Drew McDowall

The Coil veteran and art-punk lynchpin sheds light on his projects new and old

Scottish musician Drew McDowall formed the art-punk trio Poems in 1978 before spending a brief spell with boundary breaking Throbbing Gristle offshoot Psychic TV. The band split in several directions and McDowall’s own studio experiments never saw the light of day. However, he eventually became an integral member of post-industrial band Coil from 1994 until the tragic death of founding member John Balance.

Modular synthesis has fascinated McDowall since the early eighties and, remarkably, the influential producer would not release his debut solo Collapse until 2015 – an album itself based on a series of live experiments with modular equipment. Further releases Unnatural Channel and The Third Helix swiftly followed, setting the stage for McDowall’s latest collaborative release Agalma, a starkly beautiful juxtaposition of acoustics, found sounds and eerie ambient-industrial soundscapes.

Does your environmental upbringing attract you to the darker side of electronic music?

“A lot of it was serendipity, but the environment I grew up in on the periphery of Glasgow in the ’70s was pretty rough. I loved pop music – it wasn’t an either/or situation to like noise or industrial to the exclusion of anything else. Maybe pop music would be the escape and industrial would be the full-on unmitigated reality, but I liked a mixed bunch of stuff when I was a kid, from soul music to Krautrock, but nothing obsessive. Punk happened when I was 16 and in very short order I got into bands like Throbbing Gristle, who were probably the key that unlocked the door to what ostensibly could be considered the darker side of music. When I saw Suicide they blew me away and made me realise the barrier to entry was super low because you could do a lot with just a couple of pedals and a tape deck.”

How did you get involved with bands like Psychic TV and Coil?

“I knew Alex Ferguson from Psychic TV because he was from Scotland and did something for a band called Strawberry Switchblade. My ex-wife, Rose, was in that band and we also had a band called The Poems. Alex introduced us to Genesis P-Orridge and we really hit it off, but my tenure in Psychic TV was very brief. I spoke to Gen about that a few years ago and she said, ‘If I say you were in Psychic TV, then you were in Psychic TV!’.”

Was the sense of chaos and disorder in that music a reflection of their lifestyles as much as their art, and was that ever a challenge?

“I’ve always been pretty anarchistic and chaotic, but I’m not sure about disorder. Psychic TV was actually pretty disciplined in its approach. Some of their stuff could be sublime and other times downright nice with poppy tropes. But Psychic TV emerged out of Throbbing Gristle. As they said at the time, ‘the mission is terminated,’ and Chris & Cosey went in a different direction. John Balance and Peter Christopherson had already left to form Coil and I’d had a falling out with Gen, as many people did back then. Someone introduced me to John and we hit it off immediately. This was around 1987, but I didn’t officially become a member of Coil until 1994.”

Why did it take you so long to release music as a solo artist?

“I obviously don’t have the same sense of timing as other people – I just never felt the urgency. I collaborated a lot before making the solo stuff and never really left Coil, but when John Balance died it really derailed me and I couldn’t work on anything for quite some time. I did a few collaborations and still worked on music but wouldn’t let anyone hear it. Around 2012, I had a friend who was putting on these modular synthesis nights in New York. He asked me to do a solo set and it was quite well received. It was more or less an improvised set and my first album took shape from doing those.”

Even that took a while we understand?

“Yes, two years later I had to remind the label about the conversation we had to release the record [laughs]. I like taking my time. More than ever I feel there’s a lot to be said for having processes of re-evaluation when you’re working on something, but that can also be contradictory in terms of not wanting to overthink things.”

How do you know when to stop re-evaluating and let go of a piece of music?

“That’s the challenge right? It’s good to take your time but you don’t want to get into that trap of endlessly reworking things because you’ll end up sucking the life out of it. I’ve gone through so many processes of exploration and then listened to the first demo and thought, shit, I had it right there the first time. We all get lost sometimes and it might just be as simple as getting a friend or colleague to listen to it to get their take. What I like about that is you don’t even need to hear their opinion as you’re almost hearing it through their ears – and it might not sound as good as you thought, or maybe it does. It’s the process of asking that allows you to get out of your own little world and that’s invaluable.”

Your album Agalma is labelled ‘industrial’, but could equally be construed as ambient because it emphasises tone, atmosphere and texture. How do you interpret that contrast?

“I’m not trying to fight it. There’s always been this crossover between industrial and ambient – even Throbbing Gristle made peripheral things that could be considered ambient, like Weeping from Third And Final Annual Report. The people I knew who made industrial music all loved ambient and Coil definitely had a huge crossover there.”

Most of the tracks on Agalma are collaborations, which is absent on your previous

solo work. What were you looking to achieve through collaboration?

“I wanted to work with people I felt an affinity to, explore ideas of the sublime and connect with those who would immediately get that. I didn’t give them a brief or guidelines despite knowing that it can be nerve-wracking to send a track to someone and ask them to do whatever they want because you’re laying yourself open to getting something back that might not work. Thankfully, everyone completely got it and came back with stuff that was above and beyond my expectations. I worked with Maralie Armstrong and Robert Lowe in New York, Caterina Barbieri in Milan, Kali Malone in Stockholm and

Msylma, Bashar Suleiman and Elvin Brandhi who were in Cairo. They were all working remotely and sending their parts in, and I knew they were going to do something stunning, but that didn’t stop me being moved to tears on a couple of occasions.”

How much does working with others help you move beyond your own creative boundaries?

“That’s one of the great things about collaboration. At its best it’s a two-way process and you’re getting something from each other. In the studio we also had a harp player, violin, double bass and string players. When Marilu Donovan played harp it really changed the track because it led me to edit the mix just to highlight what she’d played. When you finish an album you’re kind of spent and depleted – I was exhausted physically and mentally, but my mind was also racing and full of ideas.”

The two tracks with Robert Lowe add a great contrast to your electronic soundscapes…

“Robert and I have been friends for a while and I’ve always admired his work with Om and his soundtracks. My studio is where he lives in Brooklyn so he brought his modular gear over. The vocals were pretty much improvised and processed live through his modular setup in one take. As soon as he started I was jumping up and down, although he was in the control room so couldn’t see me [laughs]. Again, I thought the demos were great but his vocal turned them into something completely different and realised them in a way they weren’t before.”

When you wrote the demos did you deliberately leave space for improvisation?

“I knew that I wanted to work with people so I definitely tried to leave space for them to do something. When someone asks you to collaborate but the track feels so complete that you don’t feel you can add anything it can be a little dispiriting. Some tracks just called out for the collaborator I had in mind. I had an instrumental thing going on with Agalma VII, which I loved, but I knew that Msylma, Bashar Suleiman and Elvin Brandhi would take it in another direction, whereas I sent Kali Malone and Robert Lowe a few tracks and let them decide what to work on. That way, when they came into the studio we all had immediate consensus.”

“That frying pan has a gorgeous bell-like tone… I almost feel bad cooking with it”

The sound on Agalma VII was enlivened by some sampled percussive instruments…

“All throughout the album there’s a whole bunch of acoustic instruments. I have a vibraphone, tubular bells and set up a bunch of metal objects to use that I then treated and manipulated so it wasn’t immediately obvious what they were. Agalma VII was actually made from harp that I’d twisted and timestretched, then Bashar and Elvin did some auto-tuned vocals. That wasn’t something I specified, but when it came back I thought the use of that technology fitted perfectly in that context.”

We noticed a frying pan in your setup

“Yeah, that was one of the bits of metal. That frying pan has a gorgeous bell-like tone; then I pitched it down. If you hit a big cast iron skillet it rings like a bell that decays for seconds long. I almost feel bad cooking with it, but that probably adds to the timbre. I’ve always loved found sounds because having an element of fun and play is so important. One of the reasons I’m still making music is because I’ve never lost that sense of play, and it’s super-rewarding for the textures and timbres you get from that.”

Is it more rewarding to make sounds from scratch rather than turn to a software library?

“I don’t discount using software as it’s important not to have a binary approach to music-making. It’s not about analogue, digital, software or hardware, just

do whatever. Yes, people use software and come up with the same-sounding stuff as everyone else, but you can misuse it too by having a synth plugin and adding a whole bunch of other plugins to make it sound like nothing you’ve heard before. It’s a bit of a cliché, but at that point you’re almost without limits, although limiting your palette also has its merits. I’m fortunate enough to have accrued a bunch of gear over the years, but I don’t think that’s necessary – I’ve heard people do mind-blowing stuff with just an iPad or a four-track tape deck.”

Does immediacy matter or are you happy to while away the hours experimenting?

“The tactile nature of hardware is very much part of my workflow and there’s certain modules I have that are very immediate, but because I don’t want to get bogged down in one way of thinking I’ve been trying to replicate the modules I really like with software. If you’re using a decent hardware controller you can still have that physicality. The experiment hasn’t been 100% successful, but it’s an interesting process; it takes me out of my comfort zone a little. Even if you fall short it can send you in another direction and create a happy accident. Someone just getting into modular asked me about spending a bunch of money on it and I said, don’t, just buy a couple of small things and drill into that, or use software like Reaktor where you can learn how sounds interact and actually build synths. Ableton’s Max for Live is another great way to understand how sound works.”

Modular is a big part of your process. Were you an early adopter?

“Very much so. My first instrument when I was 16 was a reel-to-reel tape deck. I was making tape loops and putting them through an Echo Stompbox. A few months later someone loaned me a semi-modular Korg MS-10 because they didn’t understand it and couldn’t make it work. That was my introduction to modularity and I got more into it, especially with Coil who had an ARP 2600, a Synton Fénix, MS-20, MS-50 and a few others. I didn’t get fully into modular myself until 2000 when I started to buy Eurorack. The insane setup I’ve got here is 20 years’ worth of incremental growth and I’m actually trying to get my head around thinning it down just to clear my mental space a little.”

It doesn’t seem like Eurorack has been around 20 years. Is it still making big advancements?

