Conceived over a ten week artist residency in Zaragoza, Spain last year, Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin sees US multi-instrumentalist and producer Alexandra Drewchin renew focus on acoustic practice. It is an album, Drewchin says, that has been growing inside her “like an egg”. Here she discusses how the fifth album to appear under her Eartheater moniker draws on non-human thinking, contemplates imagined internal violence and prepares for a primordial future. She also shares some writing connected to the album.

Amar Ediriwira: I last saw you in New York City right before the lockdown, how have you been since then?

Eartheater: Life is constantly throwing curveballs. I've had some really curved curveballs thrown at me during this time on top of what we're all going through collectively but I also enjoyed the resting period. The day I finished mixing Trinity, I flew to Spain to start recording Phoenix. And before I was making Trinity, I was touring non-stop. I was ready to die. I'm super grateful that I had finished the mixing and shooting the cover just right before everything got shut down. The worst thing would've been this album being somehow halted or paused.

Last month you played MoMA PS1’s Warm Up, was that the first live performance of songs from Phoenix? I imagine it’s near impossible to plan a tour of the album?

That's been my first actual show and cheque since the end of February. It's gonna feel a bit weird not being able to commune physically with people and I really had the live show in mind around this album. It'll happen eventually.

I'm about to start rehearsing with Marilu & Adam from LEYA for some pre-recorded streamed concerts. I am excited about taking advantage of the cinematic control that one has with streams.

All of the songs on the album were sourced acoustically; even the more electronic layers come from things you recorded. What inspired you to renew focus on acoustic sounds and chamber arrangements?

Acoustic guitar is how I fell in love with music. This record has been inside of me since that time like a very slowly growing egg. I remember feeling an aversion to – an allergic reaction to – being pigeonholed as a singer-songwriter guitar girl. Part of my journey throughout the last ten years of being Eartheater has been figuring out a way to satisfy my chronic inspiration in so many conflicting sounds. Having proved to myself and to others that I have all of this, it's finally time to arrive back to acoustic.

One often thinks of the past with acoustic music and I really like thinking about the skill of playing acoustic music when thinking about the post-apocalyptic future. When shit hits the fan and there's no electricity. To be able to provide the skill to play music acoustically – there's room for that in the future! [I was] even feeling my atrophy to acoustic skill before I redeveloped it to make this album. I felt like my atrophied technique bothered me when I was thinking about being an evolved person and being prepared. Maybe that's a metaphor for some prepper type shit. A metaphor for that would be the skill to grow your own food, the skill to be sustainable.

The press release did make me think about survivalists. Apparently 1% of Americans are preppers and even more than that identify as preppers, they just haven't got round to doing anything [laughing].

Don't laugh! I mean look at this shit. It's a shit show.

It’s true! We mock these people in shows like Doomsday Preppers but the pandemic has proved them right. I like that Mormons keep emergency stockpiles not only for their own sake, but to assist neighbours when, not if, disaster strikes.

It's not a selfish practice. I mean yes, there's two sides to the coin: it's selfish but being sustainable and self-reliant is also very anti-capitalist. There's a Buckminster Fuller quote that if anything's going to kill the human race it's going to be that there's too many specialised people. Having many skills and being self-sustainable is very attractive to me. It's probably because of what's going on but I feel a strong pull to having a rural base. That's how I grew up: my dad was always in the city; my mom always had a farm. I love the polarisation in me: the battery – opposite forces – that powers me.

Phoenix is rich in geological language – volcanoes, collisions, ashes. Could you talk about how you build reality through language?

Building a lexicon is helpful to me to lubricate communicating a feeling. With Trinity, I adopted this very watery lexicon about the emotional condensation between the solid, liquid, gas trinity that can be interpreted in many different ways. I think I needed a lexicon to lubricate the way that I could express love. I'm sensitive, maybe even allergic, to cliche but at the same time I'm very attracted to simple iconic ideas. With this album, I naturally started building a geological lexicon that allowed for a lot of nuance to come out too. The album is powered by polarising elements: patience versus impulse; romance versus ambition; shutting the fuck up versus speaking out; apologising versus standing one's ground. The underground versus the mountain peak is the ultimate geological metaphor that encapsulates all those different polarisations. And then, lava. This is so me but the way that lava sounds like love but it's not love–– it adds this other fiery element to it. Love is such a corny word but I love love! [laughs] So, using the word lava – this other life-force, this blood – is more than love.

I’m particularly drawn to the title “Below The Clavicle”. Can you expand on the symbolism there?

