Drew McDowall - A Thread, Silvered and Trembling
Featuring Drew McDowall, Chelley Sherman, GAZAEBAL, CYRNAI and Nihar
Friday, June 14, 2024
Doors: 8PM
Show: 8:30PM
21+
Standing performance
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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 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 centerpiece: 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 spiraling 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 cat
harsis of A Thread linger long after it goes silent. Like so much of McDowall’s multifaceted catalog, this is music of immanence and alchemy, attuned equally to the sacred and the profane, to the tile and the mosaic.
Scottish born, Brooklyn based electronic artist Drew McDowall was born and raised in Paisley, an area just outside of Glasgow, and came of age during a time when the city was one of the most dangerous places in the world. Caught up in the prevalent gang culture of Scotland’s destroyed industrial cityscape, McDowall found a way out of the daily violence as punk took hold of the UK’s disenchanted youth. In 1978, he formed the lo-fi post-punk band, The Poems, with then wife, Rose McDowall, who would later rise to mainstream acclaim as one half of Strawberry Switchblade. Though shortly realized, the Poems allowed McDowall to network and collaborate with other local musicians in Glasgow, such as Orange Juice, and granted him access to travel down to London, thus forming friendships with Genesis P-Orridge, David Tibet and countless others, bringing Drew into the fold of the experimental cultural revolution happening in England brought upon by Throbbing Gristle and executed by groups such as Psychic TV and Current 93.
Chelley Sherman is a creative technologist and liminal researcher who explores non-ordinary states of consciousness and perceptual illusions through immersive installations, data-driven biosimulations, and digital recreations of complex, dynamical and self organizing systems as her contemplating practice. . Her computational models give rise to emergent lifelike patterns and behaviors, forming the foundation of immersive experiences that serve as meditative psychocosmograms. These works engage viewers in an intricate dimensional expression of the vastness and fluid nature of reality through noetic perception and symbolic representation. Sherman leverages concepts like annealing, optics, fluid dynamics and agent driven behaviors to evoke the intricate, ineffable expressions of multi- layered consciousness in both the physical and metaphysical realms.
Her acclaimed VR installations have been featured at events such as the United Nations Women's Global Film Festival, SXSW, Nuit Blache and Mutek. Notably, Chelley's contributions to the development of real-time systems at Sphere Las Vegas and for Emmy Award-nominated immersive films have been highlighted in Time Magazine as pioneering advancements in technology along with her collaborations with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
GAZAEBAL is a sound artist based in Seoul. As one of the pioneers in the Korean electronic music scene, he has expanded his spectrum as a sound engineer, techno musician, DJ, K-POP producer, and media artist.
He began his career as a sound engineer in New York studios in the 1990s, working on recordings for artists like Wu-Tang Clan and Janet Jackson. He released his techno album "O.N.DA" in December 2000, followed by ANOTHER ONE in December 2002 and the digital single MULL released in the UK in 2004, which topped the UK techno chart in its first week.
In 2008, he formed the Tacit Group and transformed into a media artist. Tacit Group's works, combining technology and art, have garnered global attention and are still actively engaged. In 2014, GAZAEBAL initiated the WeSA Festival to foster the ecosystem of the rugged domestic sound/audiovisual genre as the artistic director.
Starting his solo project as a sound artist again in 2022, GAZAEBAL is expanding his work through various media and methods, including performances, exhibitions, music, and NFT. His audiovisual work UN/Readable Sound, which expresses dense sounds through dystopian game visuals, was selected as this year's new work by the Korea Arts and Culture Promotion Foundation.
Spanning over four decades of work, Bay Area musician Carolyn Fok (CYRNAI) specializes in electronic experimental music, composing and producing with synthesizers, piano, guitar, and percussion. Her adventures in sound began at the tender age of 9, recording stories into a tape recorder and experimenting with her father’s musical instruments and effects units. By the age of 16, Fok had become inspired by pioneering industrial electronic artists like Cabaret Voltaire, as well as anarcho-punk acts such as Crass. She is perhaps best known for pioneering a form of experimental music intertwining her ‘handcrafted’ sound designs, real life, and popular rhythm constructs. She composes, produces, engineers, remixes and masters all her designs with synthesizers and percussion, and uses any instrument and sounds from piano, guitar, to gongs, as tools to an art canvas. She has recently embarked on an ambitious project that involves releasing her vast archive of music via her website Memoir Of Sound.
Nihar (SF) is a Asian American experimentalist, musician and sound designer. Nihar’s live selector sets often mixes the sounds and rhythms of the 21st century global supply chain. Nihar has has released music on influential underground labels such as Squirrels on Film, Psychic Liberation, Jacktone Records and Ascetic House. He is also the co-label head of Left Hand Path, which has been featured in The Wire, Resident Advisor, Fact Magazine and elsewhere for its top track record of releases.
He has contributed DJ mixes to globally renowned series such as The Bunker NY and Honey Sound System.
Recent Releases: Machines (2023, Squirrels on Film), Rumble/Vermillion Garden (2020, Psychic Liberation), Chrysalis (2018, Jacktone)
The Recombinant Media Labs organization was founded to research the qualities and artistic potential of Spatial Cinema. It does so by means of Experiential Engineering; exploring processes that propagate the aesthetic and technological boundaries of panoramic AV exhibition. RML acts as producer and presenter of hybrid artworks and performance archiving based on spatial media synthesis; intermodal works using image, light, sound and other disseminated media in three-dimensional space. The CineChamber is RML's curated, nomadic platform under the artistic trajectory of founder & Director Naut Humon plus a superhuman crew.
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