Howlround

For all bookings contact RobinTheFog at gmail dot com

Forthcoming Shows:

02/05/24 – The New Obsolescents Live At Deliaphonic

Delia Derbyshire Building, Cox Street, Coventry, from noon. Details here.

11-12/05/24 – Howlround presents Vox Aeterna

Two Day Residency at Project DIVFUSE, London, E5. Details here.

07/04/24 – Until We Catch Fire #7

Endeavour Deptford, London. Details to follow.

First coming to prominence with hugely-acclaimed 2012 LP The Ghosts Of Bush, Howlround is a quintet (four slightly battered machines machines, one slightly battered operator) that creates recordings and performances entirely from manipulating natural acoustic sounds on vintage reel-to-reel tape machines, with all electronic effects or artificial reverb strictly forbidden. In an age where one can create all manner of electronic music with a simple swipe of a mouse, Howlround prove not only how much fun is to be had in making things complicated again, but conversely just how little effort is sometimes needed to create a genuinely uncanny and beguiling soundworld: the rough underbelly of our pristine, Pro-Tools universe.

[Y]ou start to feel it’s the machine’s making the decisions, the closed input one-take recording narrowing the walls and increasing the sense of intransigent, intractable progress towards oblivion. […] If an environment is suggested it’s not the desolate moors of his Cumbrian surroundings – it’s more aquatic and threatening too – teeth bared in the depths, the snarling arguments of a shoal of Baltic Pike or Humbolt Squid […] Smart horror directors should be getting this on their soundtracks. – The Wire

Howlround’s aleatory process reminds of The Stone Tape, Nigel Kneale’s 1972 tale of a residual haunting recorded by a mansion’s stone walls. The results have thick streaks of analogue energies roaming the air, fluttering and pulsing, forming rhythms that palpitate and regurgitate before ultimately crumbling under unstable tape delay. Like the cairns – burial monuments – that thread through the region, ‘The Debatable Lands’ feels like unearthly audio monoliths with hidden, ancient properties – The Quietus

‘Manually manipulating reels that feel like they’ve only recently been exhumed, [Howlround] weave a dense tapestry as haunting and immersive as Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson‘s Legend Of Hell House Soundtrack’ – The Wire

Aural Ectoplasm: ☆☆☆☆ – Record Collector Magazine

The ultimate Hauntological artefact – Simon Reynolds

Uncanny, mesmerising, difficult & sublime – The Quietus

Spikily Psychoactive – Boomkat

Howlround SNFEST17 - 1 — Live at Supernormal – By @chameleonic

Concrète theatre … It’s glorious – FACTmag

QUATERMASSIVE! – Ghostbox

A Howlround live set is always a spectacle, due to the distinctive nature of our performances, in which haunting and uncanny soundscapes are created from loops of quarter-inch tape stretched and balanced precariously around the venue, while we try desperately to prevent the loops from snarling, snapping or becoming entangled – part sound design, part chaotic performance art. So far we’ve taken our loops all over Europe and to the US, playing churches, basements, industrial shafts and secret nuclear bunkers to name a few.