Drew McDowall (Coil/Psychic TV) is readying his newest LP Agalma for release on September 18th via Dais Records. The longstanding experimental electronic musician and frequent collaborator reports that his upcoming solo LP will include appearances from a host of musicians including Italian synthesist Caterina Barbieri, American drone organist Kali Malone, prolific multi-instrumentalist Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, operatic Humanbeast vocalist Maralie Armstrong-Rial, Saudi producer MSYLMA, and warped futurist beat-makers Bashar Suleiman and Elvin Brandhi.
The pioneering Industrial artist uses a modular set-up here to combine searing noise tones, organ, strings, and chorale vocals into a hallucinatory experience of “joy, terror, and the elegiac.” When first conceiving of the project, the artist had intended on calling it Ritual Music. Instead, he settled on the Greek word “Agalma,” meaning ‘votive offering,’ a title that suggests his intent “to try and approach sublimity, or at least acknowledge it in some way.”
“Agalma V (ft. Kali Malone)” is the first single from McDowall’s upcoming effort. Ghostly whispers shudder through space as the track opens creating a nightmarish dream scenario sure to have the hairs on the back of your neck standing up. But soon, organ and strings emerge from the thick blackness as an eerie chorus of voices and searing peels of noise circle like a host of winged creatures from the deepest depths. Like the musical accompaniment to an Inverted Mass, “Agalma V” uses disassociative musical states to court the darkest mysteries.
The video for the track was created by Florence To (FKA Twigs, Jlin, Powell,). The description to it explains:
“The manipulation of frames and pixel arrangements are escalated through opposing colours revealing the elements in-between which are not often visible relative to the amount of information the eyes choose to conceive. The elements are on the edge of existence and within those moments the distinction of inner and outer worlds become designed hallucinations with unexpected visible struggles only to end with the fundamentals. As the eyes follow the dark shadows we begin to fall into a temporal space of immediacy and emotion.”
