Two artists meet on opposite shores of the sonic imagination - François J. Bonnet, with a microphone pointed at ancient winds and watery spirits in the Hebrides, and Sarah Davachi, with fingers hovering above electric organs like a slow-motion invocation in a Californian still life. Banshee / Basse Brevis, released by Portraits GRM, is not so much a split LP as a diptych: one half carved from field-recorded myth, the other painted in sustained tones and microtonal hesitations.

Bonnet, longtime director of INA GRM and philosopher of the acousmatic unknown, returns here not with theory but with landscape - cutting into coasts where geography blurs with ghost story. From the Isles of Mull, Staffa, and Skye, he brings back not postcard ambience but layered incantations: the hum of loch-side boats becomes a voice not entirely human, and wind takes on the personality of something older than climate. There’s narrative here, but it’s submerged like shipwrecks: the sonic detritus of human tools dissolves into environmental lament. No ghosts appear, but they breathe audibly.

Davachi, meanwhile, occupies a much quieter cathedral - an interior one. Her contribution, Basse Brevis, plays with temporality as if time were a silk thread slowly unwinding into harmonic meditation. She engages her instruments - electric organ, Mellotron, synthesizer - with such delicate precision that they seem to breathe through the gaps in attention. The piece feels both architectural and deeply emotional, like reading a letter from a minimalist monk. It's not ambient in the passive sense, but a conscious act of duration. Emotion seeps in sideways - never gestured, always felt.

The pairing is unexpectedly perfect. Bonnet offers an outward gaze into myth and place; Davachi, an inward journey into the architecture of restraint. Both are deeply attentive listeners, less interested in composition as command than as communion. Together, they sketch two halves of a listening practice: one where landscape becomes memory, the other where memory becomes tone.

And if one were to search for a banshee here, perhaps it is not a wailing spirit but a subtle vibration - something just beneath hearing, either arriving from the sea or emerging from within. A beautiful tension exists between the two sides of this LP: the wet, windswept realism of Bonnet and the monastic interiority of Davachi. It's a rare thing: a record that makes you feel as if you've left the room, or perhaps never quite entered it.