FURSAXA "Lepidoptera"

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Lepidoptera, Fursaxa's fifth full-length release, has the same sound heard on previous releases: a lo-fi concatenation of deliberately strummed acoustic guitars, tambourines, organs, a healthy dose of room tone (perhaps to evoke the leaden quiet of an empty cathedral) and Burke's multi-tracked vocals, mixed to be indistinct and indecipherable. Her droning dirges have ancestors in the frosty harmonium-saturated madrigals of doom Nico sang on The Marble Index. Like those chansons of the damned, all Burke's compositions (it seems inappropriate to call them songs -- you won't be whistling these tracks while you wash your car or humming them in the shower) move at a solemn, contemplative pace and feature little in the way of dynamics, chord changes, hooks or melody. Not that this is bad -- it's just not the point of this music. Some are vaguely pastoral ("Pyrcantha", on which Burke layers her moans over the same two guitar chords strummed repeatedly) and some are downright oppressive, as is the case with the glacial, foreboding "Freedom". Some are wordless ("Tyranny", which features free-form fife-piping and some primitive pounding on what sounds like a tabla); others sound like field recordings of Wiccans casting spells ("Purple Fantasy", "Una de Gato"). All seem to aspire to function as aural mandalas -- dense, interweaving patterns of sound to beguile the rational mind and facilitate meditation.
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Rob Horning / Popmatters