FEATURE:
Spotlight
a few interviews brought in that takes us back to 2020 and up to the current day. Eartheater (Alexandra Drewchin) is an American artist and composer who is starting to get a lot of attention. She has been in the industry for a while now - though this year has been especially successful and noteworthy. Her 2020 album, Phoenix: Flames Are Dews Upon My Skin, is one that created a lot of press interest. I will come to interview for that album. Her latest album, Powders, is one of the best of this year. I am going to end with a review for the album. The New York artist released perhaps her greatest album with Powders. Her fifth studio album, it is a phenomenal work that quite rightly received hugely positive reviews. Before I get to the first review, here is a little bit of biography about the sensational Eartheater:
“New York-based artist, multi-instrumentalist, composer and vocalist Eartheater distills a three-octave vocal range, experimental digital production and classical composition into works suspended between sonic abstraction and arresting lucidity. Her recorded output is enhanced by her viscerally emotive live performances that capture her fearless physical investment and gut-wrenching vocal sincerity.
With her 2020 album, Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin, Earthaeter is reborn. Composed, produced, and arranged entirely by Eartheater, Phoenix draws a path back to the primordial lava lake from which she first emerged, as it also testifies to the many resurrections her project has undergone over the last decade. While the album renews her focus on guitar performance and legible structure, Eartheater balances the unabashed prettiness of acoustic harmonic songs with the dissonant gestural embroidery of oblique instrumentals. The album, released in fall 2020 via PAN, is the result of a laborious revival in fire, and recontextualizes Eartheater’s combinatorial approach to production within her most confident abstractions, adjacent to some of her most direct and affecting songs to date.
Eartheater made her full-length debut in 2015, releasing the twin albums Metalepsis and RIP Chrysalis on Chicago label Hausu Mountain. In 2018, Eartheater signed to renowned experimental label PAN to release her third full-length, IRISIRI. The record laid out as a shifting network of abstract songcraft, laced with sudden structural upheavals and collisions of mutated themes from numerous sonic vocabularies, ranging from classical and experimental to electronica and metal. IRISIRI received year-end accolades from Pitchfork, The Quietus, CRACK and more, consistently named one of the best experimental albums of the year. In 2019, Eartheater pivoted with the release of the mixtape Trinity, a collection of siren songs created with her New York cohort of friends and collaborators including AceMo, Tony Seltzer, Color Plus, Dadras and more. Eartheater self-released the mixtape on her own recently launched imprint, Chemical X. The same year, she also released a collaborative EP with her friends, the experimental harp and violin duo LEYA, titled Angel Lust.
In addition to her own material, she has collaborated with musicians including Show Me The Body, Moor Mother, Caroline Polachek, Dinamarca, Sega Bodega, Prison Religion and more. Eartheater’s resume is also extensive with commissions for a range of institutions and ensembles; she has scored original material for visual artist Tony Oursler and video artists Semiconductor, and has soundtracked the runway collections for fashion houses Proenza Schouler, Chanel, Acne Studios, and MUGLER (for whom she regularly models). Eartheater was also tapped by the contemporary chamber orchestra Alarm Will Sound to compose an original score of six movements that has debuted in 2018 at the Sheldon Concert Hall in St. Louis, Missouri, and has since been brought to Lincoln Center’s 2019 edition of Ecstatic Music Festival in New York.
Throughout it all, Eartheater has pursued an unflinching touring schedule, headlining shows across the US, Europe, Asia and Australia, sharing bills with her contemporaries like Actress, Oneohtrix Point Never, Jenny Hval, Yves Tumor, and Juliana Huxtable, and performing at renowned international festivals like Unsound, CTM, Le Guess Who?, Donaufestival, MIRA and MoMA PS1’s Warm Up. Live performance is a central aspect of the Eartheater project, as she uses tension and improvisation to translate her intricate compositions into unforgettable corporeal expressions, often accompanied by the concert harpist Marilu Donovan (who also performs with LEYA). Additionally, Eartheater has collaborated with art duo FLUCT, and in 2017, she starred in Raul de Nieves and Colin Self’s opera The Fool at legendary NYC performance art space, the Kitchen”.
