New York-based Scottish artist Drew McDowall presents a live version of his new album A Thread, Silvered and Trembling, in which a dark timbre and twilight atmosphere prevail.

The musician’s abiding interest in a Gaelic-derived elegiac style is the inspiration for much of his earlier work. This form, traditionally used for tributes to the dead, blends modal drones with tremulous dissonances from which emerges a mournful melody that evokes an archaic and solemn mood. A Thread, Silvered and Trembling, incorporates and transforms these elements through exploratory electronic processing, weaving an electroacoustic tapestry with string sounds, tremolos, silences and voices, alternately disembodied and moving. Archaic sonorities and modal tones from recordings of an instrumental ensemble (violin, viola, cello, harp and horn) blend with soft and subdued interventions of electronics, a kind of almost imperceptible transformation of timbre leading from acoustic to electronic. The result is an evocative ambient layering, at times somber and evocative of ancient Norse sagas, at other times opening up barely hinted at glimpses of light. For the musician, this work represents in the arc of his production, a transition, a kind of “spell to take a break and usher in a new beginning.”

The first act involves a brighter and more ethereal sound register and offers the opportunity to discover Wata Igarashi, a Japanese musician who is highly regarded at major international festivals for his DJ sets but rarely present on the Italian scene. In San Fedele he exhibits the fruits of his delicate and seductive production in the field of experimental ambient. Extreme finesse in the use of synthetic sounds, with timbres and brushstrokes that echo the lightness of Japanese prints but also with ironic contributions from jazz and soul.