Kali Malone and Drew McDowell generate 'Magnetism' with intergenerational ambience

It’s weird, right? We’ve somehow stumbled into a world where, for all we’re told that algorithms homogenise music, actually more people than ever are exposed to very, very odd and abstract soundmaking.

There’s new age gong baths at even the most normie health spas. There’s a kajillion hours of “relaxation music” flooding streaming services from who knows where, a lot of it just drones and/or modulating white noise. There’s the sound design of scores by the likes of Hildur Guðnadóttir, Daniel Lopatin, Cristobal Tapia De Veer that reach millions in surround sound via movies, games and prestige dramas yet are in their own right sound sculpture on inhuman scale with chasmic voids and nanoscopic detail, felt as much as heard.

Yet for all the glut – for all that we are now really completely familiarised to the presence of arhythmic, unmelodic soundscapes and art music to a degree unimaginable a couple of decades ago – pieces of extended drone music can still stand out from the crowd, and even still have the power to startle. Case in point is this collaboration between Kali Malone, a millennial minimalist composer from Denver via Stockholm, and Drew McDowell, Scottish veteran of the more esoteric fringes of the industrial world with a vast history of works solo and in collaborations from Psychic TV and Coil onwards.

To put it crudely, Malone’s discography has tended to centre extended notes on wind or bowed instruments and especially pipe organs, while McDowell’s lately has tended to more unidentifiable drones with a few plucked strings or chimes. This seems a perfect fusion: most of it appears to be about what happens when a pluck turns into an extended notes. A lot of the timbres sound as if they’ve come from guitar or perhaps a harpischord or prepared piano string – but the tracks are essentially about what happens as reverberations and feedback surge and flow after the initial note. The suspense as they wind their own way through space is truly compelling; as background this is like a bitter but heady perfume, but if you listen closely, it can be as emotional an adventure as any traditional song.

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