London-hailing film school graduate, electronic musician, and visual artist Howe has spent the past few months gearing up for his new EP Forever. It all started with opening salvo “Rain” back in December last year, continuing with “A Yellow Flower” a month ago, and now he’s back with its third single “Forever”.
Taking the parameters of club music to their outer limits, past releases have taken sounds like grime, jungle, and dubstep, and contorted them into a raw and occasionally abrasive new form. On “Forever” that means underpinning ghostly, pitched-up vocals with an almost dubby lurch, occasionally giving way to choppy, percussive bursts and icing it with a melancholic sheen.
One common theme between “Forever” and “A Yellow Flower” has been blurring the line between the organic and the synthetic. On the latter that meant using text to speech to give the track an eerie robotic feel, but with “Forever” he’s applied that to the track’s visuals, using shots of floating heads staring lifelessly into the camera.
Speaking on some of the concepts behind the track and its video, HOWE explains: “This is an exploration of modern-day loneliness, blue light washes over the faces of despondent floating heads as they stare into the void. Aged digital avatars catch their gaze and stare as if looking back from an imagined digital future.”
The Forever EP is out tomorrow, February 23 via Higglers.