Even if it is important to focus on her current album, there was a lot of love and interest around 2020’s Phoenix: Flames Are Dews Upon My Skin. GATA spoke with Eartheater about an album that took her music to new realms, fans and corners:
“The mind behind the Eartheater project is Alexandra Drewchin, an artist based in Queens known for her raw productions, led by an amazing vocal range, touching three octaves.
Her first two albums, released on Chicago-based label Hausu Mountain were an electric dream, cradled by alien synths and folk finger-picking, sweetened with ethereal vocals. In 2018, she released IRISIRI for Berlin-based label PAN, mixing techno references alongside spoken vocals, ground up with electronic sounds from a distant and mystical world.
In 2020, Alexandra reached the height of her own journey of inner discovery, with her album Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin, an album composed, produced and arranged entirely by herself. Gestated in Zaragoza, Spain during a 10-week artist residency. Eartheater developed most of the album from within an isolated glasshouse, finding a sense of liberation through guitar and fairy electric sounds.
Home-schooled and self-taught, The New York artist is now a strong reference point in the avant-garde scene. Her latest album Phoenix seems to be the culmination of several important points in her life; an instrumental form, born from the ashes, documenting the rebuild from very personal experiences. The album is a strong feminist rhetoric, floating in the harmonies of electronic alchemy.
PHOTO CREDIT: Sam Clarke
GATA: How and when was Eartheater born? Where does the name come from?
EARTHEATER: It was 2010 in Brooklyn. It came to mind when reading “100 Years of Solitude”. There is a character who ate dirt and paint chips. I said Eartheater out loud and I just knew it was me. I like that it is the name of a worm but also a galactic entity that can consume whole planets. I like that it can encompass any aesthetic or feeling. I’m very conceptually claustrophobic.
GATA: You grew up in a very conservative environment and you were home-schooled up until your teenage years. How did that “outsider” feeling help develop your creativity?
EARTHEATER: I think my chronic loneliness forced me to have a very overactive imagination.
GATA: We heard you wrote Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon, your latest LP, over a 8 week period during an artist residency in Zaragoza; why did you choose the northeastern Spanish Capital to work on this project?
EARTHEATER: It was my only option besides recording in my bedroom again like all my previous albums. I was very honoured and grateful for the opportunity. It was really about it being a gorgeous studio more than anything. I would go anywhere if I was given 24-hour access to a top of the line studio.
GATA: Is it essential for you to find peace and get away from the city for your creative process or is it possible for you to create art in a more chaotic environment?
EARTHEATER: I don’t have the luxury of choosing what environment I work in yet. I just do what I need to do with what I have which has meant that I did everything at home in Queens. I definitely do lock myself in my room and let the rest of the world melt away when I’m working, though. As long as I can get alone time it doesn’t matter if it’s surrounded in chaos on the other side of the walls.
PHOTO CREDIT: Sam Clarke
GATA: The “Phoenix” is a representation of yourself as a mythological creature. What does this creature mean to you on a personal level? What did you leave behind and in what sense do you feel reborn again?
EARTHEATER: I had killed off parts of myself, by burning up into ashes, a few times to save myself from actual suicidal thoughts. There have been versions of myself that I grew out of and I’ve had to slay them. For me, discovering that I’m a Phoenix is what has kept me growing, sexy, and weightless. The cool thing too is each time you die as a Phoenix you always come back better. Though, you have to exist for a significant period of time between each reserection. You have to get to an intense level of anguish to ignite.
GATA: You mentioned that “Phoenix” has been growing in your womb for 10 years, you’ve reinvented yourself once again and have managed to get closer to your essence. How does it feel to deliver a work that developed over such a long time period, that represents so much of yourself?
EARTHEATER: It feels really good but is very exposing.
GATA: In this particular album, you created every sound from scratch and conducted a seven-piece string ensemble. How did you prepare yourself to face such an ambitious and delicate album?
