Drew McDowall concert
23.10.2024
For La Becque’s almost traditional end-of-year concert in the Temple Saint-Théodule of La Tour-de-Peilz, we were delighted to welcome Scottish experimental musician Drew McDowall, former member of the bands Coil and Psychic TV, who performed tracks from his latest album A Thread, Silvered and Trembling, released on the American label Dais Records.
Based in New York for over 20 years, Drew McDowall musically exploits the hallucinatory spaces that exist between reality and celestial otherness. His meditative compositions are haunting and spiritual, melding intricate modular soundscapes with cut-up samples, and deconstructing sounds into their most basic shuddering structures and shapes.
Drew McDowall has had a lifelong interest in the elegiac solo bagpipe style “pibroch”, which inspired much of his earlier work (including Coil’s legendary Time Machines). This form fuses drones with flickering dissonance and plaintive melodies evoking a solemn ambience from another time. His latest LP, A Thread, Silvered and Trembling, incorporates and transforms these elements through exploratory electronic processing, weaving an electroacoustic tapestry of strings, shudders, voids and voices, alternately disembodied and displaced.
Drew McDowall, La Becque and Temple St-Théodule, La Tour-de-Peilz, 2024, photo Aurélien Haslebacher