PAPERCLIP MINIMISER - II

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

At the helm of the Cong Burn label and based in some unspecified corner of the North of England, Howes has a day job 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 homemade software, built by him in Max/MSP, which pairs vintage gear with the principle on which the whole work rests: a system that keeps watch over what it produces and reacts to its own activity, the root of that ghost dwelling in the machine. The original sessions date back over fifteen years, recovered from old tapes recorded across the counties of the North; closing the circle is the mastering by Miles Whittaker, once half of Demdike Stare.

Howes builds his sound on a vintage hardware setup, spanning Nord Modular G2, Elektron Machinedrum and Monomachine, where each component is programmed to react to the others, planting a kind of ghost in the machine: the internal dialogue slips beyond the author's direct control. Everything is recorded live, with no overdubs or fixes: what comes out is final. The mother lode is dub techno, but filtered through an algorithmic matrix 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 across the North of 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