Drew McDowall & Florence To^UK

In experimental textures and sustained drones, Drew McDowall embarks on meditative travels, taking listeners into states of deep listening in his existential compositions, now joined by Florence To's emotionally intoxicating visual art.

Coming of age in 1970s Scotland, McDowall threw himself into punk's aggressive self-expression, formed his own band The Poems with Rose McDowall, soon after joined Genesis P-Orridge’s Psychic TV and kickstarted the transformation of Coil from avant pop into complex, methodic electronics. In New York City, he collaborated with Psychic Ills' Tres Warren on meditative electronic project Compound Eye. Solo, McDowall released an album of modular synthesizer compositions, Collapse, in 2015 and prolifically performs improvised modular explorations in New York’s electronic music scene.

Focused on site-specific architectural spatial design, Florence To explores the cognitive and emotional effects of sound and light. She merged her academic specialization in textiles and tailoring with digital technologies to develop installations in underground and disused spaces. She expanded her spatial sensory experiments into visualizations of vibration, informed by psychoacoustics, neuroscience research and computational methods. She's developed her own acoustic instruments and multi-channel systems for live performance and installation and is currently working with the Photonics group at the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory in Portugal, exploring the science behind light detection, generation and manipulation.

Originally inspired by long form ceremonial music of Tibet and meant to shift both listeners and musicians into a trance-like state, Time Machines grew from McDowall's solo explorations into a 1997 “electronic punk-primitive” project with Coil's John Balance and Peter Christopherson. A hallucinogenic journey through time and space in four pieces, four tones and unified visuals, Time Machines lets artists and audience converge to dissolve time together.