21 years after its initial release, Coil’s Musick To Play In The Dark is being remastered and reissued by US label Dais. The release coincides with ex-member Drew McDowall’s fourth solo album Agalma – which he describes as an extension of the ritualistic practices that were “woven into Coil’s DNA”. Like the industrial group’s later work Agalma drips with spectral textures, angelic backing vocals and glitchy cinematic sweeps formed from warped field recordings and modular processing. Here, he reflects on finding inspiration in solitude, the insidiousness of the patriarchy and the power of synchronicity in music and in life.

Chloé Lula: Musick To Play In The Dark has been hailed as the point at which Coil pivoted from “sun music” to “moon music”. According to Jhonn Balance, it was motivated by a desire to “let in things you had shut out before: the feminine. The tidal. The cyclical”.

Drew McDowall: Musick To Play In The Dark kind of put the stamp on a process that was happening for a couple of years with Coil. Balance and Sleazy’s music was considered kind of solar as it related to an album like Scatology with a queer, male energy. During the period that I was involved as an official member, from about ‘94 or ‘95, we began investigating lunar energies, like with Moon’s Milk or Under An Unquiet Skull, one of the Solstice/Equinox 7"s, I think the driver behind this shift was our distaste and distrust of the patriarchy, both from a cultural point of view and from an occult point of view. Musick was a conscious effort to tap into lunar, traditionally feminine energies. And in an occult sense, to move away from the ostensibly solar, patriarchal, hierarchical Crowleyian aspect of the occult into the more fluid, chaotic, unconscious practices of Austin Osman Spare.

Not a lot of people know this, but Balance and Sleazy would always say grace before a meal, and they would always give thanks to the Goddess. They did that almost as long as I knew them. I kind of liked that. So it was about those energies that only really come out in the dark, that are less blatant and present and in your face. It was a process, it wasn’t a sharp delineation. But Musick was when that crystallised, and in that sense it was an album that was completely moon music.

What were your specific contributions to the album?

It was really fragmented. I’d moved to New York after living in London for 15 years, and was dealing with a lot of chemical issues, drug issues, whatever. I went back to work on Musick, but my imbalance had gotten so extreme that I could only be awake during the nighttime hours and was asleep during the daytime. Their studio was in Weston-super-Mare, this decrepit seaside town. They’d gotten sick of London, and they wanted to get Balance away from all of the temptations that he was prey to. It was kind of an attempt to save his life, really. They had this huge Victorian mansion on a hillside overlooking this wonderful bay, the River Severn.

Balance, Sleazy, and Thighpaulsandra worked in the studio on the bones and the structure and the stratum of these tracks during the day, and I would stagger out of whatever comatose stupor I was in in the evening and just take what they’d done and process it and rework it. It was a way I wasn't used to working with Coil, but I think it added something – some kind of psychosis or strange pathology to the recordings. Back then – this was ‘99 – granular synthesis wasn’t really readily available. We’d gotten a hold of some prototype stuff that was really not very easy to use. They didn’t have the nice interface that you have now. But that was part of the fun. I was also taking things and running the material through different filters and synths that we had in the studio. I would leave the files on one of the computer desktops and go to bed. We’d cross each other’s paths in the morning, have breakfast and chat for a bit, and then I’d go to sleep while they worked for the rest of the day.

I’ve read that what you generated through granular synthesis was intended to sound like a fire. What was the idea behind that?

It was almost a kind of ritual aspect, like being around a ritual fire, or a primitive fire, and tapping into what we were and where we came from. If memory serves me right, those were some of the conversations that we had, fire being this idea of being in a glade or an opening in the forest around a fire, and having that sound, the smell and the sight of it. We could only really capture the sound of it, but hopefully we managed to create the effect of the whole experience.

You’ve mentioned to me that you like to go to upstate New York when you want to work on your solo material now. How do isolated settings, like the Catskills or Weston-super-Mare, impact your ability to tap into highly creative states?

We [Coil] loved to get out of the city and go to places like Avebury. We would take day trips or trips for a couple of days and visit stone circles. Back then, in the mid- to late-90s, they weren’t quite the Instagrammable tourist hellholes that they are now. So you could really get to these places that you weren’t allowed to be in, and you’d either cut through a fence or just walk into these places that weren’t even fenced off, for the most part. Getting out like that was a lot of our inspiration prior to doing any recording. Especially when we all lived in London, it was so vital to get out and get into the forests and connect with Pan. That was part of Coil’s methodology, and I kind of carried it over into the way that I work now. If I’m not recording upstate, I’m doing a lot of the pre-recording meditation there and getting myself ready, either psychedelically or mentally or physically or whatever. Or even doing some of the recording if not the whole album. The album that Nicky [Hiro Kone] and I did [The Ghost of George Bataille] was recorded entirely upstate in the Catskills.

You helped remaster both volumes of Musick. Is there anything notably different about these reissues?

We remade Musick into a double album and added a really beautiful etching on one side. All of the Dais reissues sound even better than the originals, thanks to Josh Bonati who remastered them. Corners were cut a little bit in some of the original packaging, and the print quality wasn't as good back then. So not only does Musick sound better, but it looks absolutely gorgeous because we got all of the original files for the artwork and gave them the kind of high-resolution, beautifully packaged reissue that it deserves.

What was it like to revisit the material? Are the guiding principles behind it still relevant 20 years later?

