Tara Burke :: Fursaxa (solo and with Grant Acker and Matt Shiley)
Tara Burke is a Farfisa chord organist and singer formerly of Clock Strikes Thirteen, formerly of Ted Casterline and his Perfectly Perfect Pieces of Fruit, formerly of the Siltbreeze band UN. She now performs with two friends of hers as Fursaxa. Tara has a cd called Mandrake that Kawabata from the Acid Mothers Temple in Japan produced and released.
In Fursaxa, Grant Acker plays guitar and a casio keyboard; he also used to play guitar in the band UN. Matt Shiley play "bells" he makes from fire extinguishers that he cuts in half.
Joey Sweeney of the Philadelphia Weekly writes:
Hailing from West Philly and boasting a Japan-only record (Mandrake, available in these parts as an import), Fursaxa is currently the darling of the Other Music set, and it's easy to see why. Boasting a label endorsement from legends of present-day Japanese psychedelia Acid Mothers Temple (see also: Ghost, et al.) and a sound that hearkens back to those other polar queens of disaffected freakout music, Nico and Barbara Manning, Mandrake is one of the most otherworldly releases you'll come across this year. Burke has a real knack for turning folk into lo-fi, and then into sheer psych and back again.
