HOWARD FEIBUSCH, the primary songwriter behind the Brooklyn quartet Howard, subverts the typical artistic process of absorbing, interpreting, and recreating experiences and environments with his band’s forthcoming EP, Please Recycle—a sort of sequel to their 2015 debut full-length, Religion.
Please Recycle is made up entirely of sounds and tracks initially recorded for the band’s first album. The EP isn’t exactly a remix record—it’s more of an exercise in creation through deconstruction, a dive inward before expanding outward. “Someone wanted to do a remix,” Feibusch explains. “I got some of the stems from the album together [and] I started hearing them very differently. Hearing the sounds on their own excited me. Slowly what started as an experiment began to come to fruition,” he recalls. “We walk around and there’s just so much stuff… There’s so much art and so much audio. What does it look like when we repurpose it?”
Howard’s sound has always been mildly electronic; synthetic timbres and rhythms loop hypnotically, in service to largely acoustic guitar-based songwriting and Feibusch’s Chris Martin-esque tenor.
“I started to work the songs as deeply as I could. To me it made a statement more than just the music,” Feibusch says. “Glass,” a track off the EP, is atmospheric and rooted, melodic and ambient, celestial and earthy. Feibusch’s ghostly voice, simultaneously organic and processed, drifts by on a wandering breeze—you’re reminded of Scottish electronic duo Boards of Canada.