EARTHEATER: I slept for a week and then got started.
GATA: As an artist, you explore concepts like femininity and technology, beyond standards and above genre, sex and humanity. Where does this tension between the organic and machine come from?
EARTHEATER: I like thinking about humans as machines — all living things for that matter. I think we’ll make really gorgeous sustainable technology in the future if we think that way”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Sam Clarke
I will move on soon. First, Loud and Quiet dug deep with Eartheater in 2020 about her then-new album. I think, before moving to the present, it is worth seeing where she came from and how her work has developed. Every interview she is involved with is fascinating! An artist open to revealing herself and letting us into her musical and personal world:
“This idea of growth is further explored through the symbol of the phoenix. “Looking back on the last decade, I can see very clear past lives within that period,” she says. “As you can tell from my work, I’ve been constantly reinventing myself, destroying myself and reinventing myself again. Now I think I’m coming more in touch with my pure essence. And this record feels less exploratory and more direct.”
Drewchin plays the titular phoenix in both the album artwork and the video for ‘How To Fight’, defiant, seductive and powerful as sparks fly from her. There was zero CGI for the shoot, an experience Drewchin describes with a laugh as “painful but totally worth it.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Levi Mandel
“I definitely am a very sexual person,” she says when asked about her intentions for the artwork. “I love feeling the conjunction between my physicality and my music. When I feel sexy and strong, that’s when my voice sounds good. And I know that maybe sounds obvious but it hasn’t been that obvious to me, actually. I’ve had family members and controlling ex-boyfriends really try to bevel my edges, and it’s taken its toll on my creativity and my energy and my ability to do my best. So it’s really nice to be reminded every time I look at the cover that I feel really powerful, but it’s important to know that I haven’t always felt like that. I had to fight to get to the point where I’m standing at the top of the volcano, having it shoot up my coochie.”
Fight is the operative word. Raised within the rigour of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Drewchin recalls an “extremely strict” childhood, characterised by conservative dress, fasting, all-night vigils, prostration, and studying iconography with nuns, in an environment where men were prioritised above women. To break free took courage and she still marvels today at how long it takes to truly dislodge learned behaviour.
“If I were to psychologically analyse myself, I think my intense loneliness as a home-schooled child who did very little socialising, living in the woods, was significant. I remember being lonely but in this really deep melancholic way, and hungry for connection while still being aware of the romance of it. But I think for a long time my albums were like smoke signals, like, ‘Hey, I’m over here! This is what I’m trying to say – does anyone else get it?’ And now I feel so deeply nourished by friends and family and community that I feel at peace.”
“I’ve definitely had those thoughts where you’re like, why am I doing this?” she continues. “Those very dark but essential conversations that I think everyone has with themselves at some point. I’ve felt very lost at times and I’ve found it to be very useful to kill of parts of myself that don’t serve me anymore, just allowing there to be violence, poetically and imaginatively. There’ll be this cathartic moment where I’ll be wrestling with myself deeply and then just cut out the succubus that’s been driving the car for a little bit too long, and the character I feel I am in those moments is this fiery phoenix.”
Beneath the mythological imagery and experimental sonics, Phoenix preaches a deeply relatable message of mankind’s ability to rebuild and thrive in the face of trauma, a fact further conveyed by the album’s subtitle, Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin, and by the words “Poetry” and “Warrior” which Eartheater has tattooed on each wrist. This universality is important to Drewchin. “These are simple ideas,” she insists. “They’re love songs and songs about breaking through to find your ultimate essence. These ideas are for everyone. Whereas I think in the past my intentions were different.
“The final track on the album is called ‘Faith Consuming Hope’ and I feel like that duality of faith and hope is interesting. Hope allows there to be space for doubt. Hope is giving into the fact that it might not work out, or it might not happen. But faith is the strength that is always there for you to access, even if you might not know how to get to it. Faith represents something bigger to me and beyond my lifetime. So when I sing, ‘I hope to die beyond hope’, it means that when I do die, I really hope I have that faith in me, and peace in my heart.”
For now, Drewchin’s focus is pushing the Eartheater project even further, including executing her vision for Phoenix live, a prospect that’s been sustaining her throughout this time of confinement. “When we go back to live shows it’s going to be a whole new thing,” she beams. “The type of magic in the air. People are so starved of connection and starved of those vibrations that they’re gonna honour it with every cell in their body. You know hunger is the best spice, and people are deeply hungry.” She adds with a laugh: “So yeah, maybe my mom was onto something making me fast all the time”.
I will move to a couple of great interview from this year. I will come to CLASH’s chat with the stunning Eartheater. First, Indie spoke with an artist who, a decade in, is close to superstardom. She discussed “recording in LA, reinterpreting System of a Down, and finally having money to record - even if it makes things complicated”:
“Powders, Eartheater’s lucent fifth album, takes its name from that idea: that everything, whether it’s love, heartbreak or personal history, can be crushed into dust, ready to become something new. It’s an abstracted memoir—one song, a cover of System of a Down’s ‘Chop Suey,’ is a track she’s had in her arsenal since she was a teenager; another, ‘Salt of the Earth,’ features her mother and brother playing violin and guitar, respectively. Many songs, including the intoxicating, romantic highlight ‘Crushing,’ draw on pure folk music, in a way she has rarely done since her 2015 debut album Metalepsis. It is a remarkable vindication of the cult success that her albums Trinity and Phoenix have found over the past few years, and—forgive the cliché—the kind of record that could expunge the ‘cult’ marker from that status.
When I Zoom Eartheater on a Wednesday afternoon in August—around midday in New York, where she lives—she’s still awake after spending the night in the studio, attempting to break a glass with only the power of her voice. Lying down on her studio couch, cocooned in a blanket, she tells me about the world of Powders and its relationship to its follow-up album, Aftermath, set to be released in 2024.
PHOTO CREDIT: Stevie & Mada
SHAAD D’SOUZA:
You call Powders your LA album, which I guess on its face could mean anything to anyone—luxury, glamour, opulence, but also loneliness, disconnection, precarity. When you call it an ‘LA album,’ what do you mean?
EARTHEATER:
I just recorded a lot of it there and that’s where I was really putting the pieces together. So the energy just permeates. It definitely felt different. I was asking myself—‘Do I even talk about this in my press release? Do I even make this a thing?’ But the fact is, it really is. When I was crunching and crushing and sort of grinding into this world of Powders, I was in LA, I was in those studios. It’s not like I set out to do anything there or I’m like, responding to anything that has happened there. Really, it just is what it is.
Music just sort of happens; people kept telling me, ‘Wow, this sounds so LA.’ In some ways, it’s a little annoying, because I’m like, well, these are genuine emotions and memories that I’m excavating from my romantic narratives that I entertained as a child. I was sort of time travelling in my mind a lot, even though I happened to be sat in Sunset Sound in LA. Then the song would come out and then people would be like, ‘This is such an LA sound.’ Meanwhile, I’ll be like ‘No, I was in Pennsylvania, Dyberry Creek, or in the haystack, or at the Wayne County Fair.’ Maybe that is actually LA, because Hollywood, movies, period pieces, movie magic, imagination, things coming to life—I guess maybe that is what it is, you know?
PHOTO CREDIT: Stevie & Mada
SD:
What made you want to record in LA, after doing Phoenix in Spain and working on your own in New York for so long?
EE:
I had been really resistant to ever working with strangers. Everything that’s happened up to this point has been really organic—not that it isn’t organic when you reach out to somebody, but I kind of have always maintained the ethos of, like, ‘don’t attack, attract.’ Things will come to you if they’re meant to happen. Don’t ask for things, just do your thing. And then opportunities will open up to you accordingly. I think that’s how I’ve operated most of the time.
