Ecdysis – Further.

Alexandra Burress is a 21-year old singer / songwriter and producer from Portland, OR. Her latest album, Ecdysis, was recorded in the San Diego of her formative years, and finds her crafting a warm, tender, dreamlike suite of eight electronically-infused songs that gently wrap the listener in their gauzy, affecting textures. Read the Further. review here.

What is your earliest memory?

My earliest memory is eating a Spongebob popsicle in China as a 3-year-old and relishing the sugar flavour on my tongue. Surrounding me was a deep grey cloud sky with palm trees the size of dinosaurs swaying heavily in the wind.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

My favourite piece of advice is something my mom always said. ‘Everybody just wants to be loved,’ and if we approach the world with this knowledge, we can all be a little kinder, a little more empathetic towards one another. We’re all searching for the same thing.

When are you most productive or inspired?

My head feels clearest after a long walk on the beach or in the forest, after sipping on a big batch of homemade hot cocoa and having no plans in the day but to create. Watching my talented friends perform their own music is another especially inspiring thing for me.

Ecdysis by Alexandra was released July 26 2019 by Spirit House Records.

Interview: Mat Smith

Alexandra Burress is a 21-year old singer / songwriter and producer from Portland, OR. Her latest album was recorded in the San Diego of her formative years, and finds her crafting a warm, tender, dreamlike suite of eight songs that gently wrap the listener in their gauzy, affecting textures.

These are pieces built from gentle, beatific fragility, their sparseness punctuated by subtle sounds – guitar, electronics, reverb, unplaceable instrumentation, field recordings – with each element given space to develop under Alexandra’s plangent, ruminative vocal. The standout track ‘Roller’ finds that vocal draped in transformative echoes while shimmering synth pads and a submerged, frantic, but never distracting processed rhythm propel the song relentlessly forward, concluding in a nest of whining, atonal sounds. ‘Membrane’ sees Alexandra’s vocal delivered as overlapping passages full of mystique and reflectiveness, accompanied by an inchoate, ever-shifting, dramatic bed of tiny sounds, scratchy micro-beats and emotion-manipulating glitches, mixed with naturalistic sounds.

The result is an album that is both deeply personal for its creator and yet universally shared: we have all transformed ourselves whether through circumstance or the decisions we make; we were all once children experiencing a world stretching out in front of us, making mistakes and finding ourselves as we go; we have all shed many skins, both physically and metaphorically. Ecdysis’s powerful and utterly captivating conceit is to focus you in on that which once was, who we are right now, and what we might yet become.

Ecdysis by Alexandra was released July 26 2019 by Spirit House Records.

Words: Mat Smith

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3 Questions: Alexandra

Alexandra – Ecdysis