Intertwining two of the most highly regarded creative voices in the contemporary landscape of experimental sound, Ideologic Organ delivers what might just be their most exciting and hotly anticipated record of the year: 'Magnetism', the debut duo outing from Kali Malone and Drew McDowall. An immersive, electroacoustic masterstroke, heavily rooted in Karplus-Strong synthesis, that harnesses Malone's mastery of tonal relationships and McDowall's singular approach to texture and emotive depth, each moment of the album's movements amount to some of the most compelling sonic statements of either artist's highly esteemed career, as well as one of our favorite records of 2025.

Active for roughly a decade and a half, Ideologic Organ - the renowned imprint run by Stephen O'Malley - has steadily moved from its beginnings as a loose constellation of ambitious works, toward its current, diamond sharp curatorial focus that has positioned it as one of the most important and exciting vehicles in contemporary experimental music. Offering a platform for the work of a diverse range of historical artists like Ákos Rózmann and Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar, as well as some of the most singularly striking voices working today, including The Necks, Lukas De Clerck, Oren Ambarchi, Jessika Kenney & Eyvind Kang, Nina Garcia, Nate Wooley, Lucy Railton, Tarek Atoui, and numerous others, few labels deserve and demand the attentiveness that its catalog does. Having already witnessed a fantastic run of releases across the length of 2025, Ideologic Organ now returns with arguably their most hotly anticipated release of the year: ‘Magnetism’, the debut recorded outing of the duo of Kali Malone and Drew McDowall. Building upon years of friendship and collaboration between the pair - intertwining each artist’s honed and highly-individualized creative vision that have respectively placed them as two of the most celebrated solo artists working in the field today - the five pieces that comprise the album’s two sides are absolutely engrossing creative triumphs - masterstrokes of tonality, texture, and structural approach. A brooding, tense body of electroacoustic wizardry - bridging elegant minimalism and seeds similar to those planted by McDowall in latter day Coil - ‘Magnetism’ totally knocks it out of the park.

While belonging to very different generations, the rising stars of Kali Malone and Drew McDowall have been roughly aligned, each emerging into the consciousness as highly regarded solo artists over roughly the last ten years. McDowall, of course, first emerged within the UK punk and post-punk scene during the late 1970s as a member of The Poems, before joining Psychic TV in the 1980s, and eventually Coil during the mid-90s, his contribution to the latter of which, featuring across iconic records like 'A Thousand Lights In A Darkened Room', 'Time Machines', 'Musick To Play In The Dark', 'The Ape Of Naples', and 'The New Backwards’, among others, elevated the band into new radical and critically celebrated realms, and brought him something of an iconic, albeit hushed status within the landscape of underground music. Following the dissolution of Coil in 2004, McDowall continued to collaborate widely - eventually relocating to New York - and perform solo, but it wasn’t until 2015, with the release of ‘Collapse’, that his reputation as a solo artist, synthesist, and composer, was truly offered the regard that it deserved. Over the years since, the seeds of this reputation have continued to grow and bear fruit, currently finding him as one of the most beloved veteran experimentalists working today.

Since appearing on the Stockholm scene during the mid 2010s, the American composer, organist, and synthesist, Kali Malone, has emerged as something of a wunderkind of experimental music, rapidly reaching heights of acclaim that few others have. Raised in Colorado, Malone moved to Stockholm at 18 to study electro-acoustic composition, expanding her practice by learning to be an organ tuner, the instrument that has arguably best defined her presence on the experimental music scene. Her work - encountered live and via a steadily increasing suite of carefully crafted full lengths and EPs - deploys specific tuning systems in minimalist structure for pipe organ, choir, chamber music ensembles, and electroacoustic formats, imbuing it with rich harmonic textures, created through synthetic and acoustic instrumentation placed in repetitive motions and extended durations, imbued with a startling sense of emotive and dynamic depth.

Unsurprisingly, given their strong ties to electronic synthesis, within roughly sympathetic realms of experimental practice - each operating within highly nuanced and personal expressions of Minimalism - Malone and McDowall orbited each other for over a decade, forming a friendship that would eventually draw them into the latter’s Brooklyn studio in 2020, eventually yielding the five stunning movements that comprise ‘Magnetism’. As with all great forms of collaboration, the resulting body of work is not simply a conjoining of the distinct elements that have defined both Malone and McDowall’s respective practices and bodies of work, but rather a meeting and intertwining somewhere in the nether regions between the two, with each responding and reacting to each intervention by the next.

Primarily rooted in Karplus-Strong synthesis - a method of electronic synthesis within which waveforms are generated utilizing a mathematical model, and then looped through a filtered delay to simulate a plucked or percussive sound - combined with just intonation tuning systems that allow the movements of ‘Magnetism’ to work within frequencies conventional instruments cannot reach, the totality of the album occupies a fascinating zone between the long-form, searching tonal expressions for which Malone has become famed, and the controlled chaos, sonic alchemy, and textural range that we have come to associate with McDowall’s work: “digital distortion that pulses like organic matter, synthesis algorithms that decay at the speed of memory”. As each of the album’s pieces unfurls, the repetition of percussive tones - drawn and extended into long, long forms and arrangements - and bristling textures evoke sprawling meditative states, punctuated by tense conjunctions and delicately knotted clusters that imply saturation as a means toward transcendence. Both ritualistic and glacial, and while understated in its richness of detail, ‘Magnetism’ stands as a world of its own, feeling connected to long histories of both electroacoustic and underground music, while forging ahead to futures unknown.

Absolutely engrossing from its first sounding to its last, across the length of ‘Magnetism’ both Malone and McDowall offer conclusive proofs for the power and urgency of creative collaboration, producing a body of work entirely of each artist’s singular vision, while being hard to conceive without their voices having been combined.