Eartheater is the pseudonym of the Queens-based artist, multi-instrumentalist, composer and vocalist, Alexandra Drewchin. As Eartheater, she distills foley-filled digital production, a three-octave vocal range, and classical composition into works suspended between obsessively detailed sonic tapestries and almost recklessly romantic electronica. Her recorded output is enhanced by her viscerally emotive live performances that capture her fearless physical investment and gut-wrenching vocal sincerity.

After several years fronting the avant-garde project Guardian Alien alongside Greg Fox, Drewchin made her full-length debut as Eartheater in 2015, releasing two consecutive albums on Hausu Mountain — Metalepsis and RIP Chrysalis . Taken together, the twin LPs were a fully realized artistic statement from Drewchin’s solo project, and both records received widespread critical acclaim for their experimentation with pop paradigms. Since her debut, Drewchin has pursued a rigorous tour schedule, sharing bills with contemporaries including Actress, Oneohtrix Point Never, Jenny Hval, Yves Tumor, Klein, Juliana Huxtable, Tim Hecker, Nicolas Jaar and others. Live performance is a central aspect of Eartheater, as Drewchin uses tension and improvisation to translate her intricate compositions into unforgettable corporeal expressions.

In addition to her Eartheater project, Drewchin performs and collaborates with art duo and close friends FLUCT. In February 2017, she also starred in Raul de Nieves and Colin Self’s opera The Fool at the Kitchen. In May 2017, Drewchin featured on two tracks from Show Me The Body’s Corpus I mixtape alongside Denzel Curry and Moor Mother. She’s currently composing original work for the contemporary chamber orchestra, Alarm Will Sound, that will debut in May 2018. This year, Eartheater signed to renowned experimental label PAN to release her third album: IRISIRI. The album lays out as a shifting network of abstract songcraft, laced with sudden structural upheavals and collisions of mutated tropes from numerous sonic vocabularies. Modular synth staccato plucks hammer out in arrhythmic spirals over a carefully muzzled grid of pumping kicks — unleashed in unpredictable disruptions. Technoid stabs mingle with crushed black metal. An icy OS reads poetry against a bed of granular synth swells. Drewchin’s sirening whistle-tone vocals drape over relentless harp arpeggios. Eartheater confounds expectations of structure and resolution before deciding to thread in a sugary melody that snaps us back into some conception,however hazy, of pop songwriting. Guest spots on IRISIRI charge Drewchin’s ideas with concordant energies, from the stark imagist poetry of Odwalla1221 on “Inhale Baby,” to the sheer lacerating force of Moor Mother’s unflinching verse on “MMXXX.” Drewchin’s lyrics, strewn with flourishes of wordplay and symbolism, explore themes of her autodidactic experience — playing with the tutelage of the ‘pupil’ within the ‘iris’ mirrored in the palindrome IRISIRI . One motif appears as a song name, “C.L.I.T.,” which Drewchin breaks down into “Curiosity Liberates Infinite Truth.” The acronym stands as a microcosm of the Eartheater project in its holistic combination of idiosyncratic spirituality and cheekiness, presented with an earnest confidence that some could consider confrontational. In spite of this lexicon’s maximal effect, it comes from a very personal place as she states, “curiosity has had to be the currency of my education.” On “OS In Vitro,” she reminds us that “These tits are just a side-effect,” and “You can’t compute her,” as if to acknowledge the clouding effect of sexuality and technology in the face of a higher self-significance. In the record’s accompanying video piece, “Claustra,” she slides between “the owning of my loneliness” and “the end of the loaning of my onliness,” encapsulating images of self- purifying isolation and the rejection of artistic exploitation with the flip of two syllables. The transmuting landscape of IRISIRI is riddled with evocative poetry and evidence of Drewchin’s development as an artist since her debut in 2015.