Benjamin Finger is nothing short of a musical polymath and his eleventh studio album, Ghost Figures show’s he’s just as adept in an acoustic language as he’s proven himself to be in an electronic one. Ghost Figures sees the producer and multi-instrumentalist turn almost exclusively to the piano and its melancholic resonances for a minimalist album evocative of the Erik Satie, transposed to a digital world. As the title implies the work lives very much in an ethereal dimension, with slow wistful piano motives lethargically pulling at simple beatific melodies.
As with everything Benjamin Finger there’s an electronic component, but with the absence of anything concrete like a synthesiser, and this being very much in the vain of a piano concerto, the electronic elements are resigned to the background. Processes either extend notes, or fill in the gaps between fingers that move across the ivories at a snail’s pace. A reverb feeding back on it self eternally or some obscure field recording of a chanting crowd, pad out the silences and add to the atmosphere of the record, where they co-exist in the echoes of the piano.
There’s nothing forced here and everything appears to exist without any real purpose. It’s a work redolent of Benjamin Finger’s more reflective moods like on “Listen to my Nerves Hum” and yet again shows us another side of this extensive artistic personality in which where everything is allowed.
You can read an extensive review of the album here.