RATSKIN RECORDS

Feminine Care is a collection of hypnotic mood swings, spirit jazz and haunted incantations that explore permutations of femininity and care between  2016 - 2020. These songs were moments of freedom and release in the midst of the Trump administration, Black terror, wildfires, displacement and heartbreak.   

This album is a rite of passage. These compositions ask, “What does it really mean to be cared for, caring, carefree and careful in the feminine experience?” 

Absurdly titled after the puritanically cursed tampon aisle in American drugstores, Feminine care plays with ideas of cycles, failed gender-conformity, climate-change, the black female body as a “pre-existing condition,”  tenderness within femme rituals, and the relationship between American horror and sexuality. This is an investigation into the femme experience, behind the capitalization of our bodies, beyond binary thinking and before the witch trials and our dislocation from the natural world. 

Lexagon’s sound swallows you into a thick atmospheric cloud of dark melodic incantations that feel both delicate and dangerous-  ancient and haunting. Her sound pushes vocal pop into realms of “spirit-noise” often letting the ghost in the machine distort and influence the compositions of her tracks.   

Field recordings of storms and animals, clarinet, cajon, omnichord,  journal entries and whispered confessions swell into rising tides of breathy ballads and electronic spirituals. 

Listen to the soundscape of a locked diary, sonic sketches oscillating between form and dissolution.Hear the musicality of the inner mind- intrusive thoughts playing peek a boo with focus, an argument between self and shadow, an overstimulated nervous system draped in sweet harmonies that melt into the uncanny valley; making rhythms out of syllables,tears in bayou cemeteries and breathlessness from being policed in Amerikkka. 

When describing her music practice Lexagon states, “I’m fascinated with the idea of exploring alternate, hidden versions of myself and the thousands of ancestors who’ve worn my face- music is a spiritual technology that allows me to drop into the deepest parts of myself and lineage...I’m not interested in making pretty music as much as capturing the variables and energies moving through me in a given moment. I see my music practice like an astrological natal chart- a blueprint documenting me and the cosmos right now.” 

Downtempo tracks like Hurricane slip you into a brooding sultry soundscape, humid with lush reverb and resonant drones. Field recordings of rain and thunder swell between lyrics like “Drench me, I can go all night” or “torrential rains between your legs” as a lovesick ode to female ejaculation.  

While other songs like Values shuffle syncopated rhythms that weave samples of paper money and pitch-shifted clarinet, almost mirroring the self-aware nuance of the chant- like lyrics “I can’t afford a good night’s rest” to “I can’t afford to be afraid, look me in the eyes-unlock the cage.”  Her vocal delivery is raw and vulnerable, exposing the threads of her grief, anxiety and courage. 

As a filmmaker, Lexagon’s compositions are often crafted with a moving image in mind. Some of her compositions like The Motivation act as a documentary soundtrack: picture a summer afternoon, she is sitting on a california beach and writing down notes about metaphysics from Walter Russell’s “The Secret of Light”  while staring off into the blue horizon. There is both a sense of channeling and autoethnographic archiving layered between sounds of crashing waves and sizzling sea foam.  

Feminine Care nods to the women who throw bricks and soup cans, the crones whose wisdom mends our broken hearts, the mothers who sing the lullabys of our ancestors, the post-men-opausal badasses with beards,the two-spirits who are both, and most of all- for Black women who conjure worlds of possibility with every breath.  

PRESS QUOTES:

“Feminine Care is a fragmented and elusive emotional sonic collage. These songs are structured around the architecture of the subconscious mind. The album is a palimpsest of layered harmonies, intrusive thoughts, cosmic resonance, an overstimulated nervous system and wild prophecy.”  -Lexagon 

“Sounds like magical realism, mystical free-loops, inner-drone, electronic spirit jazz, low-fi sci-fi, speculative opera, afrofuturism, spirit noise, wild improvisational pop, ethereal soul, heirloom lullaby, musique concréte, brood pop, lowkey maximalism, ambient drift, avant garde choral music, spirit channeling”

 BIOGRAPHY: 

 As a seasoned, multidisciplinary creative, Alexa combines her fine arts sensibility and mad design skills with a drive to make positive change happen. Visual storytelling through film, photography and animation interest her. She also creates and produces music in her solo project LEXAGON. Her music brings an afro-futurist sonic mirage of sound- weaving together loops of soulful vocals, clarinet and theremin. Inspired by female jazz vocalists and melancholy love songs, her performances incorporate femme ballads with ritualized moments of improvisation and experimental noise. She’s interested in how music activates memory, particularly ancestral trauma and epi-genetics. Music is her vehicle for time-traveling and intergenerational healing. https://alexachristineburrell.com/