“Yes, the advancements have been stunning. Even though there were great modules at the start, you were very limited. They were all your typical VCOs, VCAs, filters and modulation sources, so it was still moving along a tried and tested path drawing heavily on forebearers like Moog, ARP or Buchla. Over the last few years you’re seeing cheap small DSP chips making their way into modules and people are doing stuff that was unimaginable back then. Some of the things Make Noise have been doing are amazing – they honour the past by paying homage to tape music or music concrète techniques but have a foot in the future using technology that those pioneers could only have dreamed of.”

Could you give any examples?

“The Qu-Bit Nebulae – it’s relatively affordable and wonderful for timestretching. That module is hard to replicate in software – it has a particular character and quality, and it’s the same with the Make Noise stuff, but I’m still not going to give up on the task of trying replicating them in the box.”

You seem to be one of the few artists comfortable using a modular setup on stage. How would you advise people approach that?

“Rather than buying a whole bunch of gear, keep it limited, know it inside out and understand that with modular there are going to be surprises. My early sets were just modular so there was no safety net. You have to be prepared to either have something ready to fill a gap or go with whatever weird accidental thing happens. I love those unplanned surprises when I’m playing live and always loved Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategy cards that have little hints of what to do when you’re in a jam. My favourite one is ‘honour thy errors as hidden intentions’ – that should be a guiding light for everyone. If you make a mistake it’s not the end of the world, the people in the audience aren’t going to care and will go with it if it takes you a minute to restart.”

In the studio, is the modular gear a creative starting point and based on live takes?

“Absolutely. Again, it’s this sense of playing with something and it might take an hour-long session before I end up with one minute of something usable. With this album, I did all the pre-production at my home studio. I’ve got a decent Universal Audio Apollo 8 interface, so I was able to get the tracks to a reasonable condition and then we went to Strange Weather to basically re-amp and re-record everything and another studio called Circular Ruin to mix with a co-producer called Ben Greenberg from the band Uniform.”

What was the process of re-amplification?

“We used very little digital reverb on the album. I’d used reverb plugins on the demos but every single track came out of the box and got re-tracked through one of the spaces at Strange Weather, whether it was the live room or the control room. We put a bass amp in one of the booths and sent all the bass tracks into it and even sent some into the bathroom to get a brighter sound. The studio also had some really beautiful plate reverbs in the basement and all of that really made the album gel together and give it this sonic quality that’s hard to get otherwise. The downside of that is that you have to commit, because I love to tweak endlessly.”

Do you need a lot of expertise to blend different forms of reverb?

“You can definitely go too far, which is why I needed the skill of a producer like Ben. Something that would normally take days of finessing and tweaking he’d figure out in minutes because he’s got an incredibly good ear for how the width and tonality of sound fits into the sound spectrum.”

You have some Elektron gear. Do you find the modern gear is more complicated to use?

“Elektron gear definitely has a bit of a weird internal logic, but it’s very rewarding because the ability to

use their gear to not just create but manipulate sound is phenomenal. They’ve got a very particular design and interface philosophy, but if you stick with it and figure it out you’ll get a light bulb moment where everything becomes second nature. There’s a learning curve with anything, whether it’s a guitar or a piano, so I don’t always buy into this idea that electronic instruments should somehow be easy to learn. You can turn them on and get something usable straightaway, but the gear will always reward you if you try to come up with things that are not immediately obvious.”

What does the Octatrack add to your sound?

“The Octatrack has an ability to timestretch and modulate sound in a way that’s really unique. I don’t think anyone has really captured the ability to do what their timestretch algorithm does. If you assign LFOs to the timestretch rate you get some really interesting sound design popping up, and if you put internal effects though the comb filter, resample it and do that process again it’s super-inspiring and you can hear whole tracks emerging out of it. I used the Octatrack a lot on the first three albums, but not so much on Agalma because I didn’t want to overuse past techniques, but I’ll never get rid of it.”

It’s hard to convey what Agalma sounds like. Is it possible to describe music?

“I’m the worst person when it comes to describing my music, but with Agalma I definitely wanted to create something that had a very specific feeling. I didn’t want to do anything that sounded dark or oppressive, even if you get hints of that from the very nature of the music I make. So I wanted the music to sound radiant and create something that touched on beauty and the subliminal that had a melancholy, elegiacal quality. All of that was playing in my head during the conception of the album, which was mainly when I was on tour and playing around with different little motifs that would give birth to the recordings. Even if I didn’t achieve those goals I felt so happy with the end result when it was finally mixed and mastered. As an artist, you always feel you can do better, but that’s a good thing because you can take that feeling onto your next project.”

If you ever attained perfection you’d have no motivation. Is it all about reaching levels?

“Yes, be careful what you wish for [laughs]. I listen to a lot of music and love it when I hear something that makes me sick with jealousy. That feeling of listening to something where the artist has really killed it and left me scrambling to catch up keeps music fresh and motivating. That’s one of the great things about living in New York – the bar is very high and you always feel you have to bring something, but in a good way.”

WANT TO KNOW MORE?

Drew McDowall’s latest album Agalma is out now on Dais. For more visit drewmcdowall.bandcamp.com