Drew McDowall: An Artist Beyond Conformity
Drew McDowall's works are sacraments to alterity. An artist who has consistently refused to conform — in both music and life — McDowall explores the hallucinatory spaces between reality and celestial otherness. His meditative compositions are haunting and spiritual, weaving intricate modular soundscapes with cut-up samples and deconstructing sounds into their most elemental, shuddering forms. The resulting disorienting ambient mirages evoke terror, tender melancholy, and glimpses of expansive, heavenly beauty. McDowall creates music of immanence and alchemy, equally attuned to the sacred and the profane.
His backstory reads like a primer on psychedelic fiction, threaded with tales that verge on the unbelievable, superhuman, and outright insane. Growing up amid the gang violence of 1970s Scotland, McDowall — exhausted by daily brutality and chaos — sought refuge in punk music. He found a home within Glasgow’s thriving underground scene.
After forming The Poems with his then-wife Rose McDowall, he moved into the orbit of UK avant-garde luminaries like Genesis P-Orridge, David Tibet, Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson, and John Balance — key figures who would shape the evolution of experimental and industrial music. McDowall went on to collaborate with Psychic TV and became a full-time member of the influential cult group Coil, where his contributions helped guide the band's later output toward exercises in magical practice and music-as-psychoactive effect.
Throughout his career, McDowall has maintained a deep affinity for electronic music, yet has consistently avoided being confined to any single genre. His most recent works incorporate a diverse range of instrumentation, including strings, brass, pipe organ, and harp.
This openness to experimentation is also evident in his collaborations with a wide array of artists, including Kali Malone, Caterina Barbieri, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Hiro Kone, Varg, Puce Mary, Shapednoise, Rabit, James K, Elvin Brandhi, and LEYA.
McDowall has toured a live AV reinterpretation of Coil’s seminal drone masterpiece, Time Machines, at festivals around the world, including CTM, Berlin Atonal, Dark Mofo, Unsound, Le Guess Who, Semibreve, WOS, and Ambient Church.
LINKS:
https://drewmcdowall.bandcamp.com/
