"The IDM-esque production is cool-temperature, almost antiseptic, and the execution follows a spatial discipline that is leaner and more assured."
With his second Paperclip Minimiser transmission, John Howes doubles down on the lost aesthetics of cyberpunk minimalism and mid-digital electronica.
If you recall the early 2000s, the future arrived bathed in icy-blue, sea-green gradients. Technology moved fast and consumer tastemakers promised a frictionless world rendered in chromatic, fiber optic glow: Sony’s PlayStation rotating in liquid glass, Nokia handsets floating in sterile white space.
It’s precisely the freshness of that cyberpunk futurism that John Howes resurrects through Paperclip Minimiser, a project assembled circuit by circuit with “an authentic 2006 studio” built around a Nord Modular G2, Elektron Machinedrum, and Monomachine, sounds he insists are best listened to on Windows XP Media Player or Winamp.
Manchester’s Cong Burn label head, Howes follows his debut on Peak Oil with II, a second Paperclip Minimiser transmission that extends the terrain further. Self-imposed restrictions on his DIY DAW setup, deliberately limited channel usage, and live improvisation over editorial accumulation, produce a singularity that allows his compositions to breathe fully in the space they occupy. The results are riveting: lustrous, sleek, and slightly alien, with ageless minimalism as the undercurrent.
Many of the sketches on II date from around 2011, now accumulated into seven bass-heavy steppers that embody the technicality and simplicity of early techno. The IDM-esque production is cool-temperature, almost antiseptic, and the execution follows a spatial discipline that is leaner and more assured. Side A is glitchy with textural splutters, flickering in tight formation. Side B drops to lower altitudes, fractal-dub basslines slithering and reorganising themselves under invisible rules.
The timing of this release cannot be ignored. At the moment where Artificial Intelligence is rewriting the terms of daily life, its long-lasting impact remains to be fully understood. The appetite for modernity is quietly curdling; the neon-blue future never quite arrived as promised. If you are looking for that imagined digital utopia, it lives only in creative fragments like Paperclip Minimiser’s circuitry, where it continues, stubbornly, to hum. Get Involved.
‘II’ is out now via Peak Oil. Buy vinyl from Inverted Audio Record Store.
TRACKLIST
1. II A1
2. II A2
3. II A3
4. II B1
5. II B2
6. II B3
7. II B4