Drew McDowall announces 'Lamina' 6-CD Box Set out May 26 on Dais Records

DREW McDOWALL ANNOUNCES LAMINA 6-CD BOX SET  INCLUDING EXPANDED EDITIONS OF HIS FOUR MOST RECENT RECORDS  + TWO DISCS OF RARITIES & LIVE PERFORMANCES OUT MAY 26 ON DAIS RECORDS LISTEN TO 'ARVAL' HERE

photo courtesy of Lena Shkoda                                                                                                                                      This long-gestating box set of Scottish electronic pioneer Drew McDowall’s solo work takes its title from a technical term meaning ‘plate’ or ‘layer’ most often used in contexts either geological or anatomical: Lamina. He speaks of the compiling process similarly: “Digging into my archives felt like a mix of psychoanalysis and archaeology – uncovering buried things.” The six CD collection includes expanded editions of his four most recent Dais LPs (Collapse, 2015; Unnatural Channel, 2017; The Third Helix, 2018; and Agalma, 2020), alongside a disc of rarities (Undulations and Aberrations) and one of live performances (Entanglement). Taken together, it presents a definitive portrait of McDowall’s cryptic, questing artistry, forever seeking “that sense of stepping over a threshold.” The bonus material in particular is revelatory, broadening both the context and complexity of its respective full-length. “Hypnotic Congress Palisades (demo),” a Collapse outtake, patiently builds a mantric throb into a rippling cascade of head-nodding cosmic noise, like some glowing shrapnel splintered off the rest of the record. “Tell Me The Name (sketch),” a reworking of the eerie opener of Unnatural Channel, embodies McDowall’s goal for the compilation as “a window into the process of iteration.” More emaciated and reptilian than the original mix, the track shivers and shimmers in a reverie of alien melancholy, a corrupted file of some interdimensional hymn. “False Memory (demo),” from The Third Helix sessions, showcases the textural trial-and-error behind these compositions – a wobbly collage of seasick scrapings, sine waves, and tectonic circuitry, tested like source material in a lab. Similarly, an unreleased Agalma vault cut, “MBCST,” captures the artist at the brink of breakthrough – a time-stretched drone traced in muffled voices and phasered haze dilates across five lysergic minutes. It’s the sound of a palette being refined, poised for deployment. The fifth disc spans two decades of stray recordings, from 90’s studio experiments to lost comp tracks to sold-out tapes, modular oddities, and rhythmic sketches. Sequenced chronologically, it demonstrates the zig-zagging evolution of McDowall’s sound, colored by formative years collaborating in Coil but extrapolated into freshly forking paths: industrial dub, icy downtempo, tonal devotionals, hexed gamelan, interstitial murk. The suite of live sets, too, is essential listening. He describes his inclusion criteria as performances that fuse “the sacred and the feral, like you’re in a cathedral but the floor is dirt.” All four recordings are rich and unhinged: a spiraling, seething, somber voyage for Ascetic House and Mount Analog’s’s dark experimental series, Nuit Noire; a jagged, dissonant excerpt from his Collapse release show at New York venue Alphaville; a fractured, psychedelic rendering of “Agalma III” for Root Radio’s Exist Festival live stream; and a delirious, magisterial take of “Agalma I” [“Fold (Live)”] for the Agalma release party at Strange Editions produced by Quo Vadis (his ambition for which was “to mirror the pandemic-related ontological feeling of being suspended in mid-air”). Despite its duration, Lamina is a leanly plotted survey, devoid of dead weight. Few artists as omnivorous as McDowall are also as self-editing – his standards are rigorous, and revealing: “While working, I’m always changing things, hacking them away, abandoning them when they don’t work. When listening back I’m looking for a sense of awe and wonder. Otherworldly magic. If I’m not hearing that, I don’t see the point.” On organizing the boxset, McDowall had this to say: "Compiling Lamina was a process of excavation that felt more like psychoanalysis than sonic archaeology. I don’t usually listen back to music I create after it’s completed and released so this was an weirdly disorientating and strange process initially that became a window into my state of mind at the time these pieces were recorded. In the end the biggest problem going through the unreleased material was deciding what to leave out, at one point I had enough material for over 10 CD’s so the criteria then was to illustrate either my iterative process of composition or to include much older experiments that sound something wildly different to what I normally do but also somehow contain the seeds or traces of what I later did. One of the interesting things was the different versions of tracks from the 4 albums and finding all these different possibilities that end up being narrowed down to what made the cut for the final release. " Listen: Drew McDowall - 'ARVAL' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpvUc4K0iSk Pre-Order: Drew McDowall - Lamina https://found.ee/Lamina Drew McDowall Lamina Dais Records May 26, 2023 6-CD Box Set CD1: Collapse CD2: Unnatural Channel CD3: The Third Helix CD4: Agalma CD5: Undulations and Aberrations CD6: Entanglement