To be released on October 20th on cassette, CD, and USB key. C45 – Pink tape with black imprints. Pro-dubbed chrome + tape. 2-sided 3-panel J-card with artwork from Eartheater and Max Allison. CD packaged in a digi-pak. Pink USB Key contains bonus materials from Eartheater.

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.