But then when COVID was subsiding, all of a sudden I realised, ‘Oh my God, I have so many more fans.’ It was just way more busy. I was modelling and Phoenix and Trinity [were] permeating and I suddenly felt pulled limb from limb. I was adapting to a much crazier schedule and travelling. It was exciting, it was really great, but I wasn’t able to just sit around and write music the way that I used to.
I think my managers kind of took the reins—I kept being like, ‘I’ll just write when I can. I’ll play when I can.’ And I did little spurts here and there. But eventually, I think they realised they needed to just make a really hard schedule, and pull me out of my comfort zone. Because when I would get home from all these modelling trips and tours and stuff, I’d be exhausted. I would just need to rest.
Also, I was kind of entertaining the idea of a new sound, and I didn’t have friends immediately at my fingertips who could necessarily achieve that. So [Eartheater’s manager and Cascine founder] Jeff [Bratton] reached out to a bunch of different producers in LA and scheduled this recording period for me. I’ve never done anything like that before—going to strange studios with new people, sitting down and spending days with them. But it was incredible, and it worked out so well.
PHOTO CREDIT: Stevie & Mada
SD:
Where do you think this kind of drive to build out a new sound started?
EE:
Well, I can’t really talk about it because the sound that I set out to make is actually for the songs on [Powders follow-up] Aftermath. And weirdly, these songs on Powders were the ones that sort of just came out, off the cuff, without an idea in mind. They were just emotional little bursts that popped out.
SD:
They’re sort of interconnected, right? How do you see those albums complementing one another?
EE:
When I went to LA, I set out to make an album and I had a sound in mind, and I can’t divulge what that sound is because I’m still working on that album. What happened in the interim is that all these other songs started happening. And that’s what Powders became. So it’s like the deposit of this big mother record, which is Aftermath, and then Powders is maybe, like, the bits and pieces of powder that come off when you’re making a sculpture. All the debris that falls. It’s so unplanned, it just is what it is.
SD:
What was it, do you think, about that environment or your state of mind at that time, that led to those bursts of creativity?
EE:
I was pushing myself with the Aftermath material, and then I would sort of relax into it. It always happens to me—once the muscle is conditioned and the cogs are greased, all these beautiful things happen that you didn’t plan for, because the energy is just moving around. Powders really just picked me. The songs just sort of infiltrated, with that magical feeling when a song just wells up. And then, of course, I’ll go and edit, make it more clever, more interesting and more cohesive altogether. You invite the channel, but you kind of have to work to open the channel. And then once that opens, you know, take advantage.
PHOTO CREDIT: Stevie & Mada
SD:
After spending so long working other jobs to be able to support your art, how has your approach to music changed since you’ve had more money—or more access to money—to do things? Does modelling feel the same as a bar job?
EE:
That’s actually a really good question. I feel like, because I knew how to live quite beautifully on very little, it’s kind of overwhelming to have a lot of resources. But I feel like I ended up being quite brash with it just because I’m like, ‘I need to take advantage of [these resources].’ But I feel like I kind of miss… I’ve noticed that when people know you have money for a project, all the clever ideas that people might have kind of go out the window, because it’s like, ‘Oh, let’s just pay for this. So just pay for that.’ But then before you know it, the whole budget is spent on just the basics. And then it’s like ‘Okay, well we’re back to square one, we’re still just trying to do a clever little idea.’ I don’t know. The whole thing, the money—I like to be able to pay people, that’s what is great, but I also feel like… I don’t know, I’m really not being articulate today. I don’t know what the hell is up—something about you, like the last interview! [Note: Eartheater and I previously spoke for a story in The Face, during which she felt like she couldn’t collect her thoughts properly.]
SD:
It’s okay, introspection will do that to you.
EE:
I’m like, why can’t I express myself today? Can we both sage our rooms that we’re in?
SD:
I wish I had some, this room needs it.
