Wednesday, October 6, 2021

Album Review: Lexagon - Feminine Care

 
San Fransico-based experimental artist Lexagon's latest conjuring Feminine Care, doesn't feel so much like an album as a book of spells. A musical sphere of protection, wherein she finds a place to shelter in a reprieve from the volleys of indignities that would otherwise piece and wound her heart, and cover it in rotting soars. Feminine Care acts as a covenstead where she can extract the pain and puss from her throat and reclaim her voice. 

The name for Lexagon's index of incantations is one that calls to mind products that are designed to capture the discharge of the menstrual cycle, and otherwise hide such bodily tides from the perception of others. However useful some women find these products, they are not made and sold for woman's benefit, but rather for-profit and to ease society's discomfort with this common facet of many people's experience of womanhood. As the phrase is molded and recast through Lexagon's work though, Feminine Care takes on a different meaning, and in doing so, poses a question  - what does it mean to care for yourself, and others, as a woman? The answer she proposes is elegantly simple: to care is to listen and make heard. 

 reverent, torchy vocal performances, stygian ambient R'nB grooves and strikingly rhythmic accompaniments, Lexagon acts as an empathic beldame of sound, whose spell craft uncovers the hidden songs and plaintiff moans of the world, and gives them audience as exalted guests in her house. Whether it be the high cost of life and resilience depicted along with a dreamlike ripple on "Values," or the quietly rattling storms of emotions captured within the windy prayer bowl-shaped curves of "Hurrican," or the bone-deep, white blighted fear of extinguishment described in the bitter vignette "Sugawatta," Lexagon is lifting to the surface those voices who have found themselves submerged like a stone in the bed of a lake- cast off and out of sight, subject to the laws of force and order, as described by men of notoriety, as having a natural place in the hierarchy of the universe, and whose suffering has not dignity. 

The people from whom these sounds escape find themselves in a relationship to the world where their mere existence justifies their suffering- a suffering that gives meaning to others, but spare none for the sufferer. Lexagon details for us a world that deprives women, black women, and many others, of knowledge of themselves and their own power. As a modern-day witch, it is her sacred duty to blasphemy such an order. And in finding herself in a world that only takes, she is charged with taking it back. 

Feminine Care is out via Ratskin Records.