Fantaisie
Fantaisie
It’s a record like a mirage: epic and elusive, the music of a vanished land.
A world built in seven songs, like seven days spent traveling through a parallel universe.
This hallucinatory land belongs to the band Fantaisie, about whom nothing is known—except that the album Pariah’s Ballad—recorded then set aside until it reached the ears of byebye records in 2025—will be their first and last.
What do we hear?
First, a female voice—ethereal and weightless—a soprano tone so pure it borders on the otherworldly, as if a ghost were taking us by the hand.
Then, orchestral instrumentation, both organic and synthetic, somewhere between film score and bedroom pop. Most of the instruments seem doubled, as if the sound itself were hallucinatory: is that a bass guitar or a digital sub? An acoustic guitar or a sample? Live drums or a drum machine? Strings, a Solina? A human voice, vocoded, or sampled choirs?
It evokes 90s trip-hop and 19th-century painting; Elizabeth Fraser, Beth Gibbons, or Air—but also Shakespeare, video games, and a sleepwalking experience.
In the end, it’s a generous and haunted album, with melodies that seem like dawn or dusk—always on the edge of something about to happen.
Or end. Like a shared hallucination: a fantaisie.
Pariah’s Ballad
Stolen Days
Tango
My Oldest Fear
Pariah’s Ballad
Cold
Le Rêve
The Invitation
03:00
03:29
03:52
03:41
03:25
02:43
03:23
The strings in My Oldest Fear, a lyrical and subterranean ballad, seem to travel through time.
The track Cold could be the sonic equivalent of John Everett Millais’s painting of the Ophelia myth. Stolen Days, with its magical arpeggios, recalls Salvador Dalí’s Partial Hallucination, when, at bedtime, faces glowing with light appear to the painter over his piano.
Rêve, Tango, The Invitation—even the track titles evoke something like a dream or a nightmare, a fantasy or a lovesick psychosis.
A male voice—perhaps the pariah’s?—joins the female one in the title track Pariah’s Ballad, which sounds like a shared haunting, where the loved one becomes a riddle to solve — missed calls, tip-toes, go softly / are you lying too?
ROLL-OUT
29.10.25 — Single 1 Pariah’s Ballad
10.12.25 — Single 2 Tango
22.01.26 — Single 3 Stolen Days
20.02.26 — Album Pariah’s Ballad (focus track The Invitation)