Around April and May every year, I typically start feeling like there is no music to review. This isn’t true, of course; it’s just a feeling. This year I’ve had a couple of surprises, though, that have elevated these months for me. One is Diane Arkenstone’s new album Aquaria II: Ascension. I can’t get enough of it.
Diane Arkenstone has been making music for decades. One of her earlier albums is called Aquaria: A Liquid Blue Trancescape, and through all of her albums, it remains a favorite. That album released in 2001, and now in 2024, she has finally released a follow-up, a continuation of the story and themes, so to speak.
Her music can be described as New Age in many respects. She utilizes electronic, trance, and world music to paint flowing, beautiful tapestries of light, fantasy, and imagination. Most of her works are thematically related to healing, or perhaps Arthurian legend, or to fantasy worlds of all kinds. These are conduits for grace, heart revival, and soul edification, though.
The original Aquaria is a striking work with a watery sense of atmosphere. Rhythms rise and fall, repeat and revisit, swirl and progress in layers of what truly feels like an underwater world full of light and evolution. It has a distinctly late 90s tone in its electronica, which I love, and the voiceovers and harmonious vocals only serve to beautify it even more.
Aquaria II is much like that, only it has a more modern style. We have lost none of Diane’s dreamy vocals, electronic style, and potent and otherworldly aura. You’ll hear Celtic accents, which is normal for her music, and lots of great bass lines, spinetingling violin and flute, and various other instruments that often feel like pure magic.
And that’s what this album is: pure magic. It reaches into your darkest of days and makes your soul feel like it has a home somewhere else, somewhere mythical and wonderful. You can almost feel the watery sky above you, like being immersed within a new way to breathe, and new way to be. It is full of cultivating energy and comforting motifs.
Like the first album, the structure makes it difficult to highlight specific tracks because it really does play as one long piece, and some of my favorite parts come back around again in all the right moments in later tracks. Some of my favorites are “Ascension” with its spacious and almost 80s fantasy feeling about it; “A Sea of Ghosts” with its thrilling tone and gorgeous orchestrations; and “Above the Waves” for its magical keys and driving cinematic feelings.
I think the last three tracks are a terrific trio. “Light from the Center of All” is a haunting piece with great vocals. It leads into my favorite piece overall, “Goddessea”, a gorgeous work of art in how it portrays an underwater world, as if it truly has 3-dimensional space inside the music; it has pure style within it, from the haunting flute to the groovy orchestrations. It is absorbing. The final piece is called “The Glass Ceiling is Now the Sky”, and it is a beauty. It feels quite transformative and stream of consciousness in how it plays out, especially in the first half, and when the strings take hold, the track becomes simply a wonder.
Diane has been making beautiful music for almost as long as I’ve been alive, and every album I’ve ever heard from her is wonderful. But there is something special about Aquaria and now its sequel, Aquaria II, that connect with me. They help me float away from my troubles, or perhaps face them with calmness and serenity. These are healing works, and I will surely listen to them for years to come.
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Find Diane Arkenstone online:
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The PROG Mind 