EARTHEATER - Trinity

After landing at Bill Kouligas's PAN, giving life to the electronic melting pot "IRISIRI", American multi-instrumentalist Alexandra Drewchin, aka Eartheater, returns just a few months later with her fourth album, "Trinity", abruptly amplifying the themes she's shown so far, in what remains a varied approach to machines, made of irregular breaks, assembled and disassembled depending on her mood, in a songwriting style that is once again extremely convoluted and visionary, through which she lets her own philosophy flow, aimed at exploring "contextually incendiary subjects, alternative realities tied to the vastness of the infinite, to the isometry of time and space, to the ambiguity of words, to the evolution of sexuality in a digital age", as she herself states.

Alongside the music, which we could file under that much-debated critical catch-all that the less impressionable have dubbed "deconstructed club" - a label that isn't exactly straightforward, yet necessary to frame, on a purely compositional level, electro anagrams and assorted oddities - we find inspired lyrics, in which the trinity of water (present in nature in solid, liquid and gaseous form) emerges as a constant metaphor for a concept whose purpose is to frame, through her own sensibility and experience, the evolution of contemporary society. In "Pearl Down", produced by AceMo, it's precisely a synthetic cascade that forms a rhythm section that's at times indefinable, certainly elusive. While in "High Tide" the disruptive force of water dominates the entire narrative:

Water can put out flames

But nothing can stop this day

I feel a high tide in my eyes

Brimming at the sight of you

I feel a high tide in my chest

Ready to flood this house

Gush down the hallway

Crashing through the windowpane

Wash the pain away

Besides the aforementioned AceMo, the presence of the likes of Tony Seltzer, Kwes Darko, Color Plus, Denzxl, Dadras and Hara Kiri enriches a production that's excellent on the sonic front, as ever extremely meticulous and well-calibrated sounds, however distorted, with inserts that never really overstay their welcome, all set against an underlying complexity that demands greater attention and certainly far more listens than usual. Still, the unevenness often gives way to pathos, and the record truly takes flight on tracks like “Solid Liquid Gas,” almost a hypothetical, impossible featuring between Sophie and Juana Molina (!), at least in the “refrain,” or whatever you might call it.

There's also room for slower-paced movements, with wobble bass gnawing at the carpets and rattling the pillars, as on “Spill The Milk.” A ballad with a lunar atmosphere, in the faintest trace of trap flavour, decidedly successful. Still, there's a touch too much isolationism to flag, and some Idm offcuts on the side that occasionally veer excessively into Zola Jesus territory (“Pearl Diver”). But on the whole, the new effort from the Queens-based producer doesn't betray expectations in its own way. An album/mixtape that, among other things, also launches her new label: Chemical X.

Ad maiora.

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25/10/2019