Earlier this year, if you live in the right parts of the continental US, you were confronted with the emergence of the 17-year cicada, also known as the periodical Cicada- a strange, bumbling and bulbous insect that lives an extended, decades-long adolescence underground, only to dig its way out of the safety of the soil only to sprout a pair of wings and stagger around hoping to get lucky. Most of them don't end up mating. Most get noshed by birds or fly into car windshields or unsuspecting bicyclists at high speeds. That is, when they're not clinging to the brick exterior of your apartment building, screaming their heads off like a crowd of tiny tornado sirens. While the Brooklyn-based electronic-folk duo shares a name with these pesky little paramours, that's thankfully where the similarities end. Their first outing, arriving presumably after fewer than 17 years of gestation, is titled Autumn, a time of year when there are notably few of their namesakes buzzing around, and so you are free to indulge in the bathing whispers and warm, inviting timbre of their dollhouse sized orchestrations in unobstructed tranquility. Combing somewhat traditional jazz and country instrumentation with dust-stirring and breathy electronics, Cicada approximates a species of folk music fostered by crinkled gnome-like creatures in the shadows of projector booths, stage lighting boxes, and pit orchestras- absorbing humanity's intricacies of artisan craft and performance and reproducing them as a naive but potent form of lingua franca. Delicate, unassuming, and supplely erudite in its chosen spectrum of memetic serenades, Cicada possesses an air of the familiar while encapsulating a brush with an elfin layer of the ephemeral.
