Hausu Mountain – HAUSMO 38
"As droplets of data rain from the Cloud, Alex Drewchin embeds another
digital seed into the soil and watches the vines unfold according to
their own feral algorithms. RIP Chrysalis is her second full-length
album under the Eartheater moniker released on Hausu Mountain in the
year 2015, which she will remind you is the Year of the Goat. The files
ripped from her devices duplicate through electronic pollination and
drift from ear bud to ear bud. The moments we spend listening fall back
to earth as plucked petals. RIP Chrysalis spreads on a lateral
trajectory from the same rhizome that bore her debut full-length
Metalepsis. The two albums stand together as sibling entities, bearing
similar faces and distinct personalities. With her experiments as a
founding member of the avant-psych duo Guardian Alien illuminating a
parallel path through deep inner space, we witness Drewchin transmute
her concrete experiences into another harvest that expands in all
directions at once. Her intricate ballad arrangements rise from standing
pools of hi-fidelity synthesis. Her dynamic vocal performances span an
untold number of tactics and tonalities, flitting between sing-song
cadences, otherworldly coos, and flights of operatic grandeur. Her dense
song structures find room for multiple staggered climaxes, tangents of
sampled found sound, and expanses of drone meditation. Drewchin builds
layered electronic productions possessed of enough detail to constitute
stand-alone worlds, each weighted thick with text and texture.
RIP Chrysalis finds Eartheater stretching her omnivorous compositions
into longer frameworks, allowing each atmosphere to thicken to its
saturation point with stacked tiers of choral voice and interwoven synth
lines. The sudden onsets of spoken word interludes, bursts of corrupted
glitch, and hip hop 808 kick patterns maintain Drewchin's role as the
unpredictable curator of her own sonic universe - and yet these missives
feel more essential than ever, juxtaposed against legible passages of
guitar and vocal performance that bend conventions of pop and rock like
elastic playthings. As her productions diversify into new realms of
fine-grain electronic experimentation, Drewchin simultaneously steps
closer to some semblance of humanity. Her lyrics wind their way into
your psyche from multiple entry points. Abstract metaphysical
incantations lean on frank colloquialisms. Multi-syllabic rhyme schemes
churn through surreal images in double time. Some turns of phrase
astound on the spot, and others sneak past your defenses, only to
manifest as obvious revelations many listens down the line. Drewchin's
guitar chimes through arpeggios that glue her compositions together at
the seams, while flashes of acoustic texture provided by lush string
arrangements elevate her crescendos to new heights of emotional
catharsis. At any given moment, an Eartheater composition reads
somewhere between a folk song, a musique concrète collage, and a filmic
suite fit to soundtrack a multiversal montage that only Drewchin can
imagine in full detail. Her music grants us an opportunity to observe a
process of internal negotiation: the deprogramming of false
fundamentals; the fulfillment achieved by creating from within a system
sinking deeper into bureaucratic regulation and surveillance; the
ongoing construction of an avatar as a necessary foil to a breathing
human."
