A Closer Listen
Drone music seems to lend itself to the feeling of displaced time. You can, for example, put on a CD, and drift away from the conscious realm so completely that the 70+ minute running time passes in what feels like a couple of minutes. Alternatively, you might be so lost in a piece that when it ends, you might be surprised to find that, looking outside, life is still going on. If you were to escape the confines of physical media and play a drone piece that lasts several hours (whether one long composition or its constituent chapters), then you might go too deep. I’ve started listening to works in the daylight and emerged, discombobulated, when the sun has fully set – a more likely occurrence during the winter months – so the arrival of Magnetism, a fully absorbing album of drones that runs a concise 40 minutes, is a pleasant surprise.
This is the first album-length collaboration between Kali Malone and Drew McDowall, although they have previously worked together when Malone guested on McDowall’s Agalma in 2020. A couple of years later, they met up to record this album in a day at his studio. Whether the original plan was to make a record or to see what happened, the muse was clearly visiting that day. Although the recording was swift, it has taken quite a while for Magnetism to see daylight – it was originally mixed in 2023, with additional mixing from Malone in 2024 before being mastered for release in 2025. Again, it’s displaced time – it probably didn’t feel like three years passed between recording and release, and yet here we are.
Due to the spontaneity and location of the recording, and with no pipe organ in the vicinity, the duo worked with whatever tools were available in the studio, crafting pieces that ebb and flow. “The Secret Of Magnetism” in particular, enters softly but builds to a bristly, reverberating crescendo in the middle before settling down to a coda dominated by a plucked metallic string. That sound – drawn from a gothic harpsichord, perhaps – appears again on the following track “Withdrawn Into The Source”. Magnetism has its fair share of doomy and foreboding moments, yet it doesn’t feel like a heavy album. The darker moments are soon balanced out by brighter-sounding passages – although this is all relative given the pedigree of those involved.
The album closes with “A Sound That Is Alive”, a piece that begins with busy reverberating tones that slowly drift away over its duration. By the end, it’s actually soothing, as the disrupting elements gradually fade. Malone’s previous works have tended toward the epic (the three-hour Does Spring Hide Its Joy, for example), and McDowall is probably best known for his work during Coil’s Time Machines period, where they really expanded into psychedelic drone, so we may have been slightly disappointed upon discovering Magnetism sits comfortably on two sides of vinyl. No matter, because – as noted above – once you fall into a drone piece, time is immaterial. It’s a worthy addition to the catalogue of two artists who continue to challenge and explore. This album could flit past in the blink of an eye compared to other drone works; or it could fill an infinite void. (Jeremy Bye)
Sun Nov 09 00:01:00 GMT 2025