Drew McDowall: Collapse

Like anyone involved in the intricate network of bands that sprang from Throbbing Gristle, Drew McDowall has contributed to a number of projects over the past few decades. He’s most notable for his tenure in Psychic TV in the '80s and Coil in the '90s, during which time he honed his craft as a manipulator of synthesizers, samples, and esoteric sounds. One thing he’s never done, though, is release a solo album—that is, until now. Collapse is McDowall’s debut full-length under his own name, arriving 37 years after the first recorded appearance by the Poems, the Scottish punk band he formed with his then wife, and future Strawberry Switchblade member, Rose McDowall.

It’s been a long journey from teen punk to avant-industrial vet, but on Collapse, McDowall sounds anything but spent. The album’s five tracks—instrumental, save for a smatter of vocal samples—tap into the same deep wellspring of ritual, apocalypse, and neopagan awe that fueled Coil, only with a fuller and more focused sense of dread. Nowhere is that as evident as on "The Chimeric Mesh Withdraws (Parts 1-3)", the 20-minute triptych that anchors Collapse with an arcane gravitas straight out of McDowall’s greatest achievement with Coil, 1999’s Astral Disaster. But where Astral Disaster folds ambience and emptiness into its spellbinding substance, "Chimeric Mesh" wields those elements like hammers. The result is cinematic, insectoid, and foreboding, even as it morphs gently from movement to movement in a fugue of skittering static and fractured blocks of noise.

Another through line of McDowall’s work over the years is psychedelia, inasmuch as it intersects with the finer pulverization of industrial. "Hypnotic Congress" takes a while to settle into its mesmeric groove, but when it does, its rhythmic cascade of echoing pulses, looped chants, and submarine blips segues into a mind-dissolving wash. There’s a ceremonially circularity to "Through Is Out" and "Each Surface of Night", each of which phases into a sequence of krautrock-like pings and oscillations by song’s end—McDowall has admitted to being warped at the age of 12 by an impulse purchase of The Faust Tapes—that tensely countermands their eerily organic, almost folk-like undertones. But the most starkly psychedelic stretch of Collapse is "Convulse", a staccato salvo of hollowed-out power electronics whose chilling sampled voice—"I convulsed," intones a woman, clinically—comes across like a radical dub reworking of Joy Division’s "She’s Lost Control", told from the perspective of the song’s subject, and played at the bottom of the ocean.

In recent years, McDowall has collaborated with numerous artists, including Tres Warren of Psychic Ills in the blissful drone project Compound Eye. On Collapse, McDowall is joined by Nicky Mao (of Effi Briest and Hiro Kone), who contributes violin, unspecified samples, and splices to the album’s beckoning mix of recursion and unease. In any case, those contributions are seamless; as a whole, the collection comes across as a unified meditation that channels an atmosphere of doom, morbid curiosity, and the perplexing pluralism of modernity. It’s also frequently beautiful, even if that beauty is undermined by a vagueness that might have been more sharply defined by wider dynamics. As a solo statement, though, Collapse is a winner—a field recording of the psyche of an extreme-music journeyman who’s finally started to settle in and harness his own dark voice.