Drew McDowall: "Equipment isn’t what makes the sound" – ALICE Guest Book 02

The experimental electronic musician Drew McDowall shares how to get out of creative block, his best advice for collaborating with others, and why you shouldn’t get too hung up on equipment.

What does your compositional process look like?

»There's a lot of serendipity to it: Sometimes I’ll have some ideas of a concept to start with, and then I’ll either mutate, change or abandon it. But more often than not it’s just … play. It’s a really good antidote to creative block as well: Not intending to create anything, but simply playing with and enjoying sound.«

What’s your favourite gear?

»Right now it’s an oscillator called a DPO. It wavefolds, so it creates these very beautiful tearing sounds. But it can also be very rich and subtle. I hadn’t used it for a while, but before I set off for this tour I was playing around with it, and I actually ended up bringing it with me. It’ll be all over the set tonight!«

How important are your tools to you?

»In my studio, I have a big, modular setup. Like the one I’m using on stage, but many times bigger. And it’s important for me to have, but it’s not something to get hung up upon. That’s a piece of advice I’d give: Equipment isn’t what makes the sound. You can have wonderful results from creating on a phone, or banging pieces of metal.«

Speaking of … how do you use field recordings in your music?

»It’s a process of iteration: Taking a recording and manipulating it with my modular setup or with software, and then taking the result of that and feeding it through the process again and again. Very often it’s just random street sounds, the sounds of people’s voices that I then mutate, stretch, and mangle, so they end up sounding nothing like the original source. I like to put contact microphones on metal street furniture, like railings, lampposts, and signs. I have a magnetic microphone I can stick onto them and then bang on them to create these wonderful ‘dong-like’ sounds.«

When did you start to think of yourself as a musician?

»It’s one of those things that I don’t think about too much. Anyone who’s making music is a musician. But, as far as playing the piano or the guitar or something, my skills are pretty limited. And for me, that’s important. I like to not get too lost in technique. You know, I started making music with tape loops: From old tapes that I found that someone had recorded on, and took a random loop out of it. There was this street market with junk in Glasgow that’s gone now called Paddy’s Market. And there I bought a tape recorder and some random tapes with some really odd things on with people who had recorded themselves. On our first 7-inch with The Poems, there was a recording from one of these tapes: A woman singing, not great but really beautifully, that was looped and sent through a bunch of guitar effects.«

What is the relationship between ritual and music?

»With my previous band Coil, it felt like everything we did was ritual music, even if it wasn’t a specific ritual. And that is still present in the music that I do today. Honestly, all music can be ritual music, if it takes you to some other place.«

You've been in many different collaborations and bands. What do you think is most important to keep in mind when you collaborate creatively with other people?

»I think a lot of people are very anxious to stamp their own style, sound, or process on it when they collaborate with others. But the most important thing is listening to what the other person is doing. Because a collaboration is a conversation. And having some connection beyond just the musical connection is important too. Some of the best collaborations that I’ve had are with people I consider friends.«

After many years of releasing music with others, what did it take for you to release and perform music under your own name?

»I did some very sporadic things in the ‘80s, but it was something I was not yet comfortable with, I was still all about collaboration. But around 2012 I was randomly asked to do a live show, and I was very reluctant to do it, but I did it, and enjoyed it so much. And then Ryan Martin proposed that if I wanted to, I could release my music on his label Dais Records. It was released a few years after. The biggest challenge during that process was finding a language that was not replacing the conversations I have with collaborators, but finding some other part of myself to have the conversation with.«

What could that be?

»Something I haven’t explored. A shadow, or a dream.«

What are you having that conversation with at the moment?

»Right now, the themes that I’m exploring, and the conversations that I’m having, are about loss and grief. But also finding beauty, love and joy in the world.«

What is your most important advice for your younger, creative self?

»Don't be so fearful.«

What can you recommend from our current program?

»Brìghde Chaimbeul! She’s such an incredible artist. I first saw her as a part of a collaboration at a music festival in Glasgow. How she’s grown and expanded since! Her first album absolutely astonished me, it’s fantastic what she is doing with traditional Scottish music. And her new album is absolutely mind-blowing, the way she really leans so heavily into the inherent drone aspect of Scottish music and brings it to the fore. I’m getting goosebumps right now just thinking about how good it is!«

The ALICE Guest Book is a living archive and an ongoing work, where artists who have performed on the ALICE stage share inspiration, advice, anecdotes, and even recommendations from the ALICE program. Together, the different entries draw a collective picture of what ALICE is. The book becomes a place where widely different artists cross paths and leave their marks side by side.