User:Pmcdowell5670/sandbox

HypnoGogue is an electronic music project created by Pierce McDowell in 2017. The music is computer based acousmatic music with a wide range of influences, starting from a DIY strategy picked up from punk, a nod to "krautrock" and veering to the sound collage experiments of electroacoustic music. The first full length album is Anahata Naad, released in April 2018. McDowell is currently based in New Mexico after residing in San Francisco for many years. McDowell is a composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist who started playing music at the age of 5 and has been musically active professionally since the 1970's. He spent his high school years as a military dependent in Germany where listening to Radio Luxembourg and seeing the experimental and "kosmische" sounds of contemporary German bands were early influences. In 1977 he was a founding member of the seminal Texas punk band Teenage Popeye, whose sole recording, the 4 song EP "Modern Problems" has become a collector's item for punk archivists. At that time he also studied electronic music at the University of Texas. Jon Appleton and Morton Subotnik did residencies at the university at that time and Subotnik's music on his Buchla Music System was a major influence, along with the music of Stockhausen, Xenakis, Ligeti and Lutoslawski. In 1980 he relocated to San Francisco where he played in numerous rock bands over the years including a brief stint with Sonny Simmons. There he studied Hindustani music with Ali Akbar Khan for 5 years. He was an original member of the world prog fusion band Azigza who achieved some notoriety and critical acclaim in progressive music circles and with a series of performances on the progressive music festival circuit in the late 1990's to 2007. Around that time McDowell met and became friends with Daevid Allen and eventually other members of the band Gong. Allen appears on Azigza's first eponymous CD release. Gilli Smyth and he formed Gong Matrices who toured in the USA and Europe and released the album "Parade" in 2004. He relocated to New Mexico in 2012 where he remains active with HypnoGogue and as a session musician having performed on a number of albums, including a several by the space rock recording project Spirit's Burning.