Figure Austère’s simply titled ‘II’ is a beautiful exercise in restraint, a song cycle designed as one ‘movement’ that makes its quiet presence known through its intimate simplicity. Built around the hypnotic patterns of finger-picked guitar and atmospheric, close-miked whispers, it presents to the listener a grainy, home-recorded quietude, rich in tape hiss and vocal distortion.
There is beauty in its unadorned presentation, and detail (as I have said before) is key here – with each song occasionally decorated with subtle, tremulous counterpoints that tremble beneath the acoustic surface like ghostly whale song. These quietly rendered and delicately distorted loops of ambient drone that arrive unexpectedly, vibrate like an analogue past’s prediction of a digital future.
This is an undeniably melancholic album whose subtle textures speak cryptically to the subconscious but there is real delicacy to be found too. A controlled but apposite simplicity drives the guitar work, strings carefully picked and melodies cyclical and deliberately repetitive, providing a meditative, introverted intensity to proceedings.
There is something stark yet strangely futuristic in Figure Austère’s hushed, stripped-back bedroom folk, like an isolated traveller lost in space sending home sacred messages of hope and longing to an already abandoned planet.
I first heard this music many many months ago and have waited hopefully for its release to come- for some time I thought that it might have disappeared entirely. For Galaxy Train to now release it feels like a perfect destination for this project. A feeling of destiny wrapped up in its arrival.
I urge you to give those lost messages time to sink in. It will be time well spent.
Written by M.A Welsh (Misophone)
Music | Misophone (bandcamp.com)
