Drew McDowall — Collapse

Veteran British musician Drew McDowall is likely best known as a person who contributed to many of Coil's most powerful and singular recordings, including the drone album "Time Machines", the more tuneful, ethereal gothic ambient of "Musick to the Play in the Dark" and the "Moon's Milk" EPs.  After many years in various projects, he has finally seen fit to release an album under his own name, entitled "Collapse".

Fans of the colorful, crisp and vivid sound environments of Coil will find a similar mood and balance of sound textures here.  Wind and string instruments can be heard saturated with tube amp distortion, mutated from their original Earthy form into unpredictable & prickly overloaded shapes.  The mind is drawn to murmuring undulations of tone as every sound shimmers with vibrato.  Where Cyclobe, our other remaining Coil alumni, explore a cold & digital isolationist realm, an unforgiving granular plane representing the most disconnected of Coil's sounds, "Collapse" features frequent instances of e-bow, and resembles at times a free rhythm form of post rock or doom metal.

The sludgiest, slowest and grimmest piece is surely the opener, "The Chimeric Mesh Withdraws, Pt. 1 - 3", nearly 20 minutes, and occupying all of 'side A', as such.  Not unlike the music of TenHornedBeast, the track centers around the sluggish, vaguely rhythmic alternation of forboding bass notes, muffled and surrounded with ghostly subterranean ambience, creating a feeling of undetermined vastness unfolding before the listener.  This track is probably the least distinct and memorable thing on the album, but it's high quality dark ambient music, and should appease fans of the style.

'Side B' is a bit more of an active listen, comprised of 4 shorter tracks (3-7 minutes) filled with creative and hypnotic sound texturing, often comparable to the bright, pure feeling synth drones found on Coil's "Moon's Milk".  "Hypnotic Congress" has a vintage industrial feel, in that its fashioned from rough, worn sounding loops (which could be tape loops).  A thunderous distant bass drum is set against a buzzing distortion with a pleasant rhythmic oscillation to its waveshape, highlighting the tempo grid in a trance-like manner.  A sample of a choir is chopped rhythmically into the sound as well, and it's got that classic cassette vibe.

The album really starts to get great with "Through Is Out", a sparser soundscape track that has an immediate emotional effect on me, the way glowing whispers of guitar and flute sketch nostalgic chords, rustling in irregular gusts through a vast canyon of empty space.  The reverent, naturalistic feeling is not unlike Steve Roach's expansive, desert themed ambient works.  As a whole, the album feels emotionally unified, so the diversity of approaches serves the album well, in the end.

The 4th piece "Convulse", much like "Hypnotic Congress", is something I wouldn't be surprised to find on an old SPK, Nurse With Wound or Throbbing Gristle recording from the early 80's, centered around a plodding, irregular bass pulse like distant underwater drums, a persisting murky unease clearly analog in texture.  The backwards sound of violin or viola wailing offkey should be familiar to fans of "Thunder Perfect Mind".  The repeated sampling of various different people saying the phrase "I convulsed" provides the obligatory 'industrial' morbidity, and the samples are played off each other to sketch a curious arc with their respective tones of voice.  Like many tape loop tracks from the 80's, the loops aren't really synced with each other, but seem to form hypnotic implied rhythms.

"Each Surface of Night", the final track, begins as a round, magickally charged drone, an inviting, luminescent tone.  It's easy to imagine John Balance's voice here.  It ends as a nod to the Berlin school, a lovely arpeggio sequence swelling into bright crispness as the end of the track approaches.  This sort of sound, attempted in more recent years by such acts as Stars of the Lid and Larsen, retains its grounded, re-assuring warmth.

I am pleased to say Drew McDowall's work outside of Coil reflects the same textural creativity/beauty and emotionally charged, transcendent energy that Coil had.  Hearing "Collapse", I have a much greater respect for Drew's contribution to classic albums such as "Moon's Milk".  It's not a perfect album, as I don't think everything here is equally novel: I tend to lean in favor of the tuneful, emotive ambient style rather than what I perceive to be occasional tired attempts at 1st wave industrial darkness.  I would recommend this album to any fan of Coil, or really anybody looking for a melancholic ambient disk with above average creativity and variety.  That said, the work of fellow Coil alumni Cyclobe is undoubtedly more forward thinking.