Lexagon’s Mystical Album, ‘Feminine Care,’ Conjures an Archive of Freedom

Welcome to Pass the Aux, where KQED Arts & Culture brings you our favorite new tracks by Bay Area artists. Check out past entries and submit a song for future coverage here.

For Bay Area multimedia artist Alexa Burrell (Lexagon), sound transcends dimension. Her latest sonic opus, Feminine Care, enraptures listeners in a vast and haunting incantation of fear, urgency, Black terror, displacement and healing.

Collaged during the Trump administration, Feminine Care plays like a multimedia diary where ghosts of trauma and flickers of hope dance with one another. Whispered secrets, hypnotic electro ballads and field recordings of storms and animals paint the artist’s confessional.

Lexagon is a musical shapeshifter. With Feminine Care, which came out on Ratskin Records on September, she traverses spiritual jazz, soulful R&B and dream pop. At other moments, she croons in a synth-infused underworld. As her artist statement reads, “I’m fascinated with the idea of exploring alternate, hidden versions of myself and the thousands of ancestors who’ve worn my face.”

Seeing music as “spiritual technology,” the record builds a liminal space where anxiety and salvation coexist. Lexagon’s voice soars with the vigor of protest and cracks with the pain of being crushed before lulling the listener to sleep. 

The lullaby is interrupted by the second-to-last track. “Sugawata” begins with labored breaths and magical bells. The growing drone of an insect-like synth licks the track as Lexagon’s sniffs and breaths as if she’s running away from this universe. The track would almost be Bonobo-esque if it weren’t for vocal samples of a man, an officer, interjecting with declaratives like “I don’t work for the sheriff’s office right now. I want to see some identification.”

At 8 minutes long, “Sugawata” reaches its coda in street noise, sniffles and whispers. Lexagon lists examples of internalized misogyny with an audible page flip. Then she leaves us with the thought, “There is a story to your spirit. The hands that hold your spirit are reaching for what?”

Feminine Care harnesses the spirit of ancestry to try to make sense of contemporary grief. When the atrocities of patriarchy and white supremacy weave through generations, Lexagon’s Feminine Care conjures an archive of freedom.