Guardian Alien, the ecstatic experimentalists that singer-songwriter Alexandra Drewchin has run with over the last few years, have been described as "psychedelic." But despite that tag—and despite the fact that they had a Rastafarian extraterrestrial on one of their record sleeves—the rapturous emotional peaks and torturous noisemaking that Drewchin contributed to the group always rendered their explorations more ritualistic and earthy than that label suggests. Their interest in psychedelic experience is more ideological than aesthetic, an idea that carries through on Drewchin's first full-length release as Eartheater, Metalepsis.
Drewchin displays an all-consuming interest in blurring boundaries that burrows all the way down to the record's textural details. Leadoff track "Macro EV" dances between delicate reverse-delayed electric guitar plinks and needly loops of her own vocals, teetering on the brink between swooning and sickly. Drewchin plays with these opposing textures over the course of the record, imbuing "Homonyms"—the most tuneful and immediate of her folkier efforts—with lurching and chattering vocal exercises. She's upending the conventions of folk and ambient music—taking little excursions into harsher realms, just for good measure—gracefully crossing stereotypical divides between genres without even really letting you notice that she's done so. It's a sort of sonic jamais vu: All of the ingredients feel familiar, but the whole that they eventually make up remains alien and unattainable.
There are also moments where Drewchin intentionally jars us, delivering seemingly absurd elements (such as the minute-long Eastern European rap sample at the end of "Youniverse"). But even those play seriously in context. In the tradition of most who consider themselves experimenters, the origin of the sounds Drewchin uses become muddled. There are samples from John Frusciante solo experiments and stabbing string sections, and all manners of instrumentation both recorded and synthesized. What's a product of the organic world and what's a product of her array of electronic equipment is suddenly unclear. Her treatment lightly suggests that all of these varying parts should be treated and approached the same way, like a utopian psych-folk that embraces electronic instrumentation.
Drewchin's lyrical concerns, too, center on interstitial spaces: between the natural world and the digital ("The Internet Is Handmade"), between the subjective truth and objective reality ("Infinity"), and between the self and the cosmos ("Youniverse"). Throughout she embraces thematic abstraction and philosophical ambiguities as guiding principles. In other words, Drewchin may not have everything quite figured out, and her insistence on posing questions rather than answers elevates Metalepsis into a compelling document of postmodern (and importantly, post-Internet) confusion. Metalepsis is music that's built to overwhelm and envelop you, and maybe even, as Drewchin's moniker suggests, swallow worlds whole.
