Rock Monsters Romania

On October 19, the tenth edition of Bucharest Photofest comes to a close with a performance that promises to be nothing short of transcendental. Drew McDowall, a legendary figure in experimental and industrial music, joins forces with Pedro Maia, the acclaimed Portuguese visual artist, for an immersive live A/V experience at Control Club. Together, they will transform sound and light into ritual, in a finale that mirrors the festival’s theme of LEGACY: a meditation on transformation, memory, and the spaces between worlds.

McDowall’s work has long existed in those in-between spaces, between the sacred and the profane, the earthly and the cosmic, the seen and the unseen. His compositions are sacraments to alterity, delving into the hallucinatory realms that hover just beyond reality. Built from intricate modular synthesis, deconstructed samples, and meditative drones, his music is both haunting and redemptive: a form of sonic alchemy that conjures terror, melancholy, and transcendent beauty in equal measure. The Quietus described his latest work as “absolutely majestic… potent and powerful,” noting how his command of form and timbre makes his compositions “a weave of timbres strikingly beautiful, structurally masterful.”

McDowall’s story is the stuff of underground legend. Growing up amid the rough edges of 1970s Scotland, he found refuge from daily violence in the punk and post-industrial underground, soon aligning with visionary figures such as Genesis P-Orridge, David Tibet, and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson. As a member of the seminal group Coil, he helped shape a generation’s understanding of sound as a form of ritual and psychological transformation. His later collaborations, with Psychic TV, Kali Malone, Caterina Barbieri, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Hiro Kone, and Varg, among others, attest to his restless creative spirit and deep empathy for sonic experimentation.

Since his first solo release Collapse (Dais Records, 2015), McDowall has continued to expand his sound vocabulary through albums such as Unnatural Channel (2017), The Third Helix (2018), and Agalma (2020), a record The Quietus called “deliriously fruitful,” dissolving boundaries between human voice, synthetic texture, and spiritual invocation. His 2024 album, A Thread, Silvered and Trembling, revisits the ancient Gaelic form of pibroch, the lamenting solo style of Highland bagpipes, transforming it through electronic processing into an “electro-acoustic tapestry of strings, shudders, voids, and voices.” As The Wire wrote, “its prevailing form is long, semi-improvised drones… bringing one’s attention to the continuity of time, existence and life after death.” Electronic Sound praised it as “wonderfully stirring,” while Gonzo (Circus) captured its paradox perfectly: “We see heaven and hell, we hear angels singing and damned souls wailing.”

For this special closing-night performance at Bucharest Photofest, McDowall’s sound will be paired with the visceral visual world of Pedro Maia, whose analog film projections unfold live, transforming sound into a luminous, physical experience. Together, they will construct an immersive environment where time, image, and resonance collapse into one another, a space to feel rather than to observe, to surrender rather than to interpret.

The result promises to be a full-body encounter: an audiovisual ceremony where the boundaries between performer and audience, sound and image, begin to blur. “Funeral music, so to speak, but full of life,” wrote HHV Magazine, a fitting description for the work of an artist whose creations continually touch the threshold between darkness and illumination.

Tickets are now available here!