Drew McDowall: Time Machines

Time Machine is a central work for the Scottish electronic musician and performance artist Drew McDowell, born in 1961. In the mid-1990s he conceived the suite in four movements, naming each of them for a chemical compound contained in psychedelic and hallucinogenic drugs.

»Four notes which make it easier to travel in time« – thus the subtitle referring to the four electronically generated tones of each movement, around which one sonic layer after another is wound and which determine the density of the resulting drones. The goal is to develop ritual and archaic electronic music, putting the listener into a trance-like state – similar to religious rites.

The evening’s second formation also hails from Great Britain: O Yuki Conjugate, founded in Nottingham in 1982 by Roger Horberry and Andrew Hulme, among others. Here again, individual, electronically generated tones are the point of departure for musical processes leading to drones which are equally compact and pulsating. The boundaries between sound and noise are fluent. Still, if one feels the need to define these sonic entities, one could do worse than use the label “dirty ambient”, which the band itself is said to have employed.