Simonel's greatest virtue is being able to evoke -not force- a sense of nostalgia by distorting fragments taken from his surroundings, making the personal feel universal, while still keeping the audience at bay.

I have never been a fan of nostalgia being used as a tool to force a reaction or engagement from the audience. Even if it comes from a sincere place, once too much emphasis is placed on that sole aspect of the work in question, I immediately lose interest since I won’t see it as anything but manipulative and lazy. Nonetheless, when this feeling occurs organically, its power is so strong that it just becomes impossible to ignore.

Simonel has the great virtue of being able to evoke nostalgia by making the personal resonate universally, and he does this without really giving us the script to the whole story. There are clues and hints that filter through the dense textures he creates, but nothing is obvious; his work is subliminal. He does not have to rely on vintage clips/samples that shamelessly force out memories from our childhood or from situations that we did not even experience; rather, he achieves this by the pure -and apparent- simplicity of sound manipulation, distorting fragments that are taken from his own surroundings. What these pieces mean to him will not have the same meaning to the audience, but they will certainly strike our emotional core in a similar way.

Ephemeral Passages can be seen as an extension or a continuation of what Simonel has been working on for more than a decade, but there is something that must be emphasized: extension and continuation are not synonymous with repetition. Yes, he works with loops and the cyclical, but his work does not feel stagnant; there are nuances and shapes with subtle, yet important, differences. Arrebatos (Facade Electronics, 2021) was dark (without completely falling into the ominous realm of dark-ambient) and perhaps a bit more abstract than Segundo Plano (Discos Deleite, 2021), which in turn feels more open and vast than Ephemeral. This current EP is dense, impenetrable, and just as introspective as the previous albums, but unlike both, there’s hope hidden underneath. At a superficial level, the differences might not be so obvious, but it is through deep listening that they come to light, demonstrating once again that Simonel's work demands attention and interaction, and is not to be left to drift off in the background.