PLEASE VISIT
howielee.bandcamp.com/album/birdy-island TO LISTEN TO THE ORIGINAL STUDIO ALBUM BY HOWIE LEE
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"Combining traditional Chinese music and historical references with wild electronic experimentation” - 7.6 in Pitchfork
"Birdy Island is Lee's most organic work" - Album of the day, Resident Advisor
“It’s quite a feat to sound this ancient and futuristic simultaneously” - The Guardian
“There has never been a record that sounds like this. And, very possibly, never will be again." – Bandcamp
Six months on from the release of his acclaimed LP, Birdy Island, Beijing-based producer/artist Howie Lee calls in a thrilling lineup of producers/musicians to present the album’s follow up remix EP, forthcoming this October on Mais Um.
Across five tracks featuring remixes by influential Peruvian club forces, Dengue Dengue Dengue and Argentinian producer Prisma, experimental Japanese musician/artist, Foodman, Mexico City-based composer Mabe Fratti, alongside Silvia Kastel & Kupla, Birdy Island (Remixes) represents the latest chapter of Howie Lee’s most organic and expansive project to date.
Guatemalan-born, Mexico-based cellist/vocalist Mabe Fratti opens proceedings, substituting the cello-led centrepiece of her dynamic first two albums, for synths and deft cut & paste sampling, on her stripped-back fix of Lee's acoustic-grime single, Island Birdy. New Hyperdub signing and electronic producer, Foodman hits the ground running, on his playful and bouncy 4/4 take on Wave, Wave, Wave introducing tuned poly-percussion, dub lasers and spliced vocals into the mix before Lima-based, high-impact club duo, Dengue Dengue Dengue link up with Prisma to invoke the spirits of FWD>> nights at Plastic People circa 2004 on Foreign Flowers.
London-based NTS resident & one half of ambient digi-dub meets fourth-world techno duo Shakey, Silvia Kastel, chops & screws opening track Time To The Sun (featuring Shanghai vocalist/producer, Yehaiyahan), bringing into focus all of its elemental magic and simplicity, channelling Suzanne Ciani, Jon Hassell et al at the end, just before Finnish producer Kupla rounds things off with his dreamy lo-fi beats take on the album title track.
Written, produced and recorded entirely by Lee at the back end of 2018 (with the exception of the album’s resident four-piece choir made up of rising Beijing artist, Fishdoll, Yehaiyahan and West by West, with Lee himself also included), Birdy Island’s almost exclusively acoustic yet broad sound palette threads continuities between ceremonial Taoist music, early Buchla synth experiments, jazz fusion and video game-composition.
Loosely based around Lee’s own long-formed concept of a floating Sicilian theme park, co-inhabited by both birds and ancestral spirits, Howie remarks: "Birdy Island to me is a palace in the clouds and the birds are worshipped like Gods. Not like a western God though.” Reminiscent of Hayao Miyazaki’s Laputa (in the 1986 film Castle In The Sky), Lee’s Birdy Island has been built by a Chinese investment company seeking to re-sync our relationship with the spiritual and natural world after years of economic collapse and degradation, and who invite Howie to compose the park’s soundtrack. Inside Birdy Island’s 30-minute gallery of collaged sound, Lee draws on a wide history of traditional pan-Asian music, filtered through his unique lens of contemporary electronic production.
released October 22, 2021