From the spectral core of Coil to his own radical transmissions, Drew McDowall sculpts sound as ritual.
His music is less composed than summoned — a slow invocation of memory, mysticism, and electronic disintegration.
A key architect of Coil’s shadowy later works and a lifelong sonic alchemist, Drew McDowall has shaped a deeply personal practice where modular synthesis, tape collage, and acoustic rupture meet mysticism, trauma, and transformation. His work is haunted — not by ghosts, but by impressions: of past selves, sacred texts, lost futures. Each piece unfolds like a slow spell, weaving terror and tenderness into shimmering, unstable atmospheres.
Emerging from Glasgow’s punk underbelly, McDowall’s trajectory carried him through the core of the UK’s industrial avant-garde (Psychic TV, Current 93, Coil) and into a solo career defined by fearless experimentation. His recent works incorporate everything from pipe organ to solo bagpipe lament (pibroch), refracted through dense electronic ritualism. In A Thread, Silvered and Trembling (2024), he translates Gaelic mourning music into an elegy for disintegration and renewal.
He’s collaborated with Kali Malone, Puce Mary, Hiro Kone, and Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, and toured a live AV reinterpretation of Time Machines to festivals like CTM, Unsound, and Ambient Church. Whether conjuring glacial drones or violent ruptures, McDowall remains devoted to sound’s deepest function: transformation.
RIYL: Coil, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Puce Mary, Hiro Kone, Eliane Radigue, Modular ritualism, Post-industrial ambient, Drone alchemy, Occult minimalism, Abul Mogard, Alva Noto, Alessandro Cortini, Current 93
Concert included in the SS26 season pass! https://secure.tickster.com/5vmn7ynvgjj79gj