces the imperfection of physical media and the value of surface noise. In her preteen years she was an acolyte of Depeche Mode, Björk, Cocteau Twins, and Sinéad O’Connor, leading to an early passion for boundary-pushing aesthetics, soulful authenticity, and carefully arranged production. Upon discovering rave and dance music during its rise in the mid 1990s, she found her first true calling behind the turntables, letting everything else fall to the wayside.
An innate drive for eclecticism echoes her guiding philosophy that no person feels one way all the time. Fittingly, Lacey IQ DJ sets journey through disco, tribal, acid, and afro house, with shades of deep, dark techno rhythms, found samples, and a capellas, each performance weaving a different tapestry than the last. Further influenced by a lifelong feeling of “otherness”, she sees every effort – whether ephemeral or documented – as a vital statement of self, and an open hand to the disaffected outsider.
Away from the communal pulse of the dancefloor, she thrives in the solitary cocoon of her studio, making lush, sprawling ambient work, like Destroyesterday (with friend and hero bvdub, 2023), and bass-heavy, sample-driven underground house singles like “Submarine Discotech” (2018) and “Gone” (2019). These elements of her artistic evolution are puzzle pieces that form the image of a vibrant, multifaceted life, and, even when enjoyed alone, they cultivate a rich sense of connection to humanity and the natural world.
Among her artillery of instruments and other means of creation, Lacey considers her own voice to be the most precious, and it permeates much of her work as a sonic throughline. In her more cerebral recordings as Inquiri, vocals are layered into towering harmonies, playing against glitchy electronics, trip-hop cadences, and arpeggiated synth lines. This “softer side” defines the albums Walk For Miles (2010), Semi-Human (with vocalist/pianist Mayumi Kaneyuki, 2014), and Seven (2022), reaching its fullest iteration on See You Someday (2024), a collection that grew from ten years of patient reflection on loss, and the complicated prospect of finding a place in the immensity of the cosmos.
Primarily self-taught, Lacey relies on intuition and experimentation to achieve her atmospheres and guide her compositional impulses. An indispensable period of mentorship from the late sound designer Kevin Lamb deepened her understanding of the importance of mixing, as well as how the brain processes sound, and the ways in which music can be used for everything from deep meditation, to unfettered movement, to a thousand other states guided by mood and circumstance.
In her professional life, Lacey established a unique approach to pads and patches through work with Native Instruments, and is a Director of Artist Development Programs at a music college, allowing adventurousness and continued creative growth to remain at the forefront of her daily disciplines. She also maintains a weekly DJ livestream on Twitch, Radio IQ, which provides a regular platform for new ideas and explorations.
Throughout Lacey’s childhood in Texas, her mother was always singing – a habit the artist herself naturally adopted – and, raised on her parents’ vast LP and cassette collection, she embraces the imperfection of physical media and the value of surface noise. In her preteen years she was an acolyte of Depeche Mode, Björk, Cocteau Twins, and Sinéad O’Connor, leading to an early passion for boundary-pushing aesthetics, soulful authenticity, and carefully arranged production. Upon discovering rave and dance music during its rise in the mid 1990s, she found her first true calling behind the turntables, letting everything else fall to the wayside.
An innate drive for eclecticism echoes her guiding philosophy that no person feels one way all the time. Fittingly, Lacey IQ DJ sets journey through disco, tribal, acid, and afro house, with shades of deep, dark techno rhythms, found samples, and a capellas, each performance weaving a different tapestry than the last. Further influenced by a lifelong feeling of “otherness”, she sees every effort – whether ephemeral or documented – as a vital statement of self, and an open hand to the disaffected outsider.
Away from the communal pulse of the dancefloor, she thrives in the solitary cocoon of her studio, making lush, sprawling ambient work, like Destroyesterday (with friend and hero bvdub, 2023), and bass-heavy, sample-driven underground house singles like “Submarine Discotech” (2018) and “Gone” (2019). These elements of her artistic evolution are puzzle pieces that form the image of a vibrant, multifaceted life, and, even when enjoyed alone, they cultivate a rich sense of connection to humanity and the natural world.