EE:
To be honest, I feel like I’m still just investing—I’ve always invested everything I have into the art and the music, and I feel like I’m still doing that. Life is still the same. Yes, there are way more resources, but nothing really feels particularly different. Like, I can record, I can pay for all these studios, but I don’t know if it feels that different. It’s also not like it’s that much more money. Obviously it’s a blessing. But one thing I am proud of—and I’ve noticed now that I have a label and I’m working with other artists and stuff—is that I’ve been able to do beautiful things with nothing. Like, just use your iPhone, find the magic in the moment, make something that is stunning [while] not having to rely on a budget. I feel like a budget can kind of complicate things. Sometimes, you know, you spend all this money on this huge crane. But then you find yourself having to perform for the crane—meanwhile, isn’t the camera supposed to follow you? I don’t know”.
I will come to a review soon. First, CLASH spoke with the wonderful and always compelling Eartheater. As they open: “For a decade, Eartheater has distilled classical and club music tropes into apocryphal utopias. Now, the Queens-based musician embraces a sweeping vision of pop on her most potent and poetic love profusion”. Powders is a wonderful album that has been picked up by stations like BBC Radio 6 Music. I can see Eartheater dominating festival bills next year:
“Drewchin’s studio session on the day we speak is for ‘Aftermath’, an album she first conceived in component parts before ‘Powders’ and the pandemic threw a spanner in the works. “I had an idea and a plan for a sound, but these other songs just infiltrated and interrupted everything. There were these pent-up memories; these beautiful, gorgeous things that needed to come out of me,” she explains. The nine-track ‘Powders’ aggregates the antithetical forces Eartheater has traversed in her decade-long career: entropy, mutation, a study of the arcane, a study of form, a subversion of outmoded narratives on femininity, a distortion of the rigid rules of classical compositions. “I realised I’ve left a trail of breadcrumbs because I forgot what I needed to remember. These are reminders to keep it all close to the source,” Drewchin shares.
Bringing together the baroque arrangements of her debut project ‘Metalepsis’ with ‘Trinity’s’ programmed permutations within the dance music biosphere, ‘Powders’ is a work of exquisite alchemy between past variant versions of Eartheater; a mesmeric mix of stillness and desolation that could score a time-lapse of a seedling’s bloom and eventual death. I ask Drewchin if she pines for the unfettered purity of those primitive creations. She pauses the call to get a coffee. “I needed the fuel,” she says, locking back in. “I’m grateful for where I am in my career but life is crazier now. The time to find that space is so few and far between, I have to really fight for it. When I listen to those early albums I learn from her: I think about the peace, patience and wonderment that was there. In her, I see my dreams, fantasies and ideas. It’s almost medicinal when I revisit my past.”
‘Powders’ is Eartheater’s most pop-leaning experiment to date, although she resists that classification in its most explicit characterisation of her repertoire. Her version is “a trojan horse pop that may be more poppier by design, but isn’t quite pop music until it’s actually being consumed by a wider audience.” In her oeuvre, Drewchin has used her three-octave range as a textural device woven into a wider sonic tapestry, sometimes completely hidden in the murky expanse of her creations. “All of those experimental voices were me not finding my confidence to really show my soul like I am on this album,” she says. On ‘Powders’, Eartheater explores every dimension of her voice – breathy, belting, pleading, yelping, staccato chorales, operatic trilling – stylistically, over dusky electronic beats and ballads. Before Drewchin’s voice was icy, remote, pulverized digitally through a synthetic blender. On ‘Powders’ it more clearly, and with more clarity, delineates the core message of transformative rapture. “The delivery of the voice is different. I’m using the same microphones and same production, but this time I’m not layering and hiding behind a thousand layers, or a character voice. I can stand firmly behind the way I feel and what I believe in. I’ve grown up now, I know myself enough…I’m ready to show me,” she avows.
