Our first concert of 2022 features legendary Scottish composer and sound designer Drew McDowall; Nairobi-born, Berlin-based sound artist Joseph Kamaru, AKA KMRU; and the first ever duo performance by Canadian artists Doreen Girard and Craig Boychuk. The concert takes place on Tuesday, April 5th at Crescent Fort Rouge United Church (525 Wardlaw Ave). Tickets are available online and at the door by donation. ** Please note that Fennesz will no longer be performing at this concert. **

Drew McDowall‘s works are sacraments to alterity. An artist who has refused to conform in music and in life, McDowall mines the hallucinatory spaces that exist between reality and celestial otherness. His meditative compositions are haunting and spiritual, melding intricate modular soundscapes with cut-up samples, and deconstructing sounds into their most basic shuddering structures and shapes. The disorienting ambient mirages that result elicit terror, tender melancholy, and heavenly flickers of expansive beauty.

His backstory reads like a primer of psychedelic fiction woven into statements of the unbelievable, superhuman, and outright insane. Growing up in the gangs of 1970’s Scotland, McDowall—fatigued by years of daily violence and the chaotic madness of that life—sought aggressive self-expression in punk and found a home in Glasgow’s rich underground music community. 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 cult outfit Coil, where his influence shaped the group’s later output: exercises in magical practice and music-as-psychoactive effect.

Currently studying sonic arts in Berlin, Joseph Kamaru aka KMRU is a Nairobi-born, Berlin-based sound artist whose work is grounded on the discourse of field recording, noise, and improvisation. His work posits expanded listening cultures of sonic thoughts and sound practices, a proposition to consider and reflect on auditory cultures beyond the norms, an awareness of surroundings through creative compositions and installations. His last three albums, 2020’s “Peel”, “Opaquer” and “Jar” received high praise from Resident Advisor, DJ Mag, NPR, and Bandcamp, KMRU is part of SHAPE platform roaster of artists for 2021. His works have been presented in NyegeNyege Festival (UG), CTM Festival (DE), GAMMA (RU), and Mutek Montreal and Barcelona among others.

Doreen Girard is an interdisciplinary artist working with sound, installation, and expanded cinema. Craig Boychuk is an audio engineer and multi-instrumentalist. Together, they create textural lullabies on amplified autoharp and electric guitar.