Among her artillery of instruments and other means of creation, Lacey considers her own voice to be the most precious, and it permeates much of her work as a sonic throughline. In her more cerebral recordings as Inquiri, vocals are layered into towering harmonies, playing against glitchy electronics, trip-hop cadences, and arpeggiated synth lines. This “softer side” defines the albums Walk For Miles (2010), Semi-Human (with vocalist/pianist Mayumi Kaneyuki, 2014), and Seven (2022), reaching its fullest iteration on See You Someday (2024), a collection that grew from ten years of patient reflection on loss, and the complicated prospect of finding a place in the immensity of the cosmos.
Primarily self-taught, Lacey relies on intuition and experimentation to achieve her atmospheres and guide her compositional impulses. An indispensable period of mentorship from the late sound designer Kevin Lamb deepened her understanding of the importance of mixing, as well as how the brain processes sound, and the ways in which music can be used for everything from deep meditation, to unfettered movement, to a thousand other states guided by mood and circumstance.
In her professional life, Lacey established a unique approach to pads and patches through work with Native Instruments, and is a Director of Artist Development Programs at a music college, allowing adventurousness and continued creative growth to remain at the forefront of her daily disciplines. She also maintains a weekly DJ livestream on Twitch, Radio IQ, which provides a regular platform for new ideas and explorations.
press
"Los Angeles-based artist Inquiri aka Lacey Harris blends choral, orchestral, IDM, glitch, and ambient music with silken vocals and diaristic field recordings on her sublime new album See You Someday. This emotional album explores grief, loss, and self-discovery as tracks like 'My Eyes Opened' and 'Be The Hero' showcase Harris's ambient prowess with delay-steeped electronics and intricate rhythms. 'They Come Around' features glitchy beats and reversed synths, while 'Our Souls Kissed' includes angelic vocals. Composed over a decade, the album documents Harris's journey through personal upheavals and healing so it is a deeply personal and rewarding work."
-Juno Records
✦✦✦
"See You Someday touches on a lot of different styles and approaches to assemble its dreamy and psychedelic sound. You can hear a lot of pure ambience, however, most of the time it is infused with ambient pop aesthetics, some big string arrangements, and straight up psychedelia. All of this is immersed in a myriad of smooth and pleasing ambience, coming especially from the layers and layers of synth pads, and the extensive use of the piano, which always sounds really clean; it is very much used in ambient fashion, with some motifs being repeated and little to no emphasis on tangible chord progressions, sometimes it’s just some notes fleeting by, making it so it is never invasive and can easily blend in with the rest.
This should make it quite clear that atmosphere is this album’s strong suit, but it’s also quite interesting how some moments do really latch onto pop structures; examples are tracks like “Be the Hero” and “The Come Around,” but not solely because they’re more vocal-centric than most material on the LP, rather because they seem to bring back certain parts as if they were choruses. They’re not actual choruses, hence why this isn’t actual pop music per se, but they do have a proper sense of structure due to how they alternate their different sections; this makes it so that both of these tunes are quite memorable. On the other hand, “They Come Around” is easily one of the album’s highlights, its lead melody is really beautiful and I like just how big and slow it is, it makes the whole tune a lot more immersive. There’s also a great contrast with the vocals, which are really laid back instead, making the song as a whole a big moment to let yourself sink.
“Then Heaven Fell” is also a highlight, one of the more immersive tracks. Its sound almost latches onto the aesthetics of vaporwave, especially with its steamy beat and blurry vocals; the surreal soundscape it creates is really pleasant, and it is especially engaging thanks to how repetitive it is; really something you can just immerse yourself in instead of something that you’d really expect to be gratified by.
The last two tracks are also quite enjoyable; they’re the more ambient pieces of the album, as both are rather sparse and patiently enveloping. The title track is a really captivating, pad-based ambient track, while “They’re Gone Forever” is a bit more emotionally impactful due to how many different layers it stacks. The piano is seriously beautiful, and all the vocals and really vast pads make the piece feel very organic, in a way. A sound this pretty isn’t really elsewhere on this LP, but it is really comforting as its tail, makes it end on a sunny spring afternoon."
