Bleep

Coil legend Drew McDowall returns to Dais Records for a new collection of music inspired in part by the pibroch play style of bagpipe music. This being a Drew McDowall record, A Thread, Silver and Trembling does indeed take the wheezing thrum of the humble bagpipe into darker, more exploratory planes (even for pibroch, a musical style usually reserved for funerals) but the sentiment and respect for its traditions stem from his longtime fascination with the Gaelic instrument. Glided along by full orchestral swells of strings and haunting electronic drones and scraps of metal, McDowall’s playing here evokes both the grimly biblical and the strangely beautiful in equal measure. The processed vocals that shade into frame on the closing ‘A Dream of a Cartographic Membrane Dissolves’ act something like a Greek Chorus of sorts for the intense movements that precede.