G.H.

G.H.

Housebound Demigod

Modern Love

Long in the making debut album from Modern Love’s most elusive operator G. Howell. Recorded with a DR550, a battered Charvel guitar + assorted pedals, recommended if you're into Stephen O’Malley, Autechre, David Lynch, Shackleton, NWW, Demdike Stare...  From the disputed border somewhere between Lancashire and Yorkshire, G..H. claims a no mans land where he is free to decimate distinctions between black metal and concrète techno by drawing upon an elusive, metaphysical force that’s exclusively common to music rooted in that region; from Muslimgauze and Autechre thru Shackleton and Demdike Stare.  The inarguably mongrel Housebound Demigod is G.H.’s debut solo album, following the Ground EP (2011) and his involvement with the hexed Pendle Coven project & HATE, alongside Miles Whittaker and Andy Stott, respectively, between 2003 - 2009. It sounds like nothing out there; the result of countless hours at the grindstone, using sound as tonal therapy and a purely expressive sculptural material to best render the feel of his bleak but extraordinarily beautiful surroundings with all the rugged texture and captivating aesthetic of some ancient cave graffiti.  The album unfolds as a treacherous topography of boggy drones, entrenched subbass and deforested, windswept feedback, strewn with the charred remains of black metal in opener Screaming Demon Pickups and the hollow-eyed stare down of Angels & Doormen, or prone to bury the senses with unpredictable slow techno mudslides in Mickey Cosmos or the subsidence of Packhorse.  He often underlines that physicality with a drily ambiguous wit; check...

G.H.

Ground EP

Modern Love

G.H. is Gary Howell, longtime associate of Modern Love as one half of Pendle Coven and sometime contributor to the HATE project. The Ground EP features Howell's first material produced outside of Pendle Coven and takes on a much darker, more stripped down aesthetic - making use of location recordings amassed over the last decade. The title track extends over 7 minutes from a solitary bass pulse into a slow, three dimensional industrial reduction heaving with uncomfortable bass weight and a sense of nervous expectation. It's like the bare, skeletal noise framework for darkest junglist hardcore stripped of its percussion - all bar a bass drum and intense shards of noise. Albedo has more of a swing to it, dominated by a growling bassline and the metallic clunk of disjointed percussion at odds with the squashed funk lurking somewhere at its core. The template is extended on Earth, a brilliantly discordant club variant that sounds like an R&B mastertrack exploded into 100 constituent parts and put together not entirely in the right order. It builds and collapses into itself, a stylistic oddity that at one and the same time brings to mind Boards of Canada's re-working of Colonel Abrams' 'Trapped' and the extreme frequency vortex of the Raster Noton label.