Artist Florence To provides hallucinatory visuals for the haunting composition.
On his new album, Agalma, Drew McDowall draws upon the sacred energy of devotional ceremonies in an attempt, in his own words, “to try and approach sublimity, or at least acknowledge it in some way.”
Moving away from the industrial sounds of his work with Coil and Psychic TV, on Agalma Drew McDowall explores a transcendent new sonic vocabulary with the help of a new generation of experimental pioneers, including Caterina Barbieri, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, MSYLMA and Elvin Brandhi.
This renewed interest in invoking liturgical reverence is keenly felt on the first track to be released from the album, a collaboration with experimental composer Kali Malone. On ‘Agalma V’ soaring orchestral passages are assimilated into eerie electronics, something that McDowall describes as evoking “”joy, terror, and the elegiac”, or, more expressively, “that ‘what the fuck is going on’ feeling”.
Frequent McDowall collaborator Florence To provides hallucinatory visuals for the haunting composition. “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”, she explains.
“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.”
Agalma arrives on September 18 via Dais Records.
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