Drew McDowall (UK)

Drew McDowall’s works are sacraments to alterity.

An artist who has refused to conform in music and in life, McDowall mines the hallucinatory spaces that exist between reality and celestial otherness. His meditative compositions are haunting and spiritual, melding intricate modular soundscapes with cut-up samples, and deconstructing sounds into their most basic shuddering structures and shapes. The disorienting ambient mirages that result elicit terror, tender melancholy, and heavenly flickers of expansive beauty. McDowall creates music of immanence and alchemy, attuned equally to the sacred and the profane.

His backstory reads like a primer of psychedelic fiction woven into statements of the unbelievable, superhuman, and outright insane. Growing up in the gangs of 1970’s Scotland, McDowall-fatigued by years of daily violence and the chaotic madness of that life- sought self-expression and sanctuary in punk and found a home in Glasgow’s rich underground music community.  After a stint with The Poems, a band he started with his then-wife Rose McDowall, he joined the ranks of UK avant-gardists Genesis P-Orridge, David Tibet, Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, John Balance, and countless others who would come to define the industrial music’s blossoming experimental vanguard. McDowall eventually collaborated with Psychic TV and became a full-time member of the hugely influential cult outfit Coil, where his influence shaped the group’s later output: exercises in magical practice and music-as-psychoactive effect.

While McDowall has had a strong affinity to electronic music throughout his career, he has avoided making music confined to any one genre and in his most recent works has used string players, brass, pipe organ and harp.

This diversity of approach is reflected in his collaborations with Kali Malone, Catarina Barbieri, Robert Aki Aubrey Lowe, Hiro Kone, Varg, Puce Mary, Shapednoise, Rabit, James K, Elvin Brandhi and LEYA amongst others.

He has toured a live AV reinterpretation of Coil’s seminal drone work, Time Machines, at festivals across the world including CTM, Berlin Atonal, Dark Mofo, Unsound, Le Guess Who, Semibreve, WOS and Ambient Church.

Dais Records released his first solo album in 2015, Collapse, 2017’s Unnatural Channel, 2018’s The Third Helix, and 2020’s Agalma. These four studio albums were collected in the CD box set Lamina, which includes demos, and two bonus discs of rarities and live recordings.

2024 saw the release of A Thread, Silvered and Trembling, which continues McDowall’s lifelong interest in the elegiac solo bagpipe style “pibroch” (ceòl mòr in Gaelic). This form, often traditionally used for laments and for tributes to the dead, fuses modal drones with flickering dissonance and plaintive melody evoking an ancient, solemn mood. The album incorporates and transforms these elements via exploratory electronic processing, weaving an electro-acoustic tapestry of strings, shudders, voids, and voices, alternately disembodied and displaced.