The experimental ambient-folk project fhae, created by Ellena Ramsay and based in Meanjin, combines ethereal, mesmerizing vocals with organic instrumental textures and an almost primal, raw percussive production aesthetic.

The story of fhae began almost by accident—with a high school multimedia assignment in GarageBand. Ellena Ramsay discovered a pull toward music production, downloaded an app on her phone, and that same day, without equipment or experience, recorded her first track ‘I waited’. This song, built on reverberating vocals and guitar sounds recorded through Apple earbuds placed inside the instrument, defined the project’s future path. Since 2021, when fhae officially formed as a solo project, Ellena has focused on creating conceptual albums exploring profound human states—grief, discomfort, desire, greed. Her method is quite particular—layered synthesizers, guitar, and ghostly vocals creating sonic landscapes for introspection. The album she lives within me showed how a child perceives the world, demonstrating the signature combination of vulnerability and emotional depth.

photo credit: Ellena Ramsay, Molly Ramsay

The new album life in cycle continues this trajectory, choosing the butterfly’s metamorphosis as a structure for talking about existence—from birth to death, from stillness to movement, from unknowing to excessive knowledge. The album recreates the butterfly’s life cycle, drawing a parallel with human experience, and together this forms a rather flexible story about time, body, and memory.

the egg is a prologue to life. The world before birth, calm and unrecognized. Dense ambient creates the atmosphere of a womb where time has stopped. fhae‘s voice sounds distant but clear enough to affect the mind, hypnotizing and drawing one into a cinematic story.

hatches from egg acquires vivid textures. The world gradually takes shape, and in this change lies ephemeral beauty. Hope, faith, wonder, and joy blend in a soft, cool ambient sound, felt like a milky fog embracing with its fluffy haze. Behind it, one can discern a golden sun and feel its warm rays. This is the beginning of awareness—the moment when a being first encounters space beyond itself.

In search of itself and its place, creates the cocoon and inside the cocoon fill the sound with bright electronic textures. The sound here is strong, energetic, reflecting the desire to move forward, but simultaneously the aspiration for tranquility and peace. fhae plays with textures in creates the cocoon, mixing them to hypnotic enchantment, while inside the cocoon sounds like time suspended—ephemeral, inaccessible, and safe. The cocoon is simultaneously a cage and protection, a place of dissolution and reconstruction. Here warmth, uncertainty, and comfort reign. The being is suspended in transformation.

emerges from the cocoon sounds hypnotically fast, demonstrating an obvious change of stage, or rather rebirth. This is felt in the pulsating movement and fairy-tale mystical vibration in the melody. There is something infinitely hopeful here. Emerging from the cocoon feels like rebirth. The air is now different—sharper, wider. The butterfly has wings, but they are fragile and wet, waiting to harden. Patience becomes strength. When the being finally gains the ability to fly, the sky seems infinite. It ceases to be alone—the air is filled with others: butterflies, dragonflies, bees, birds, airplanes. Everything moves through the same space.

The track flight sounds alluring and passionate. fhae has created an infinite space of pleasure, love, and aspirations without a specific goal—simply experience, encompassing every moment of existence. flight is deep ambient, intended to reach something incredibly emotional, perhaps beyond the understanding of consciousness and the feeling of the unconscious.

The album concludes with the track death—empty, very dark, sounding in thick, dark withering. death is the longest track on the release, nine minutes. Synthetic figures sound like reconciliation with life, gratitude for experience, and yet this leaves a thought about rebirth, possibly a new beginning and new experience. The butterfly is not ready to die. Its life passed fleetingly—a blurred series of growth, changes, connections. Wings weaken, the body slows, but memory and awareness remain. The being resists the inevitable, stubbornly clinging to a world it has only begun to understand. Then comes capitulation. The drone absorbs it, soft and infinite. Death comes as completion. Because there was life. Because there was love.

I’m thrilled! life in cycle works as a meditation on finitude, but Ellena Ramsay avoids sentimentality. The album takes a biological process and transforms it into sonic philosophy—about how we move through stages of existence, how we transform and accept change. Textures fold into layers, synthesizers breathe, vocals hover somewhere between presence and disappearance.

One could reproach fhae for excessive conceptuality—the butterfly metaphor risks becoming too illustrative. Nine minutes of the final death might seem excessive for those seeking background music or light immersion in ambient. The album’s structure is rigid, almost didactic: egg, hatching, cocoon, flight, death. This predictability could kill curiosity. Could—if Ramsay were simply illustrating the process. Instead, she lives it.

The difference is that the album never explains itself. Tracks exist autonomously, without the need to follow a narrative. Inside it lives music that works on its own terms. The album demands immersion, but in return gives space for reflection on one’s own life, on what stage of metamorphosis we find ourselves. And here it becomes clear why Ramsay chose precisely the butterfly, and not, say, a tree or a wave. The butterfly is a creature that lives briefly but goes through radical transformation. It changes completely, losing one form and gaining another. Human life is arranged similarly, only we rarely notice the moment of transition. The album closes the circle but leaves the door open. Perhaps this is fhae‘s main achievement: to create music about the end that makes one think about the beginning.

life in cycle releases on limited edition compact disc

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