I think they might be even more relevant today, if anything. There’s this massive pushback into this really regressive patriarchal state worldwide. Obviously we see it here in the USA, but in Poland, Hungary – all of those places. It feels like patriarchy’s last death spasm. Unfortunately, as we all know with male rage and white rage, the death spasm can take everything down with it. And while it’s unquestionably a good thing that it feels like its death spasm, we should be aware that it will try to destroy the planet in its desire to not give up power. I think that’s in the nature of patriarchy. It would rather burn the planet to cinders than cede its position. Patriarchy and white supremacy both being intermeshed in the same thing. Things felt apocalyptic back then too, do you know what I mean? But now there is no hiding from as it really feels like everything’s spiraling and whiplashing into oblivion.

I really hadn’t listened to Musick very much, because the process of making it was often very traumatic. And dramatic. I didn’t hear it until about two years after it was released. So when we were listening to what we had during the process of having it remastered, it was kind of mind-blowing. There are moments of darkness, but there are moments of really delicate sweetness, like “Broccoli”, where Sleazy is singing in his soft and sort of adorable voice about vegetables.

I hear similarities between songs like “Are You Shivering?” on Musick and “Agalma II” on your new album. There’s so much going on in their sense of depth, space, and evolution, and their allusions to familiar instruments combined with granular glitch.

That wasn’t deliberate, but it’s kind of inevitable. I added to Coil’s DNA, but Coil added to my DNA as well. There’s something we tapped into that I want to keep exploring. That never changes – this feeling that the work is never done, the mission is never complete. You can always go deeper or explore more, or take it in different directions.

In past interviews, you’ve talked about how your music as part of Coil and as a solo artist has aimed to trace various dissociative states.

I disassociate very easily. And rather than fighting it, I try to use it as a wellspring – as fertile ground for the work that I do. That’s always been a process, and always been part of the work or part of the inspiration for the work. I took my inspiration from those states that we all experience, that we can’t really put a name to. There are moments that fall short of language, and when we try and pin these moments down, it feels like we’re trying to hold water in our hands and it’s slipping out, and we feel adrift. So the idea with Agalma was to try and capture those moments. I guess the closest that I could come to putting a word on it was trying to capture the feeling of the sublime. Not just beauty, but joy, terror, dread. It was partly that. And the working title of the album was Ritual Music. That’s another thing that’s kind of been woven into my DNA from being with Coil. All of the music that we did was ritual music, and everything I’ve done since then has been a form of ritual music.

Agalma feels improvisational in its sense of chaos, but controlled enough to indicate planning, arrangement, and methodology. How did you put it together?

I’m not a very rigorous conceptualist. For me, it’s really trial and error and serendipity. Some of the inspirations or methodology might be that I’ll take the particular architecture of a dream and translate that sonically. Or it might just be a process of iteration, which is really my main workflow: manipulating what I’m doing to the point that something else is revealed in it, something that was trying to get out – that I was consciously cajoling or persuading to speak to me – or else something that just pops up unexpectedly, and I’m like, “This is where this piece is trying to take me”. I might take something through the modular and put it through different processes on the computer, then send it back into the modular. A lot of what I find really rewarding is field recordings. There are a lot of field recordings in my work that don’t even sound like field recordings. I kind of like that, where it’s not immediately apparent what something is.

What were some of the field recordings you used on this album?

I was in Naples a couple of years ago staying in this incredible apartment building that was carved into the side of a hill. I spent hours just recording in the marbled hallways. I got a ton of really good field recordings that I then shaped using the modular. You can’t really listen to it and say, “Oh, that sounds like a voice”. It just sounds like traces and resonances of something. But it’s really hard to pinpoint what it is you’re listening to.

Eight out of nine tracks on Agalma feature contributions from other artists. How did you choose who to work with?

This album started to take shape in my head last year, before I started recording. I really wanted to work with people that inspired me. I wanted to work with people I had that sense of trust with. I didn’t give anyone any guidelines, but everything just gelled in a way that felt really magical and weird.

We’ve talked quite a bit about subverting the patriarchy and being an outsider. Are your collaborations motivated by a desire to mine that feeling of operating from the margins?

That’s interesting. All the collaborators on the record are friends. That was one of the important things. My personal connections with people are always predicated on the idea of this affinity of outsiderness. Alterity. When I meet someone I like, I get the sense that they’re also kind of an outsider. Even if it’s not, like, explicit, there’s always a strand. For this record, it just felt that those were the voices who I really felt a presence with.

One of the feelings that I was also trying to explore and skirt around the edges of, or have in some way in my brain, was the sense of the sacred, and to really reconnect with that idea. And not in any religious terms. That’s something that was very, very much part of Coil. Even though their focus changed for me, I still see it as going back to the albums that preceded my involvement. Coil always had a strong sense of the sacred, and it wasn’t in any Sky God sense. It was in the sense of a sacred materiality. Like “sacred” in the Bataille sense of the word. That’s always been part of my work, but with this I wanted to make it more up-front.

It’s powerful when the act of following a kind of altered, oneiric logic leads to moments of synchronicity.

Those moments have to be valued and not just dismissed as coincidence or something mundane. There are moments of just huge resonance that we’re often not aware of at the time – like the moment feels loaded in a way that we can’t immediately put our finger on. But sometimes months or even years later, we see them as points where our life changed and we started on a different path. We do ourselves a huge disservice to just write them off to chance or happenstance or accidents. What they are I don’t know, but I think they’re much more meaningful than just randomness.

Agalma is available via Dais now. Musick To Play In The Dark is released on 27 November

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