Fursaxa - Lepidoptera (2005)

Fursaxa to jednoosobowy projekt Tary Burke artystki ze Stanów Zjednoczonych. Serdecznie polecam jej muzykę, która myślę, że potrafi oczarować każdego i zabrać w swoje piękne krainy.

Fursaxa is a USA-based acid folk or freak folk project led by Tara Burke (born June 28th, 1969) of Philadelphia. She began home-recording songs featuring acoustic guitar, simple Casio electronic keyboards, accordion, dulcimer and her heavily overdubbed vocals on a 4-track recorder after having casually played with friends at "drunken/stoned jams".

She has been making music since childhood. Her music has been compared to Nico's solo work and is often categorized among New Weird America artists. She has recorded with numerous bands as a guest or side-project, including Acid Mothers Temple, fellow Philadelphians Bardo Pond, Iditarod, Scorces and Six Organs of Admittance. Fursaxa is currently signed to the London based ATP Recordings label. (wikipedia)

This is the Fursaxa that people need to hear, raw and intoxicating; beautiful and perhaps still a little bit dangerous.

"Over the past couple of years, Tara Burke (aka Fursaxa) has entrenched herself as a mystical queen for the free-folk crowd, channelling the disaffected sorrow of Nico as well as the transcendent visions of 12th Century abbess Hildegard von Bingen. On her previous recordings, Burke sewed together her albums from short vignettes of narcoleptic folk songs, typically in the form of monotone lullabies in which her resonant voice radiated through stoned-and-droned acoustic guitar strum and / or farfisa arrangements. So it's very rare to finds a Fursaxa song that clocks in at anything longer than 3 minutes, which curiously is ample time for her to hypnotise her audience with her utterly compelling songs. Amulet, thus, is a bit of a detour from the collections of shortened songs as she offers four extended pieces of sprawling drones built out of delay-pedal loops. On the first couple of tracks, it's Burke's voice that takes center stage, spiralling into a hypnotic set of oscillating patterns, mossy psychedelic chants harkening back to the dark ages. She accentuates these tracks with occasional interludes for flutes and hand bells. On one of the final tracks on Amulet, Burke sets forth on a slow-motion acoustic guitar renditition of a Glenn Branca symphony, aiming for nothing more than transcendent hypnotic monotone. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!"--Aquarius Records

(photo by Rebecca Waleski)

"Everyone thinking of buying a Fursaxa album should be aware that Tara Burke has the ability to put listeners into a trance-like state. Her voice is somewhere between a tenor and an alto, and when she ventures in the lower ranges, she might as well be a hypnotist. Burke got my attention years ago because there weren't many women making weird, experimental, psychedelic music. There still aren't many, but Burke continues to put out excellent album after excellent album.... After one listen, I'm even more convinced that Tara Burke is a mystic." --Brad Rose (Foxy digitalis)

"A previous member of the band UN, Burke is now one of the epicentres and key collaborators of the North American free-folk movement, along with such luminaries as Jack Rose, Charalambides, Ben Chasny and the Jewelled Antler Collective. With her hypnotic, echo-y churchbell chanting, Burke possesses a power-filled vocal sound that harkens back not only to those other polar queens of disaffected freakout psychedelia Nico and Barbara Manning, but she is also akin to and inspired by Hildegard von Bingen, the 12th-century Benedictine mystical abbess. With the low drone of chord organ and farfisa, detuned ringing guitar, and endlessly looped, multiply-tracked vocals applied with heaps of delay, Fursaxa sounds like a tripped-out medievalist perched upon a poppy petal. Burke has an alchemical knack for turning folk into lo-fi, and then into sheer psych and back again, but more importantly, her music is pure humming narcosis" --fusetron

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