Silence and Wisdom + Double Happiness

Two CD set. The short, mysterious career of aptly named French female duo Deux Filles is bookended by tragedy. Gemini Forque and Claudine Coule met as teenagers on a holiday pilgrimage to Lourdes, during which Coule's mother died of an incurable lung disease and Forque's mother was killed and her father paralyzed in a grisly auto accident. The two teens bonded over their shared grief and worked through their bereavement with music. However, after recording two critically acclaimed albums, Forque and Coule disappeared without a trace during a trip to Algiers in 1984, where Forque had lived from birth to the age of five. In the ensuing years, not a trace of the duo has surfaced. Indeed, the short and terribly unhappy lives of Forque and Coule are at the root of the small but fervent cult following the mysterious duo have gained since their disappearance, not least because the placid, largely instrumental music on the duo's albums betrays no hint of the sorrow that framed their personal lives. (The duo is actually an elaborate pseudonym for British musicians Simon Fisher Turner and Colin Lloyd Tucker)