DREW MCDOWALL
NEW ALBUM OUT TODAY DAIS RECORDS
NORTH AMERICAN TOUR STARTS TONIGHT IN NY
“Potent and powerful.” – The Quietus
Drew McDowall has today released his fifth solo studio album, A Thread, Silvered and Trembling on vinyl and digitally via Dais Recorcds. A North America tour – starting at Le Poisson Rouge in NY – starts tonight with more dates to be added for Europe / UK in the autumn.
Listen to the full album HERE
Scottish experimental / electronic musician McDowall’s lifelong interest in an elegiac solo bagpipe style called pibroch (ceòl mòr in Gaelic) has been an inspiration for much of his previous work (including Coil’s legendary Time Machines). 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.
His latest work, A Thread, Silvered and Trembling, both incorporates and transforms these elements via exploratory electronic processing, weaving an electro-acoustic tapestry of strings, shudders, voids, and voices, alternately disembodied and displaced. Co-produced with engineer Randall Dunn at Circular Ruin Studios in Brooklyn, the collection’s four pieces capture McDowall at his most elevated and elusive, in thrall to "the ineffable – that which refuses to be spoken."
McDowall’s palette here is unusually eclectic, sourced from a dynamic orchestral ensemble arranged by Brent Arnold and comprised of cello, viola, violin, harp (Marilu Donovan of LEYA), and French horn. Ebbing between shrouded electronics and enigmatic, sometimes spectralist orchestration, the album moves with a seething, simmering energy, surging into elegant, uneasy crescendos. The first two pieces are inspired by a liberatory hijacking and inversion of a grim biblical story (and by a cryptic and strange UK simple syrup branding). Opener ‘Out of Strength Comes Sweetness’ shivers with short echo and resonant pads, before shifting into the album’s centrepiece: the 14-minute saga ‘And Lions Will Sing with Joy’. A murmuring electrical storm of keening strings and disorienting drones gradually grows darker and denser, until suddenly there’s a crack in the clouds, revealing mutated choral voices and sparkling harp. McDowall describes the track as "an incantation to help usher in a break, and a new beginning."
The record’s latter half evokes a deep untamed animism shot through with spiralling radiance. ‘In Wound and Water’ sways with harp, plucked strings and eerie cello undertows while lush layers of disorientated electronics hang in the dusk. There is no resolution, only a faint gradient of fragile dissipation, leading into the album’s harrowing and climactic closer, ‘A Dream of a Cartographic Membrane Dissolves’. Processed voices (credited on the liner notes to "The Ghosts Who Refuse to Rest") contort, whisper, and gather as the rest of the ensemble sharpens, poising to strike. Then it does – grand, tragic stabs of strings and horns lashing the sky, storming heaven by force.
The fallout is poetic and inevitable, raining embers into a dark sea. But the journey and catharsis of A Thread linger long after it goes silent. Like so much of McDowall’s multifaceted catalogue, this is music of immanence and alchemy, attuned equally to the sacred and the profane, to the tile and the mosaic.
The album features collaborations and instrumentation from harpist Marilu Donovan (LEYA), Grammy nominated French Horn player Eric Davis (David Byrne & St. Vincent, Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings) and more, and is co-produced by Randall Dunn (John Medeski and Daniel Lopatin's The Curse, Drab Majesty's An Object In Motion, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe's Candyman, Zola Jesus’ Arkhon).
Drew McDowall’s A Thread, Silvered and Trembling is out today on vinyl and digitally via Dais Records. Listen to the album HERE
A THREAD, SILVERED AND TREMBLING TRACKLISTING (DAIS221)
DREW MCDOWALL LIVE
31 May – Le Poisson Rouge, NY -
TICKETS6 June – Velvet Underground, Toronto ON –
TICKETS7 June – Industrial Detroit, Leland City Club, Detroit MI -
TICKETS8 June – Bohemian National Cemetery, Chicago IL with Kim Gordon, Irreversible Entanglements -
TICKETS14 June – Gray Area, San Francisco CA -
TICKETS15 June – Vera Project, Seattle WA -
TICKETS16 June – Holocene, Portland OR -
TICKETS19 June – Lodge Room, Los Angeles CA -
TICKETS
RECENT PRAISE
"EMBARRASSMENT OF RICHES?... Agalma is nothing if not cohesive in its lean, slow-burn, low-key psychedelia... This album, buzzing and resonant, draws time thin, pulls it almost transparent like a veil, perhaps disregarding it as a linear concept altogether" - The Quietus review of Agalma
"Agalma drips with spectral textures, angelic backing vocals and glitchy cinematic sweeps formed from warped field recordings and modular processing." – The Wire
"Seeing Drew McDowall live is an experience of equal parts pain and beauty. Simply put, it is the work of a master." – Noisey / Vice
EDITORS NOTES
Drew McDowall is a Scottish born, NYC based composer and musician. He was a member of Coil in the ‘90s contributing heavily to some of their most respected and influential works.
An artist who has refused to conform in music and in life, McDowall mines the hallucinatory spaces that exist between reality and transcendental otherness. His work has been described as “sacraments to alterity”, with meditative compositions that are haunting and spiritual, melding intricate modular soundscapes with acoustic instruments and cut-up field recordings, deconstructing and reconfiguring sounds into otherworldly structures and shapes. The disorienting ambient mirages that result elicit terror, tender melancholy, and always heavenly flickers of expansive beauty.
