Alexandra Drewchin

Alexandra Drewchin

Alexandra Drewchin (born March 16, 1989) is an American musician, performance artist and visual artist. She is currently based in Queens, New York and actively performs in the band Guardian Alien and has been performing solo under the name Eartheater since 2009. Her music has been released on Thrill Jockey and Hausu Mountain.

Drewchin jumps first to her childhood, growing up on a rural farm in New York state (“Like, ten miles away from a store where you could buy milk”) where she was homeschooled by her English mother. She started playing violin at the age of three, the influence, she says, of her Russian artist dad “holding the hammer above my head." This “educational experiment” turned her into a “tangly-haired barefoot little freak,” at home with her three brothers and their chicken and sheep, but ill-prepared for the pressures of public school, which she was forced to attend as of her sophomore year of high school. Her parents split, and her mother sold their farm. “That was my first year in school ever,” she explains. “[Dealing with] the over-sensory input… I was like ‘What?‘” Soon she found herself picking up on her abandoned impulses toward music-making as a sort of “self-prescribed anxiety medication.” She pauses, looks down at the table, and grins, cognizant of the cliché that’s coming. “Music saved me,” she says.

Some of these songs would form the basis for the mutant standards and abstract mantras that make up Metalepsis, and to an even greater degree, the more personally intimate RIP Chrysalis. But it took moving to New York as a late teen and letting herself and these straightforward folk ballads — raw material of the songs she makes now — get chewed up by the whirring gears of the big city before she’d feel comfortable releasing any of the lilting material out into the world. Drewchin played her songs in Central Park and found herself casually involved in the major label music wheeling and dealing after writing some songs for a film directed by a woman she met on the street. She tried to make records in big studios, but nothing really stuck; the result of her own insecurities and the “slimy” people she worked with. “I had these mentors that I was hanging onto because I didn’t have anything else,” she says. “I was a leaf floating.”

Guardian Alien was formed in 2010 by Greg Fox, former drummer of Teeth Mountain, Dan Deacon, the black metal band Liturgy,[2] and others. They played several shows throughout 2010 and 2011 in Brooklyn, New York and released their self-titled debut album exclusively on vinyl during the same year.[3] Their second album, See the World Given to a One Love Entity was released on July 24, 2012.[4] It is a 37-minute instrumental one track album. The iTunes version contains a bonus track.[5]

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