When we interviewed Alexandra Drewchin, aka Eartheater, last year around the release of her Metalepsis record, she expressed her motivation to create as living “for the future folklore of figures of speech and the tributaries of new association that continually present themselves through metalepsis,” which is to say she is never finished with context. Drewchin finds fluidity in context, she “moves through walls like soft warm water” on “Wetware”, and her new record RIP Chrysalis is a post-mortem ode to metamorphosis.
Is the title to be interpreted as death in transition? On “Ecdysisyphus”, Drewchin invokes the transitory passages of never stepping in the same stream, but speaks the title in violence as “rip this chrysalis” rather than resting in peace. She feels the “this perpetual metalepsis just is.” Spoken over bell tolls and billowing ambient washes, “Ecdysisyphus” is one of Eartheater’s many faces. Virtual psychedelia might most aptly describe her realm. The eponymous track overlaps worlds of baroque at its most macabre and bone-chilling psych rock, harrowing chants and the backwoods twang of a banjo. There is a deep interplay of mythos in Eartheater that is without vengeance in reclaiming the mother as hero. RIP Chrysalis is the eros engagement of conflicting worlds and embracing them as natural evolutions, malleable to our inexorable comprehension.
RIP Chrysalis is out now on Hausu Mountain.
