DREW MCDOWALL presents »Time Machines«

Drew McDowall’s works are sacraments to alterity. An artist who has refused to conform in music and in life, McDowall mines the hallucinatory spaces that exist between reality and celestial otherness. His meditative compositions are haunting and spiritual, melding intricate modular soundscapes with cut-up samples, and deconstructing sounds into their most basic shuddering structures and shapes. The disorienting ambient mirages that result elicit terror, tender melancholy, and heavenly flickers of expansive beauty.

His backstory reads like a primer of psychedelic fiction woven into statements of the unbelievable, superhuman, and outright insane. Growing up in the gangs of 1970’s Scotland, McDowall-fatigued by years of daily violence and the chaotic madness of that life- sought aggressive self-expression in punk and found a home in Glasgows rich underground music community.  After a stint with The Poems, a band he started with his then-wife Rose McDowall, he joined the ranks of UK avant-gardists Genesis P-Orridge, David Tibet, Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, John Balance, and countless others who would come to define the industrial music’s blossoming experimental vanguard. McDowall eventually collaborated with Psychic TV and became a full-time member of the cult outfit Coil, where his influence shaped the group’s later output: exercises in magical practice and music-as-psychoactive effect.

While McDowall has adhered to electronics throughout his career, he has escaped making music confined to any one genre. This is partially because of his diverse collaborations; since moving to Brooklyn 20 years ago, he has worked with esteemed acts like Hiro Kone, Puce Mary, Croatian Amor, Varg, Uniform, Rabit and Shapednoise, and toured a live AV reinterpretation of Coil’s seminal drone work, Time Machines, at festivals across the world.

KARA-LIS COVERDALE live

Kara-Lis Coverdale, also known as K-LC, is a Canadian composer, musician, producer, based in Montreal, Quebec. Coverdale is known equally for her piano, organ, and keyboard work as she is for her experimental electronic projects; often her work integrates the two, blurring the lines between traditional composition and research-based modernism.

Driven by a patient devotion to sonic afterlife, memory, and material curiosity, Kara-Lis Coverdale’s dynamic work occupies new planes built upon a borderless understanding of electronic music with roots in several interlocking musical systems and languages. Coverdale’s work has been met with consistent critical acclaim. Her most recent recorded release, Grafts (Boomkat, 2017), is a set of three pieces in long form that highlight the composer’s distinct approach to digital-based ratio tuning. It has been described as an “arresting” “masterful work” of “uncompromisingly distinct,” “indescribable beauty.” Coverdale’s recordings are incredibly considered and often understated, but her live shows can evoke the unpredictable, chaotic, eerie, dynamic, and confrontational; all for which she has earned a steady reputation as a festival favourite (The Guardian, The New York Times, RA, The Fader) as a highly dynamic and explorative artist, resistant to categorization and stasis.

RABIT

Eric C. Burton, best known by the recording alias Rabit, is an American producer of experimental electronic music, as well as the owner of his own label Halcyon Veil, born in Houston. Career Burton began his musical career making experimental grime music for online record labels. Eventually, he released his debut album Communion on Tri Angle, which was released to critical acclaim. In a Pitchfork review by Philip Sherburne, where he rated the record 7.9 out of 10, he stated that it was ‘violent music’ and that ‘you emerge even after just a few minutes’ worth of the album’s unrelenting barrage of beats and palette of sampled shrapnel feeling dazed and punch-drunk’. In 2017, Burton was featured as a producer on Björk’s Grammy-nominated album Utopia for the track ‘Losss’. In the same year, he released Les Fleurs Du Mal, a shift in style to pure experimental electronic music outside of grime. He currently owns and releases music on the record label Halcyon Veil, which has existed since 2015. Burton has also produced and independently released mixtapes of chopped and screwed mixtapes in the vein of DJ Screw.

MERMAID & SEAFRUIT live

Mermaid & Seafruit is the collaborative project of Magdalena Chowaniec and Markus Steinkellner. Together they take us on a ferocious trip through various musical styles. The straight forward vocals reflect on our society, body and gender politics and the emotional abyss of the contemporary subject. The tracks of the Polish-Austrian duo inhale the deep, corporeal bass of Grime, the snottiness of Hip Hop, the frenzy of Hardstyle, the confrontational dynamics of Noise as well as the patient elegance of R’n’B and theatrical spoken word passages. The result is a hybrid, an intriguing and dystopian amalgam of contemporary club genres, shimmering in different emotional shades. Magdalena, who is mostly known for her work as a performance artist and Markus, who is active in the Viennese music scene since over a decade now, just seem to be the perfect match. As Mermaid & Seafruit they practice sensual activism, both edgy and kinky.

KLEFT live

Kleft is Glasgow artist Vickie McDonald.

“synthetic flesh | pressing the wrong buttons since 2015”