Ben Butler and Mousepad: Scandinavian Conflict R&B

Ben Butler and Mousepad is the brainchild of musician and producer Joe Howe, formerly of Glasgow-based digital noiseniks Gay Against You. After an extended period living in the vibrant musical community of Berlin – a stint that saw him develop Ben Butler and Mousepad into a two-man band, alongside German grindcore drummer Bastian Hagedorn; doing sound design and composition for a conceptual opera; and completing a collaborative album with itinerant musical outsider Momus – Howe has returned to Glasgow to begin a Masters degree in Sound For The Moving Image.

His latest collaboration, Bad Brain Call, saw him linking up with songwriter Annabel Frierson, and on the eve of a tour to promote the project, he is looking forward to getting stuck into new Ben Butler recordings, and rediscovering the joys of the collaborative atmosphere of Glasgow's underground music scene.

First of all, where did the moniker for Ben Butler and Mousepad originate? “I've said before that the name and the loose concept came to me in a dream, but there's no way of saying that without making it sound really wacky,” admits Howe. “Sometimes your subconscious chews over things like that on its own. It was just too funny a name not to choose, especially since my name isn't Ben, there's nobody in the band called Ben Butler... even when there are two of us, it still doesn't make any more sense. I love the fact that people always ask 'Who's Ben? Where's Ben?' I've been on tour with two people called Ben recently. It gets confusing, but it's a good icebreaker.”

How did Berlin compare to Glasgow as a place to make music? “There's so much going on [in Berlin], it's incredibly freeing and inspiring,” says Howe. “There's a massive amount of energy because there are so many people involved in creative work there. But people do tend go there with a specific idea of what they want to do in mind, so they tend to be wrapped up in their own little world of work; there's possibly not as much collaboration as there is in Glasgow.”

How did working and living in Berlin affect the sound of Ben Butler and Mousepad? “I was lucky to meet Bastian [Hagedorn, of grindcore band GTUK], my pal who plays drums on a lot of the Ben Butler stuff out there, and we work really well together,” says Howe. “But I knew a lot of people in Berlin who were really like hermits within this big party city. They're really on their own thing. They'll meet pals, but they won't collaborate on anything. Coming back to Glasgow and remembering that everyone works together, that was really good. I kind of never thought that I would come back to be honest, but I think I had been away just long enough – about three years, all in all – for me to have changed, and for the place have changed just enough for it to be fresh again.”

Now Howe's back, is he at all tempted to reprise Gay Against You? Does he miss being in that band? “I miss working with Lachlan [Rattray]. He's been my friend for a very long time,” he explains. “But... yeah, I couldn't see us doing that particular project again. For example we do get asked quite regularly now to reform and play; I think it's been long enough time since we did it for people to get interested again. But we said we'd never do it again until we were in our fifties or something, and it would be really funny and weird. I suppose the other thing is that the stuff I'm doing musically now, the people who knew Gay Against You would definitely recognise elements of the same sound. Some of it is still there.”

Gay Against You were often described as a noise band – is that a label he's happy with? “If we were a 'noise' band, it was probably down to the fact that we couldn't translate our more extravagant ideas into reality, so we were always on some level failing to get those ideas across,” explains Howe. “With Ben Butler & Mousepad, things have just gotten a bit more focused and refined. What comes out is closer to what I've originally imagined. With Gay Against You, the noise elements came as much from that as from any intention to be a noise band. I mean, we wanted to piss people off and be a stupid, noisy band too, but a lot of it was flailing around, trying to get something across, and never quite managing it.”

Howe has been part of a great number of collaborations in the past few years – has his more experimental approach helped with these projects? “I think the thing with a lot of the collaborations I've done with other artists is that a more traditional musician, if there is such a thing, might baulk at the things I've been asked to do,” he suggests. “Certainly with Bad Brain Call, the artist I was working with, Annabel Frierson, had no musical experience at all. She had a lot of ideas that she wanted to get across, and sometimes quite specific ways of doing it, but she didn't really have the language to talk about it, she didn't have the reference points. At the risk of sounding cocky, I think that perhaps someone who was classically trained, or who came from a traditional pop background or something, might have struggled to get those ideas across in the way that I did. It's to do with having a more fluid creative approach, or just a kind of weird approach; not being afraid to take risks or to do something in a way which other people might think is totally goofy. I haven't sung in years, so that was really weird getting to grips with singing again, but also it was a lot of fun. To be able to approach the pop song format after a couple of years off was really refreshing.”

The opera which Howe collaborated on was called 'Switch On Conference Oper' – a conceptual show, telling the story of three archetypal female electronic musicians, set to music. “The director was Santiago Blaum, he's from South America but living in Germany now,” Howe elaborates. “Three actresses loosely portray roles that are loosely in the mould of Robert Moog, Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind, who was Carlos' producer, and introduced her to people like Stanley Kubrick, and made connections for her. They weren't specifically these characters: they just embodied a lot of their history. The way the director worked was to come up with the ideas and then improvise all the text, so a lot of the pieces which I had to work with were classical pieces which had been rearranged; some of it was my own work, some of it was Santiago's work. My job, loosely speaking, was to come up with the 'sound world' for the whole thing – the sound design, working with synthesizers, which was a lot of fun. It ran for a week. There are plans to do it somewhere else, but nothing firm – we'll see what happens.”

Howe hopes his upcoming Masters degree at the Glasgow School of Art will lead to more similarly fruitful work: “All my collaborations so far have been people asking me, and I'm very grateful that they have, but I've found it hard to be a self-starter with that kind of thing,” says Howe. “I just want to do more of it. And there will be a lot of technical stuff. Like, I've never really learned to do these things properly... ever (laughs). That's a big part of my personality I guess, so actually learning how to do things, and why things sound the way they sound, will be really good.”

Working with Momus, a legendary figure in the Scottish music scene, was a challenge for Howe, but also a learning experience: “We worked on this record that an artist called Kemal Akkaya was putting together, called Recovery. It was this boutique 7-inch boxset of covers, so everyone had to choose a nostalgic song from the sixties to the eighties. Momus wanted to do Ashes to Ashes, the David Bowie song. We did that, and then he enjoyed it so much that we talked about doing a record together. I was still in Glasgow at the time, so we did it back and forth via email, and then finished it in Berlin at the point that I was over there.”

Momus is famous for being a bit of a grouch, did Howe have any problems working with him? “He can be a bit of a curmudgeon. I don't think he'd mind me saying that, either. In some ways the collaboration was really easy, in that we got things done so fast. But in some ways it was also quite frustrating; I feel like I work quite quickly, but Momus works so much more quickly than I do. He was telling me a story the other day about how he had recorded a song, written the lyrics, recorded it and then made the video, all in one session. He tends to do all of that in about four hours, and then doesn't go back to it. Which I think is amazing, it's brilliant, but with the collaboration that we did, where a lot of it's quite finnicky – I was mostly editing things that he'd sent, then he'd edit them again and I'd edit them again – some things, I think, maybe weren't as finished as they could have been, as a result of that. But it was certainly really eye-opening to work with somebody that worked that fast. Although I make computer music, I do tend to make it in the way that people always would – with four tracks or whatever, playing parts quite quickly. I do really like making things fast. You get a much better energy if you do things that way, rather than labouring over it. So that way of working definitely rubbed off on me.”

Howe has released on several labels, from eclectic Norweigian label Dødpop, to the hyper-trendy L.O.A.F. label, to his critically acclaimed Gif N Run EP on Musique Large. He has also released several albums, including Bad Brain Call, independently, through Bandcamp. He's open to working with all these labels again, but is enthusiastic about the opportunities presented by sites and services such as Bandcamp: “Their tools are very simple, and they're pretty unobtrusive,” he explains. “There's not so much of a brand involved, which is really good: with a lot of sites you're endorsing your work as a product, and I'm not really into that. Bandcamp's more like a blank canvas, with a very simple setup.” The ability to do limted edition runs of releases like Bad Brain Call is liberating for Howe: “There's only a hundred of them, at the end of the day, the scale is really good. It's not hard to sell all of a given thing on Bandcamp.”

For Howe, Bandcamp potentially provides a much fairer deal for up-and-coming musicians: “Although you're giving a small amount of profit to the people who run these sites, it's pretty different to these stories you've heard about bands in the seventies or whatever, with labels stealing fifty percent of their own stock, or selling it and then not passing on the royalties. To be honest I would rather avoid that whole structure, because I think it's fundamentally dishonest. But also, there's the whole thing of musicians being seen as some kind of godly figures, put on a ridiculous pedestal and expecting people to come to them because they do this kind of mellifluous thing that most people aren't able to do... I don't really buy into that. I believe you'll get results if you work hard, and if you put in enough effort to make sure that people hear your stuff, that will come back to you. I quite like that idea that you can avoid the mechanism, but that if you do enough then people will still get to hear it.”

Howe's work as Ben Butler and Mousepad has become associated with the musical microgenre known as 'Skwee' – he explains what the term means to him: “The best description I've heard of it was 'Scandinavian conflict R&B.' It's the internal conflict, rather than like, war. I'd say it's like very synthetic funk; influenced by hip-hop, and simultaneously very colourful and funny, but also icy and cold. The name comes from 'squeeze' – to squeeze as much as possible out of the smallest amount stuff, especially cheap-ass, rubbish equipment. That's one aspect I like. Cheap, colourful sounds. I like that democratisation: it doesn't really matter what gear you use as long as you squeeze as much melody, as much energy, as many ideas as you can out of it. The thing I like about Skwee is that it is really daft, and really funky – which was a bad word until quite recently, but it's something I say with pride, now!”

Ben Butler and Mousepad's music offten has an organic feel – is he a big analogue gear head? “Let's say if I had an unlimited amount of money, I would love to have an analogue studio,” grins Howe. “My wife and I talk about if I die, and she had my life insurance money to spend, she would build the Joe Howe Memorial Studio. But I don't really have any analogue gear to be honest. I've had bits and pieces of things. I've got one cheap analogue monosynth, and then a computer. I'm sort of weirdly a Luddite when it comes to computers. I've used the same thing ever since I started making music. I use Cubase on a Mac, because that's what they had on an Atari at my high school. I learned to use it then, and I've been kind of intimidated by other software ever since. I've just stuck with what I know. The way I put music together is very simple, racking up various plugins or real synths when I get the chance, playing things by hand. I worked with a live drummer when we were in Berlin, the album we recorded together had live drums. I don't collaborate with Bastian so much any more because we don't live in the same country, and it's pretty hard to do that particular collaboration from here, so I tend to use samples and drum machines. But my approach to music is pretty simple; I don't think you need a lot of gear to get good results. It's way more important to have some good ideas, and think about good sounds, rather than spending all your money on synthesizers. Although, like I said, I would love to be in the position to do that!”

Talking about his influences, Butler reveals a passion for jazz (he was a saxophonist, and played in a “really awful” funk band while growing up in the Highlands), for the psychedelic sounds of Zappa and the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, and experimental German rock bands such as D.A.F.: “I love the kind of itchy, tense, paranoid music of that time,” he enthuses. “I remember reading something which said there's a certain age which you get to – they call it the 'age of magical realism' – it happens when you're about ten. At that point you still think anything is achievable in life, and apparently the influences which you have then are the ones which stick with you for the rest of your life. You can't shake them. So I really like the idea of finding out what people were into when they were ten, when they still thought like that.”

In addition to several gigs in Europe over the coming months, Howe has a plan to release another collaboration, this time on some kind of 'non-traditional format': “It'll be something with a download code attached,” he explains. “I'm trying to think about what I would like to buy, or to have. And, of course, it's a great opportunity to collaborate with people whose work I like: doing the artwork, the photos, the promo material. That's a collaboration as well. It's not just people fulfilling my ideas, it's a partnership. I like the idea of making something which people will see and say: 'That's exactly what I'm looking for.' Because the wide distribution of music almost takes some of the fun out of it, unless it's like a really beautiful vinyl, or a cassette with really clever packaging. I think often nowadays the thrill of owning something like that, of poring over it, is gone. I think it's important to make something that makes people feel included. It's like a totem.”