Agalma

Description

NEW ALBUM FROM SCOTTISH VETERAN, FORMER MEMBER OF COIL & PSYCHIC TV, POST-PUNK PIONEER AND INDUSTRIAL ICONThis new album by Drew McDowall, Scottish veteran of electronic music and member of Psychic TV and Coil, surely stands as his most ambitious, most liturgical, least industrial, and potentially the culminating point of his recent discography. Named after the Ancient Greek word for a votive offering (linked to a vow), Agalma exudes a hooded, grating, and capsizing shadow in front of vast stone vaults, stained glass windows, and shredded cables. It is majestic and mysterious yet also modern music offered to the listener, with McDowall's refined modular system forming metamorphic sounds of strings, piano, flutes, and massive choirs in a synthetic mirage of the sacred. As a true icon of the scene, this project also provided McDowall with the opportunity to gather an impressive circle of high-caliber musicians. Italian keyboardist Caterina Barbieri, American drone organist Kali Malone, multi-instrumentalist Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, opera singer Maralie Armstrong-Rial, Saudi producer MSYLMA, and finally futuristic beatmakers Bashar Suleiman and Elvin Brandhi, take turns appearing throughout the 42 minutes that make up Agalma. Each of them enhances the musical alchemy taking place with surreal textures and other transcendences. With Agalma, we share a more enigmatic, cryptic vision of industrial music, worthy of dark catacombs or ruined cathedrals. McDowall characterizes his initial intention for this project as an attempt to convey experiences he is unable to express with words: "Trying to approach the sublime, or at least in some way, recognize its existence." Agalma does more than recognize the ineffable; it embodies it.