- Igloo Magazine
✦✦✦
"Los Angeles-based Lacey Harris makes very large ambient music as Inquiri. The label say she “creates an emotional fantasia… a powerfully personal reckoning with grief, loss, and the complicated task of finding a place in the universe as an individual”. Opener ‘My Eyes Opened’ is a squall of strings repeating over and over with the ominous drone underneath sounding like waves rolling in on the shore. The thing that strikes you is the tracks here are crafted into song-length pieces, mostly around the four-five minute mark, which is unusual for this sort of thing.
The tracks feel weighty, ‘Be The Hero’ has the best shimmering intro and it lasts for the whole length of the track, Lacey’s distance vocal sounding no unlike Tracey Thorn. In fact, ‘Our Souls Kissed’ has a vocal guest in the shape of the brilliant marine eyes. The track itself grows and swells to a crescendo before tailing off, like climbing up a hill and then back down again. Excellent stuff as always from our friends at Past Inside the Present."
- Moonbuilding Magazine
-Juno Records
✦✦✦
"See You Someday touches on a lot of different styles and approaches to assemble its dreamy and psychedelic sound. You can hear a lot of pure ambience, however, most of the time it is infused with ambient pop aesthetics, some big string arrangements, and straight up psychedelia. All of this is immersed in a myriad of smooth and pleasing ambience, coming especially from the layers and layers of synth pads, and the extensive use of the piano, which always sounds really clean; it is very much used in ambient fashion, with some motifs being repeated and little to no emphasis on tangible chord progressions, sometimes it’s just some notes fleeting by, making it so it is never invasive and can easily blend in with the rest.
This should make it quite clear that atmosphere is this album’s strong suit, but it’s also quite interesting how some moments do really latch onto pop structures; examples are tracks like “Be the Hero” and “The Come Around,” but not solely because they’re more vocal-centric than most material on the LP, rather because they seem to bring back certain parts as if they were choruses. They’re not actual choruses, hence why this isn’t actual pop music per se, but they do have a proper sense of structure due to how they alternate their different sections; this makes it so that both of these tunes are quite memorable. On the other hand, “They Come Around” is easily one of the album’s highlights, its lead melody is really beautiful and I like just how big and slow it is, it makes the whole tune a lot more immersive. There’s also a great contrast with the vocals, which are really laid back instead, making the song as a whole a big moment to let yourself sink.
“Then Heaven Fell” is also a highlight, one of the more immersive tracks. Its sound almost latches onto the aesthetics of vaporwave, especially with its steamy beat and blurry vocals; the surreal soundscape it creates is really pleasant, and it is especially engaging thanks to how repetitive it is; really something you can just immerse yourself in instead of something that you’d really expect to be gratified by.
The last two tracks are also quite enjoyable; they’re the more ambient pieces of the album, as both are rather sparse and patiently enveloping. The title track is a really captivating, pad-based ambient track, while “They’re Gone Forever” is a bit more emotionally impactful due to how many different layers it stacks. The piano is seriously beautiful, and all the vocals and really vast pads make the piece feel very organic, in a way. A sound this pretty isn’t really elsewhere on this LP, but it is really comforting as its tail, makes it end on a sunny spring afternoon."
- Igloo Magazine
✦✦✦
"Los Angeles-based Lacey Harris makes very large ambient music as Inquiri. The label say she “creates an emotional fantasia… a powerfully personal reckoning with grief, loss, and the complicated task of finding a place in the universe as an individual”. Opener ‘My Eyes Opened’ is a squall of strings repeating over and over with the ominous drone underneath sounding like waves rolling in on the shore. The thing that strikes you is the tracks here are crafted into song-length pieces, mostly around the four-five minute mark, which is unusual for this sort of thing.
The tracks feel weighty, ‘Be The Hero’ has the best shimmering intro and it lasts for the whole length of the track, Lacey’s distance vocal sounding no unlike Tracey Thorn. In fact, ‘Our Souls Kissed’ has a vocal guest in the shape of the brilliant marine eyes. The track itself grows and swells to a crescendo before tailing off, like climbing up a hill and then back down again. Excellent stuff as always from our friends at Past Inside the Present."
- Moonbuilding Magazine
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