PHOTO CREDIT: Hannah Khymych
Drewchin masterminded the bulk of ‘Powders’ at Sunset Sound studios in LA, alongside collaborative hit squad, Yves Rothman, Tony Seltzer and CaseyMQ; the studio spot where Prince recorded parts of ‘Purple Rain’, and the Rolling Stones completed work on their much-lauded studio album ‘Exile on Main St’. Drewchin herself fell under the studio’s folkloric spell: “I don’t want to get spooky but when I recorded ‘Face In The Moon’, Yves put that guitar in my hands and the song just flew out of me. I felt something possess me.” Drewchin moved beyond her modus operandi to imbue ‘Powders’ with “the pieces, parts and people” that could make it a collaborative whole. “It’s like spices. We take for granted that we have access to a spice from a particular continent. Now, I’m bringing together all these different flavours,” she continues. I liken the molecular synthesis of ‘Powders’ to an apothecary, her reconstituted process to a witch’s brew. “That’s exactly what this is! I house these powders in my apothecary,” Drewchin says. “I’m boiling and crushing it all down. These producers my management set me up with were ready to receive my sacks and bundles of powders that I’ve collected over the years.”
Eartheater has long surveyed the flammable evocations of desire in her work. Across the nine tracks on ‘Powders’, romantic neurosis is a split-screen phenomenon; an external catastrophe and an unravelling of the inner depths of the heart. There is no track purer in filtering the desperation of trying to safeguard an elusive love than ‘Crushing’. Created during a residency at Palm Heights, Drewchin’s muse was a handsome chef called Jake “who had a voice like Frank Sinatra”. Inspired to create an instrumental for him to sing over (he shied away in the end) Drewchin revisited the demo a few months down the line. What started out as a karaoke special became a serene trip-hop devotional to lovers in and out of orbit: “I love the idea of being whisked away for a night, of having someone with me I can switch off with. I love being enamoured with someone. ‘Crushing’ just poured out of me, and I wrote it in one sitting. I feel like I was talking to a lot of past lovers, not just one.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Hannah Khymych
Alexandra Drewchin founded her label Chemical X in 2019 and self-released her mixtape ‘Trinity’ via the imprint. Her fervour for endorsing talent is generously articulated when I ask what the central tenet at the heart of the talent incubator is. To Drewchin, true creativity lies in originality and thriftiness, mirroring her own early career moves. “What I try to encourage is resourcefulness. It’s about trying to create beautiful things with very little because we live in a time when we can broadcast things around the world for free. It’s finding your magic, being inspired, and being humble enough to create cool things that don’t need to be high-budget or bombastic,” she explains.
Like Drewchin herself, Chemical X has its roots firmly in New York’s fast-changing and transient underground scenes. Through the next-gen artists that comprise the talent incubator – Lourdes Leon aka LOLAHOL, engineer-producer Kiri, producer and DJ Sammy, and idiosyncratic Houston-born rapper Ish Couture – Eartheater has not only sourced musicians with flair in spades, but discovered like minded creatives to cross-examine the world with. Chemical X eludes bureaucracy in favour of real-time community-funded events and conversations. “I think beyond helping talent through the industry side of things, it’s been fun to ping pong with these hungry artists and rinse out all of these emotions we’re feeling about the world. I wish I had that when I was starting out,” Drewchin explains before proudly sponsoring her roster like the protective Mother hen she is. “Both Ish and LOLA are incredibly prolific. Ish Couture’s new EP is stunning. I signed him when he had less than a thousand plays on Spotify because I believed in him. That’s not what conventional labels do.”
Eartheater has fought her way to a place of creative stasis. Without the career stops, starts and diversions there would be no hero’s journey; no voids to mine through, no inner revolutions, no point of arrival. With her feet planted firmly on the ground, but her mind scouring the heavens above for the next sliver of inspiration, there’s an emancipated aura about Eartheater right now. Where does she go from here? Well, to the studio to refine her next interplanetary (mis)adventure. “’Powders’ opened up a new portal for me. I’m accessing parts of my voice I haven’t before and I’m going even further down the path of exploration on ‘Aftermath’. It’s going to be a beautiful cacophony. The tagline is: we’re going to make sense of not making sense”.
Maybe I am slightly late to the Eartheater party. I think that 2024 is going to be another big year for her. With this enormously respected album out into the world, things will get better and better for Alexandra Drewchin. This is what The Line of Best Fit had to say about the mighty Powders:
“It has been a long few years since 2020’s, Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin, the fiery masterpiece that cemented Eartheater’s place in the pantheon of alternative music.
