Eartheater shares new single ‘Volcano’
Taken from upcoming album ‘Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin’
Released on PAN
Last month, Eartheater announced a new album, ‘Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin’, out on PAN.
The Queens-based artist has already released two singles from ‘Phoenix’ — ‘How To Fight’ and ‘Below The Clavicle’ and now, she shares a third. ‘Volcano’; the stunning centrepiece of ‘Phoenix’, out today.
Composed, produced, and arranged by Eartheater alone, 'Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin' draws a path back to the primordial lava lake from which she first emerged, as it also testifies to the reincarnating resurrections the project has undergone over its first full decade of existence. While the album renews her focus on guitar performance and legible structure, Eartheater balances the unabashed prettiness of acoustic harmonic songs with the dissonant gestural embroidery of oblique instrumentals. Having fallen back in love with the idioms that first captivated her, she worked to crack open the techniques that had fossilized inside of her, while still seeking to apply the electro-alchemical knowledge she picked up along her journey. The result of a laborious revival in fire, Phoenix recontextualizes Eartheater’s combinatorial approach to production within her most confident abstractions, adjacent to some of her most direct songs to date.
Eartheater composed and workshopped most of 'Phoenix' over a ten-week artist residency (FUGA) in Zaragoza, Spain, housed in a sprawling, cubic glass facility that looked out over wildflower-flecked mountains. Following an intensive period of recording and touring, the residency provided her with an unprecedented period of solitude in the small Spanish town. Her newfound sense of isolation ultimately became liberating, leading her to sidestep the crutches and steady grids inherent to electronic music, and to conceive pieces rooted in her guitar and her desire to perform with other players live. Eartheater’s voice glows brighter than ever at the center of 'Phoenix'’s arrangements — her familiar operatic highs are grounded by newly expanded velvety lows, leaping lucidly up and down octaves. Her intricate guitar work flits across baroque fingerpicked passages and latches into cyclical figures that meet her voice in lush harmonic progressions. From her own guitar parts, to the orchestral string arrangements she wrote for the Spanish conservatory group Ensemble de Camara, to the harp and violin lines performed by her close friends and collaborators Marilu Donovan and Adam Markiewicz of LEYA, Eartheater’s applications of acoustic instruments bring an extraordinary emotional emphasis to her compositions.
Eartheater drew inspiration for 'Phoenix' from the Earth’s geology, whose turbulence and the potential for regenesis mirrors the trajectory of her own life and relationships. The album’s instrumental pieces directly reference these moments of upheaval, colliding thunderous soundscapes with resplendent string and angelic vocal arrangements. Eartheater initially developed some of the blistering instrumental compositions as part of Fracture Patterns, a UK performance series presented by Outlands, in which Eartheater created and performed original scores for films of solar storms and volcanic eruptions by visual artist duo Semiconductor.
On 'Phoenix', 'Volcano' looks out over the album from its peak at the center, its tectonic plates colliding in towering melodies and layers of vocal harmonies, as piano accents crest and cascade down the mountainside. When Eartheater sings, “I’m still building mountains underground,” she is trying to reconcile the pinnacles of her ambition with the comforts of a simple existence buried beneath the surface. Later, 'Diamond in the Bedrock' finds her admiring the gemstone forming under intense pressure inside her, but rejecting the romantic promise that the diamond signifies, choosing instead to escape a relationship that has come to stifle her.
With the album’s subtitle, 'Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin', Eartheater imagines being tempered to a state of perfect equilibrium, suspended between melting and freezing, where fire could streak across her body and appear as a crystalline blush. This image captures the tension at the heart of the Eartheater project, as she decides how best to distill her passion and render it cool to the touch; to find beauty in simple pleasure, while keeping one eye fixed on the peaks that loom in the horizon.
Tracklisting:
01. Airborne Ashes
02. Metallic Taste of Patience
03. Below The Clavicle
04. Burning Feather
05. How To Fight
06. Kiss Of The Phoenix
07. Volcano
08. Fantasy Collision
09. Mercurial Nerve
10. Goodbye Diamond
11. Bringing Me Back
12. Diamond In The Bedrock
13. Faith Consuming Hope
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