Fursaxa
Amulet
Fursaxa has never quite turned out a studio album that reflected the power and awe of her live shows. Instead, fans have had only a series of tour cd-rs as compensation for this deficiency in her output. Rectifying this problem (at least in part), comes the CD reissue of Amulet along with half of her previous tour cd-r, 'From the Cult of Moon Mountain'. This hour plus selection of live material captures Fursaxa at her very best, and will hopefully make believers of those who haven't yet had a chance to catch her during her tours. Two of the tracks feature extra fuzz and wah from Bardo Pond's Michael and John Gibbons!
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
"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