Drew McDowall – Live AV Set w/ Pedro Maia. Closing Night / Bucharest Photofest

Alternative Culture proudly present: Drew McDowall (USA) – Live AV Performance. Guest Pedro Maia (PT) / October 19, 9 PM — Closing Night / Bucharest Photofest, 10th Edition

A legendary figure in experimental and industrial music, Drew McDowall (ex-Coil) takes the stage with a rare and immersive live performance — a sonic ritual rooted in decades of avant-garde exploration. Drawing from the deep well of mystical drone, modular synthesis, and haunting electroacoustic textures, McDowall crafts a sound world where the sacred collides with the profane.

His most recent work, A Thread, Silvered and Trembling, co-produced with Randall Dunn, fuses pibroch-inspired atmospheres with spectral voices and dissonant echoes. It is a music of immanence, tension, and transcendence — charged with raw spiritual force. His backstory reads like a primer of psychedelic fiction woven into statements of the unbelievable, superhuman, and outright insane. 

After a stint with The Poems, a band he started with his then-wife Rose McDowall, he joined the ranks of UK avant-gardists Genesis P-Orridge, David Tibet, Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, John Balance, and countless others who would come to define the industrial music's blossoming experimental vanguard. McDowall eventually collaborated with Psychic TV and became a full-time member of the hugely influential cult outfit Coil, where his influence shaped the group's later output: exercises in magical practice and music-as-psychoactive effect.