Kali Malone & Drew McDowall announce new album

The pair share lead track, ‘The Sound in My Mind’.

Kali Malone and Drew McDowall have announced details of their collaborative album, Magnetism, which is set for release on November 7 via Ideologic Organ. Earlier this morning, Malone and McDowall shared the lead track, The Sound in My Mind, which you can listen to below.

Recorded in just a matter of days, the project grew out of a decade-long friendship, and brings together McDowall’s roots in the industrial vanguard of Coil and Psychic TV with Malone’s foundation in contemporary organ composition, just intonation, and electroacoustic music, uniting two generations in a deeply complementary partnership.

“We put trust in each other, in our own domains and our unique strengths,” they say about the recording process, which began McDowall’s Brooklyn studio, where the foundation of the music emerged almost instantly. The pair decided they would impose certain limitations on their improvisations; they programmed bespoke tunings on a monophonic modular synth patch and recorded performance takes without overdubs. “Playing this music felt like singing, as I freely followed my internal voice,” says Malone. “I had been holding a lot of those melodies inside of me for so long.”

McDowall’s synthesis approach employs Karplus–Strong synthesis, delay, and distortion, which he shapes with an intuitive touch, gracefully morphing Malone’s motifs. “The music is surprisingly accessible even though some of the timbres are extreme,” says McDowall. “It’s not foreboding or even opaque. We might even be dabbling with pop sentiments.”