(2020) Drew McDowall - Agalma


Review:
…let’s say that Agalma presents us with exactly the right amount of riches made manifest in part by an impossibly stacked deck of collaborators: Caterina Barbieri, Kali Malone, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Bashar Suleiman, Elvin Brandhi, MSYLMA, and Maralie Armstrong-Rial on a bonus track, with Ben Greenberg in the production booth and Josh Bonati on the master. That’s a who’s who of experimental music. Even if Drew McDowall totally sucked, based on the strength of those collaborators, it’s hard to imagine this record being bad. But McDowall doesn’t suck – his post-Coil body of work alone is singularly excellent, and the few “non-collaborative” compositions on this record – ‘Agalma I (Folding)’, ‘Agalma VI’, and the bonus track ‘Abandoned Object’ – attest to his excellence flying solo. Still, the bulk of his latest full-length is made up of deliriously fruitful collaborations that sound united in purpose and vision. Agalma is nothing if not cohesive in its lean, slow-burn, low-key psychedelia – which is an achievement in and of itself, given the tendency of records with so many “featured” artists to feel somewhat disjointed, like grab bags. (Honestly, it’s hard to imagine any fans of the guest musicians listed above being less than into this LP. Elvin Brandhi heads take note.) This album, buzzing and resonant, draws time thin, pulls it almost transparent like a veil, perhaps disregarding it as a linear concept altogether. Folklorically speaking, this is when the membrane between worlds is arguably at its thinnest. Or, should you not believe in “other worlds”, just this one with its past and present and future, one could posit that this is when linear time is at its most discombobulated, when the tarpaulin that separates its three primary components has the potential to part ever so slightly. Who knows? In certain medieval Eastern European traditions, common folk would spend All Hallows’ Eve tramping through the forests, praying and singing to benefit and soothe the souls of their lost kin, who were also meant to be wandering the woods that night. But maybe those souls sang, too, simultaneously, for their ancestors and their descendants – nothing more than moments in time, forward and back, all overlapping? However fantastical that proposition, the works that unspool over the course of Agalma‘s 52 minutes sound like hymns of comfort piercing the membrane, drifting back and forth through that tarpaulin, oddly soothing but rendered equally strange and sometimes unsettling as they overlap, unmoored by time, distorted by their journey. Voices multiply and become nearly indistinguishable from synth tones which, in turn, might become nearly indistinguishable from the human voice or mingle with asynchronous organic elements like Kali Malone’s pipe organ and its evocation of the sacred.





Tracklist:
01 - Agalma I (Folding)
02 - Agalma II (feat. Caterina Barbieri)
03 - Agalma III (Beacon) (feat. Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe)
04 - Agalma IV (feat. Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe)
05 - Agalma V (feat. Kali Malone)
06 - Agalma VI
07 - Agalma VII (Toyor El Janeh) (feat. Bashar Suleiman, Elvin Brandhi & MSYLMA)
08 - Agalma I (feat. Maralie Armstrong-Rial)
09 - Abandoned Object


Media Report:
Genre: ambient, experimental
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits