Let's Start Over: Howes interviewed
His EP of summer 2013 got Manchester chattering, but young talent Howes has spent the last two years heading in a new direction. He tells The Skinny about his debut full-length LP, making connections through music and the wily ways of the modular synth
At a time when any artist with some form of career aspiration now needs to be the complete package from the get-go, John Howes has quite possibly fucked it already at the age of 22. It's something he doesn't have a problem with at all, however.
Releasing his debut EP – a set of lean, loosely house-associated constructions that nevertheless contained no small amount of dancefloor bounce – in the summer of 2013 through Melodic Records, the Manchester-based producer was in the flush of his first dalliances with clubbing. “I was going to the Warehouse Project and getting my head ripped off by amazing tunes every weekend,” he recalls, as we drink upstairs in a beer house just around the corner from the night club's Store Street home. It was there, watching the likes of Joy Orbison graduate from underground residencies in basement venues to holding court in front of thousands under the Piccadilly arches, that Howes felt inspired to move in that direction himself.
“With my first EP, though, I got a taste of what it would be like trying to write tunes for specific labels and attempting to be 'cool' or whatever, and realised I didn't want to do that at all,” he reflects now. Tiring quickly of the compromises he felt he was making in his music just to attract larger label attention, Howes was also struck by how quickly the response to his debut release dissipated – the initial bluster disappearing after a handful of retweets – while those who were more attentive subsequently threw a weight of expectation on him he didn't feel he could bear. “What I'm doing now feels so much better than the first EP, where people were just like 'Congratulations! You've made a house track!' The pay-off is so much more rewarding.”
"I'd just have the synth playing, go wash the dishes, come back and see how it was getting on" – Howes
So what exactly is he doing now? Following more than two years of silence, Howes has his full-length debut out this month, again sticking with local label Melodic. It's the result of a period that's seen him reposition himself in counterpoint to the click-for-instant-gratification nature of both creating and consuming music. 3.5 Degrees was constructed around a modular synth, with Howes ditching much of the software used on his debut EP and immersing himself in a longform process of creation, which is reflected in a record that steadfastly refuses to open up from a base of tentacle-like modulations.
Opening track Concagnis crawls across a deep seabed, the quietness of the undiscovered surrounding it; and much of the record has a stillness to it even as the producer shifts and moves patterns around at pace – an indication, perhaps, of its making, with half the work being done as Howes graduated from university and sought respite from hours of job agency applications, and the other half as a means of escape from the stresses of the employment he ultimately found himself in. “It's just about getting burnt out at work by Friday and thinking, 'I've got three days to get away from this.' I'd just have the synth playing the entire weekend, tweak it slightly, go wash the dishes or something, come back and see how it was getting on, then record the last five minutes of what I'd built up on a Sunday.”
Elsewhere, Green Lense is a warped take on the motorik and rhythm of psychedelic guitar music, based around a couple of motifs that repeat on themselves while textures coagulate and blur around them. Howes admits that he still, in part, lives for the weekend – calling Manchester's nightlife “better than ever” – but in the case of Green Lense it was events like Liverpool Psych Fest and, in particular, a robust set by Salford-based collective Gnod in 2014 that inspired him. “I just remembered having to sit on the floor outside the venue after their set, thinking, 'Fuck! Psychedelic music!'”
On a record that is deeply personal – if not thematically then in terms of how close Howes felt to it during its creation – it's no surprise that the personability of the modular synth is at its root. “Using [a modular synth] is a really low level of abstraction,” he says. “You really have to get deep down as low as you can go with it, building things like resistors and soldering things together, going to that depth so that you can build up an entire process that's yours. If you took my synth and tried to sell it to somebody they'd never buy it. It only works with what I build and the things I like.” Most of his time away from releasing music was spent getting to grips with his synth's array of cables and patches, while in the background the accessibility and increasing speed of digital software whirred ever faster. “Music technology is such a goldmine at the minute. Big companies are angling everything at making a track as quickly as possible. Who gets the most out of this?
“There's no effort any more, you see these big electronic sites run features where people have to make a tune in ten minutes and they open a plug-in and make some drums and that's it. I don't want to hear how awesome a Flash plug-in can make you sound; it's about learning a way to express yourself and putting a bit of yourself on show. When I finished the record, I didn't want people to hear this, 'cause it's mine. This is me as a person. I didn't want anyone else to get that close to it.”
Howes is quick, though, to dismiss the idea that he's adopted analogue as a rejection of autonomy – an argument increasingly redundant as we plunge deeper into the digital world. “I don't buy into retro sensationalism at all,” he claims. “I'm just trying to express – and if it's with a ten-grand analogue synth or a £50 MIDI controller, then whatever. I do programming stuff in my material too because I can't afford what I want. If you're making good music, 99% of people won't care how it's made and the other 1% probably can't hear the distinction between what you're using anyway.”
3.5 Degrees, then, is to be taken as another manifestation of Howes himself, a talkative but shy presence who – as he admits – “was never going to be the guy to create a track to peak a night.” Instead, he's created an album that gradually seeps in and quietly but surely ends up becoming a whole world, with codes both in its sound and in song titles like Source 000535 and DVR 16 that have been left as a trail for the listener, “like those side bars in pieces on records where it's like, 'this is the music we were listening to, this is the book we were reading, this is the philosophy.'”
It's a record the impact of which he perhaps pessimistically foresees as being minimal, but one he hopes will strike a deep chord with those who do make a connection. “The track OYC is named after [Nottingham-formed 80s experimental band] O Yuki Conjugate,” he says, his eyes lighting up. “Late one night I emailed saying they were the inspiration for me making music and they were like, 'Oh cool, do you want some CDs?' I bought everything they ever made. I play it to mates at five in the morning after a night out and they're like 'for fuck's sake...'
“But I'd love someone like Finders Keepers to find this record and re-release it in 20 years and have people have the same reaction, like, 'Fuck, what was this guy doing?' There's probably one person that fell in love with OYC in their entire 40-year career – but that means there's probably one person out there that'll fall in love with me, and if that person finds this record and works out all the codes then that's amazing.”