Drew McDowall

Drew McDowall is a musician based in Brooklyn, NY. A founding member of Coil, he develops solo work centered on modal drones, cut-up techniques, and pibroch, the Scottish bagpipe lament tradition.

McDowall's music is less composed than summoned — a slow invocation across four decades. A Coil member in the 1990s, he shaped the group's electronics into ritual instruments, then moved to Brooklyn to develop a fiercely independent solo practice. His lifelong interest in pibroch, the elegiac solo bagpipe style used for laments and tributes to the dead, fuses modal drones with flickering dissonance and plaintive melody. McDowall treats the cut-up method — fracturing sounds so something new leaks through — as one of his favorite compositional approaches. His influence shaped Coil's later output: exercises in magical practice and music-as-psychoactive effect. Recent work weaves strings, harp, and electronics into transformations of mourning music. Sound for him remains devoted to one function: transfiguration.