It means underground. It means everything underneath the head: the heart, the gut, the pussy, the feet. Everything under the ego and the rationale and all of this self-consciousness and self-editing. What have I promised myself to and when do I abandon promises? When do I end a relationship? When do I kill this part of myself that's not serving my growth? Shedding the exoskeleton and being reborn. The phoenix made so much sense as the ultimate encapsulation of all of that. The catastrophic horror of a volcano erupting also has provided the most nutritious ecosystems in nature. You know I said I've had this egg growing inside of me? It has felt like an eternity. The time that it takes for carbon to be pressed into a diamond. For crystals and rocks to form. And also that explosive point when a volcano erupts after hundreds and hundreds of years. It feels that way. It's almost too perfect: some of these songs and lyrics, the way they just poured out of me. It did feel like an eruption.

We make these distinctions between the natural and unnatural, human and not human. I like the way you bridge that gap even as you talk now. I think like if we’re to overcome ecological disaster...

It's funny how we associate toxicity with the unnatural, though the gases that leak out of a volcano are extremely toxic but those are the most natural. The burning of gasoline is clearly damaging to the planet but we also take it out of the Earth. I often think about the selfishness of people who are like "we're destroying the planet!". No, we're destroying the resources for our survival. The Earth will be just fine. She's just gonna pop into a vanilla sky ice age and then come out with a bunch of way cooler species from whatever tiny little cell is resuscitated by photosynthesis once she melts. I think that's one of the ways to interpret the song “Faith Consuming Hope”: hope belongs to humans; faith belongs to the Earth. But I don't want this to be interpreted that I'm not extremely invested in lessening my carbon footprint and being vigilant about how I can be a node in moving forward.

I read an interesting analogy about how capitalism forces us into a perpetual larval state – we excessively consume and accumulate resources in a way that resembles caterpillars. Caterpillars increase their weight 10,000 fold in less than three weeks before metamorphosis.

I play this game with myself sometimes like "don't spend any money today – not a cent". You wouldn't believe how difficult it is. Like I'm not a prepper but this is how larval my state of trying to move out of that. Can I just prepare enough to not buy anything in one day? Nothing online. Just prepare enough to live for a week, without having to buy anything.

It's scary how coded it is. I actually bought a car recently. It suddenly made a load of sense in the pandemic. So I've been driving it around and listening to Phoenix on journeys. I've found that being in a car enhances the album’s liminal qualities.

Definitely. I think it’s venue is headphones or a car.

That thought made me wonder about your headspace during that ten week residency, when you workshopped the album, isolated in a small town in Spain. How would you summarise that time?

It was a complete dream come true having 24 hour studio access for two months. I became a sleep camel where I would store – sleep a bunch – then stay up for like multiple days working in this lucid state.

It's interesting to see how the colours of the album campaign visually also really echoed the colours that were there just naturally. The desert is a cayenne pepper orange colour like the rocks. The grass is a burnt fiery yellow. You can see the layers of mineral and sediment in the sides of the mountains. This very dusty natural environment in conjunction with the glossy [studio] facility informed a lot of the sound.

I started spending a lot of time with the locals on farms with baby goats, which have entered the lyrics of the album too. The baby goat, when it's born, very quickly jumps to its feet, it very quickly has a sure-footedness. I like to think about that in those moments when you break through despair.

I find thinking about animal energy really useful. Like if I'm nervous and I have to go into a room, I find that if I think about a tiger or a panther, if I meditate on that energy, I can move better. A friend of mine was telling me "you're an animal artist" as if it's a category. I guess I am? I guess I'm an animal artist!

There's something powerful in thinking as a multi-species or imagining in the supernatural.

“Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin” has been stuck inside my head since I was a little kid. My mom says it's a story that she read to me about martyred children that were burned at the stake. I sing versions of that phrase in many of my songs. When I was writing “Mercurial Nerve” I started imagining what kind of superhuman alchemy one would have to achieve and resist the wrath of flames. Let me read you something I wrote about this, it’s a meditation on sci-fi powers on a molecular level:

If one could slow one's molecules down lower than the body temperature to hyper freezing, one might be able to resist the heat of flames enveloping one. Then I imagined that one wouldn't want to be too cold. I'd want to dial my body heat to exactly the resistance to gently oscillate between melting & sudden blushes & frosting back up into crystal. The melting blushes appear like dew upon my skin.

Eartheater's Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin is available via PAN now

Read The Wire's 2016 interview with Eartheater in issue 386, in print or online.