Alone in the Dark Wood

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. Alone in the Dark Wood, recorded half in Pennsylvania, half in Finland, evokes pale moonlight and deep shadows, where tree limbs bend to form cathedral arches over a procession of mystics. Disembodied female voices rise like sacral fire-smoke amongst the strum of mandolin, balalaika, and the piper's call of bells and flute-whistle. At some turns mournful and stark, at others a celebratory invocation, Alone in the Dark Wood displays Burke's 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.