Eartheater is as alien, as familiar, and as omnivorous as the name would suggest. Throughout the Eartheater project, Alexandra Drewchin (Guardian Alien) has experimented with varying ratios of the technological and the analog – sometimes playing fully acoustic with just vocals and banjo, other times going through a full hardware setup, layering on synths and processing. Her forthcoming album Metalepsis (a term for the fractal-like rhetoric device in which a figure of speech is recontextualized within another figure of speech) promises to be a synthesis of the two: “cyborg psychedelia” that “presents Drewchin’s personal evolution as a musical process at once tethered to advancing technologies and to the flashes of humanity that escape between the circuits.”
“Homonyms” is a good introduction. Skittering and folding in on itself, the song devours elements of electronic pop, psych folk, and drone and synthesizes them into a warbling space lullaby. All tethered to Drewchin’s dreamy voice and a crisp guitar melody, all cosmos and folktale and human machine.
Metalepsis is out February 24 on Hausu Mountain.
