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Forward of the discharge of his fifth solo studio album, A Thread, Silvered and Trembling, due out on vinyl and digitally on 31 Might 2024 via Dais, at this time, Drew McDowall has shared a brand new monitor from the discharge, A Dream of a Cartographic Membrane Dissolves.
Hear right here.
Pre-order the album right here.
A North America tour, beginning at Le Poisson Rouge in NY on album launch will comply with, with extra dates to be added for Europe / UK within the autumn.
Scottish experimental/digital musician McDowall’s lifelong curiosity in an elegiac solo bagpipe fashion known as pibroch (ceòl mòr in Gaelic) has been an inspiration for a lot of his earlier work (together with Coil’s legendary Time Machines). This kind, usually historically used for laments and for tributes to the useless, fuses modal drones with flickering dissonance and plaintive melody evoking an historic, solemn temper.
His newest work, A Thread, Silvered and Trembling, each incorporates and transforms these parts by way of exploratory digital processing, weaving an electro-acoustic tapestry of strings, shudders, voids, and voices, alternately disembodied and displaced. Co-produced with engineer Randall Dunn at Round Spoil Studios in Brooklyn, the gathering’s 4 items seize McDowall at his most elevated and elusive, in thrall to ”the ineffable – that which refuses to be spoken.”
The primary two items are impressed by a liberatory hijacking and inversion of a grim biblical story (and by a cryptic and unusual UK easy syrup branding). Opener Out of Power Comes Sweetness shivers with brief echo and resonant pads, earlier than shifting into the album’s centrepiece: the 14-minute saga And Lions Will Sing with Pleasure. A murmuring electrical storm of keening strings and disorienting drones progressively grows darker and denser, till abruptly there’s a crack within the clouds, revealing mutated choral voices and glowing harp. McDowall describes the monitor as “an incantation to assist usher in a break, and a brand new starting.”
The document’s latter half evokes a deep untamed animism shot via with spiralling radiance. In Wound and Water sways with harp, plucked strings and eerie cello undertows whereas lush layers of disorientated electronics cling within the nightfall. There isn’t any decision, solely a faint gradient of fragile dissipation, main into the album’s harrowing and climactic nearer, A Dream of a Cartographic Membrane Dissolves. Processed voices (credited on the liner notes to The Ghosts Who Refuse to Relaxation) contort, whisper, and collect as the remainder of the ensemble sharpens, poising to strike. Grand, tragic stabs of strings and horns lashing the sky, storming heaven by pressure – it does.
McDowall’s palette right here is unusually eclectic, sourced from a dynamic orchestral ensemble organized by Brent Arnold and comprised of cello, viola, violin, harp (Marilu Donovan of LEYA), and French horn. Ebbing between shrouded electronics and enigmatic, generally spectralist orchestration, the album strikes with a seething, simmering vitality, surging into elegant, uneasy crescendos.
An artist who has refused to adapt in music and in life, McDowall mines the hallucinatory areas that exist between actuality and transcendental otherness. His work has been described as ”sacraments to alterity”, with meditative compositions which might be haunting and religious, melding intricate modular soundscapes with acoustic devices and cut-up discipline recordings, deconstructing and reconfiguring sounds into otherworldly constructions and shapes. The disorienting ambient mirages that end result elicit terror, tender melancholy, and at all times heavenly sparkles of expansive magnificence.
The fallout is poetic and inevitable, raining embers right into a darkish sea. However the journey and catharsis of A Thread linger lengthy after it goes silent. Like a lot of McDowall’s multifaceted catalogue, that is music of immanence and alchemy, attuned equally to the sacred and the profane, to the tile and the mosaic.
Additionally identified for his various collaborations, working with Kali Malone, Catarina Barbieri, Robert Aki Aubrey Lowe, Hiro Kone, Varg, Puce Mary, Shapednoise and others and has carried out at many worldwide festivals together with CTM, Berlin Atonal, Darkish Mofo, Unsound, Le Guess Who, Semibreve, WOS and Ambient Church, the album encompasses a related expansiveness of sonic coconspirators.
Collaborations and instrumentation from harpist Marilu Donovan (LEYA), Grammy-nominated French Horn participant Eric Davis (David Byrne & St. Vincent, Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings) and extra, and is co-produced by Randall Dunn (John Medeski and Daniel Lopatin’s The Curse, Drab Majesty’s An Object In Movement, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe’s Candyman, Zola Jesus’ Arkhon).
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Drew McDowall | Web site | Instagram
Dais | Web site
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