Austere is a group based in Portland, Oregon USA, that makes ambient-electronic music. It is unknown who they are, because the group thinks that the music is the important matter and not who is behind it. They have been releasing musick since 1998 and are distributed by Hypnos Online (http://hypnos.com).

Their work has covered a wide-variety of ground in the ambient genre: minimalist "process piece" works (Convergence), minimal dark drones (Monodia), classic flowing "Enoesque" ambient ("fade"), glitchy ambient drum & bass (distance), bizarre and difficult-to-classify "Coilesque" pastiche (Curio), active, moving "unignorable" ambient (evergone) and blissful, floating guitar-only ambient (Remittance.)

They have also released a track called "Coruscate" as part of the Music for Seances: Talking Board series (http://austere.org/oracle/seances.shtml) produced by The Sound-O-Mat (http://sound-o-mat.com) in conjunction with the Art*O*Mat project (http://artomat.org) as has one of their member's side-project, The Mystifying Oracle (http://austere.org/oracle).

They are also regular contributors free MP3-only projects and labels such as the Dark Duck Drone Download Project (http://www.darkduck.net/drone.htm) and the Dark Winter Coil Tribute Project "Full Cold Moon" (http://darkwinter.com.)