Electronic musician, Cong Burn label head and developer John Howes’ music lives on the boundary between chaos and control. On the one hand, his work is largely produced using systems and tools of his own design: rhythms and notes are generated using Strokes, a sequencing environment he’s developed, synth patches are meticulously constructed on his Nord Modular G2 and Elektron Machinedrum, while parameters are modulated using another self-built software tool, the global modulation matrix Dispatch.
But though he’s rigorous in his command of the creative process, Howes tells us, it’s when he begins to let go that the magic happens, through generative music-making and semi-autonomous agents that possess what he’s called “lo-fi AI”. His latest release, a self-titled project under a new alias, derives its name from Paperclip Maximiser, a thought experiment that envisions how an AI tasked solely with manufacturing paperclips could run out of control and inadvertently kill us all in the process, were it not instilled with some form of self-correcting, machine-based ethics.
Thankfully, the AI-powered tools used to produce Howes’ latest release, haven’t yet threatened us with extinction:
