Agalma: Drew McDowall mit neuem Album im September

admin — Sat, 25 Jul 2020 05:50:08 +0000

Benannt nach einem altgriechischen Wort für Votivgabe und ursprünglich unter dem Arbeitstitel “Ritual Music” konzipiert, hat der in New York lebende schottische Musiker Drew McDowall ein kollaboratives Album fertiggestellt, an dem zahlreiche internationale Musiker beteiligt sind – Kali Malone und Catarina Barbieri sind nur die hierzulande bekanntesten. “Agalma” ist ein klanglich wie emotional facettenreiches Album, McDowall selbst betrachtet es als sein bisher liturgischstes und am weitesten vom Industrial entferntes Werk. Teil des Albums sind Fotografien und Designs der Künstlerin Caroline Schub.
“Named after an ancient Greek word for votive offering, Agalma exudes a hooded, devotional aura, creaking and keeling under vast rafters of stone, stained glass, and shredded wires. It’s a music of majesty and mystery but also modernity, McDowall’s refined modular system shape-shifting strings, piano, pipe organ, and choral masses into disorienting synthetic mirages of the sacred. [...] As a career collaborator himself, with stints in Coil, Psychic TV, and countless other shorter-lived partnerships, it’s telling that McDowall chose this project to gather such an impressive spectrum of peers. Italian synthesist Caterina Barbieri, American drone organist Kali Malone, prolific multi-instrumentalist Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, operatic

Humanbeast vocalist Maralie Armstrong-Rial, Saudi producer MSYLMA, and warped futurist beat-makers Bashar Suleiman and Elvin Brandhi cameo across the album’s 42 minutes, contouring McDowall’s nuanced negative spaces with shudders, shadows, and shivering flickers of serenity. Each of them shines in their spotlight, elevating these elusive alchemical states into surreal revelations of texture and transcendence. McDowall’s original working title for the record is revealing: Ritual Music. He speaks of his creative practice in ceremonial terms, negating binaries by seeking the middle path to a numinous equilibrium that erases the distinction between the inner and outer worlds. These compositions feel similarly processional and intuitive, at the crossroads of holiness and hallucination, the sacred vertigo of yawning naves rising into untouchable night skies.

It’s a vision of industrial music as enigma and invocation, cryptic hymnals of shrouded beauty summoned in catacombs and crumbling cathedrals. Despite its depths, Agalma is also an album of immediacy and emotion. Celestial laments of and for times of unrest and suffering. McDowall characterizes his initial intention for this music as an to attempt to convey experiences he felt incapable of putting into words: “To try and approach sublimity, or at least acknowledge it in some way.” Agalma more than acknowledges the ineffable – it embodies it.” (Dais Records)

Messing: Lukas König alias Kœnig mit neuem Album bei Ventil Records

admin — Fri, 15 May 2020 05:17:30 +0000

Drummer Lukas König alias Kœnig bringt Anfang Juni das Album “Messing” heraus. Der Titel spielt mit der Mehrdeutigkeit des Begriffs, der einerseits im deutschen für das Material steht, aus dem perkussive Becken hergestellt werden – hier das einzig verwendete traditionelle Musikinstrument. Andererseits steht bedeutet der Begriff im Englischen so etwas wie “herumhantieren”, was auf eine chaotische oder gewagte Handhabung verweist. Die insgesamt zehn Tracks, die von abstrakten Klangarbeiten bis zu tanzbaren Tracks rangieren, sind durch vielfältige Aufnahme- und Bearbeitungstechniken und durch die Beiträge verschiedener VokalistInnen (Elvin Brandhi, Coco Béchamel, Sensational) zu dem geworden was sie sind.
“The internationally acclaimed drummer concentrated only on a single cymbal (brass plate) as a sound source, messed around with it and therefore discovered new possibilities for sound developments. According to Kœnig, this reduction in means can be attributed to the loss of his rehearsal room and additionally to an acute lack of space, which is also connected to his constant commuting between New York and Vienna. The warehouse was converted into a quiet rehearsal room, where he explored his dexterity on the cymbal and its tonal characteristics using contact microphones and headphones, and perfected his technique to this end. And this reduction of means bore fruit.

In the studio, in intensive cooperation with producer Nik Hummer, various microphoning and amplification techniques were used, in some places the metal sound is supplemented and filtered by Hummer’s modular synth. König composed tracks with complex but always driving rhythmic patterns, whose raw- and directness give them a unique aesthetic, an extraordinary punch and also a special acousmatic charm. The pieces oscillate between abstract sound fields (Hot Springs) and more catchy, groove-based pieces. Three times he has them supported by vocalists*, which gives the tracks featured by Elvin Brandhi (track 2) and Coco Béchamel (track 7) a riot character and a decidedly political dimension. On track 4 (Mr.Kiwi’s) the New York based rapper Sensational is featured.

»MESSING« by Kœnig is a courageous statement that rejects straightforward pop and instead shines with artistic freedom and the will for change. The metal, the brass, always reverberates, at times mercilessly pounding on us, driving us forward, resonating. An artistically valuable and independent work by one of the most remarkable drummers of these times.” (Ventil Records)

African Paper » Elvin Brandhi

Agalma: Drew McDowall mit neuem Album im September

Messing: Lukas König alias Kœnig mit neuem Album bei Ventil Records