She released two great singles; collaborated with artists, Lolahol, Sega Bodega, LSDXOXO, and Tony Seltzer to name a few; and became one of the faces of multiple Mugler campaigns. Her image has never been more striking as she continues her ascent.
Swelling, Disney-villain strings draw you into the latest tapestry from avant-pop tastemaker, Eartheater’s sixth album, Powders. Fans of hers will remember being left speechless by the heights she conquered on Phoenix cut, “Below The Clavicle”; immediately, Vigorsky reminds the listener that her voice remains her most elastic instrument.
Powders begins in classic Eartheater form with, “Sugarcane Switch”. Understated orchestral arrangements underlay a trip-hop beat, harking to canonical records in the genre such as Björk’s, Homogenic and Portishead’s, Dummy. Thinking it could be seen to be more of a natural successor to 2018’s, Irisiri should not lead you to believe that Powders is a step backwards; Vigorsky is simply zooming out and taking you down another path of influence. “Crushing” follows in a similar vein. Without wishing to sound like a broken record, it is strikingly similar to Björk’s, “Come To Me” from 1993’s, Debut. This is not a bad thing at all. She plays with a reverence to 90s trip-hop, whilst keeping it rooted in the sound world of Eartheater.
What has always been clear with Eartheater is that she is a master at executing her visions through a completely unique lens; however, never before has it been performed so brazenly as on Powders’ cover of System of a Down’s signature, “Chop Suey”. It couldn’t be further from what was expected of this record, and yet it makes perfect sense. Most of the track centres around her lilting voice and acoustic guitar, before breaking into an alt-rock, somewhere-between-Madonna-and-Garbage style climax. It’s such a lot of fun and really showcases Vigorsky’s commitment to extending her reach beyond genre restrictions. It contains the same magic captured in other unexpected covers of songs: like, Sonic Youth’s fuzzy rendition of The Carpenter’s, “Superstar”; and Lingua Ignota’s harrowing version of Dolly Parton’s, “Jolene. Despite being a seemingly random choice, Powders anchors itself around the inclusion of “Chop Suey”. It’s the thing that makes Eartheater such a compelling artist; no one else could pull off such a daring feat, yet she draws magic out of the way she performs.
Things pick up the pace towards the end of the record. The title track vibrates like an unholy incantation, and “Mona Lisa Moan” trickles into your consciousness. Her voice surrounds and then isolates, howling and then whispering. It’s this disorientating effect that makes the penultimate track and lead single, “Pure Smile Snake Venom” so rewarding. It thunders through the verses before twisting into a garage chorus. It’s bumpy and ethereal and is a wonderfully unexpected pivot this far along in the album. Lyrically, Eartheater has often been highly conceptual and cryptic. “Pure Smile Snake Venom” is perhaps her most vulnerable track to date, the chorus being particularly resonant; “I choose not to bite you/In spite of my venom welling up/Pure smile to soothe/Us into the future/Show me what you can do”. It’s enough to stop you in your tracks, as this is the same artist who wrote, “Don’t make me wait/You got me wet, come over/You know I got that supersoaker”. Her ever-increasing versatility as an artist is astounding and merits more recognition than she currently has.
“Salt of the Earth (H2ome)” concludes the album, an instrumental that completes the full circle of Powders. This record further displays Eartheater’s talents for creating worlds of hyper-saturated textures and sounds. Her ability to give life to elemental forces sets her apart from other artists, and never before has it sounded so effortless. Trinity Vigorsky is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of artist, offering listeners the opportunity to see the world through Eartheater’s singular expression; this album is another masterwork and continues her steady ascension”.
If you have not followed Eartheater, then do go and check her out. A truly wonderful producer, artist and musical innovator, this is a modern-day queen (from Queens) who has released one of this year’s best albums. Powders is a magnificent work that everyone needs to listen to. I have so much respect and admiration…
FOR the incredible Eartheater.
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