DREW MCDOWALL
Scottish experimental/electronic musician Drew 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 traditional form, often used for laments and tributes to the dead, fuses modal drones with flickering dissonance and plaintive melodies, evoking an ancient, solemn mood.
His latest work, A Thread, Silvered and Trembling, both incorporates and transforms these elements through 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.
MT. GEMINI
“In 2019, my interest in early ska, boss reggae, rocksteady and dancehall has led me to initiate MT Gemini, a project in which I started exploring the many unexpected polarities taking place between Jamaican music and quite rudimentary electroacoustic manipulations.
I quickly came up with a debut LP which was released on Belgian label Sub Rosa, it ended up in the “10 records of the year” list of the Wire Magazine’s Dub section.
In another review, Brainwashed (UK) wrote: “Every single one of the pieces is a striking example of transformational wizardly, going beyond mere deconstruction to create something deeply lysergic that is light years away from the raw material that it was birthed from. Moreover, Franck is consistently inventive in his alchemy, studiously avoiding the temptation to repeat the same tricks or head in a direction that has already been explored: each piece is treated like a completely unique foundation for a new vision to organically grow from.”
As I see it, MT Gemini is not dub music per se but rather an incantatory deconstruction of Jamaican tunes that I love, a home laboratory grown mixture of aural mutations infused with strangeness, joy and nostalgia. But above all, a meditation on alterity and the conciliation of opposites.
FOR FANS OF: Coil | Kali Malone | Laurel Halo
