PAPERCLIP MINIMISER - II

Minimalist and crackling, the new album by Paperclip Minimiser, aka John Howes, is an oblique movement between ferrous tones and complex rhythms. "II" is a second chapter that adds organic texture to a fractal approach to dub: glitch fragments, ambient haze and Uk bass manipulations, with a hypnagogic stereo image that owes as much to Burial as to Andy Stott. An album conceived as a direct antithesis to contemporary electronic production, released on Peak Oil, home to Purelink and Topdown Dialectic.

Head of the Cong Burn label and based in some unspecified corner of Northern England, Howes has a parallel trade that explains a lot about the record: he develops audio plug-ins for a living, and that programmer's expertise pours entirely into his tracks. At the heart of it all is a homemade piece of software, built by him in Max/MSP, which pairs vintage gear with the principle on which the entire record rests: a system that keeps watch over what it produces and reacts to its own activity, the root of that ghost that haunts the machine. The original sessions date back over fifteen years ago, recovered from old tapes recorded across the counties of the North; closing the circle is the mastering by Miles Whittaker, already half of Demdike Stare.

Howes builds his sound on a vintage hardware setup, between Nord Modular G2, Elektron Machinedrum and Monomachine, where every component is programmed to react to the others, planting a kind of ghost in the machine: the internal dialogue escapes the author's direct control. Everything is recorded live, with no overdubs or corrections: what comes out is final. The main road is dub techno, but in an algorithmic form that looks less to Basic Channel and more to the generative minimalism of Kit Clayton and the ~scape label. The material dates back to 2011, born from scattered sessions in Northern England and left unreleased until now. A notch below the debut, "II" still delivers seven doses of urban hypnosis that are hard to shake off.

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07/05/2026