♫♪  Howie Lee - “Four Seas 四海”

名扬四海
míng yáng sì hǎi
to become known far and wide (idiom); famous

A prematurely gray-headed Howie Lee wonders where and when he is. Strumming his sanxian, spinning through overlapping layers of virtuality, his very breath is converted to binary vapor in the flash-freeze of digital time.

Heaving cyborgs come online. The city folds in on itself (too many people, too many data). Red rays from a black sun pulse as monkey-minded face time melts into “the world’s thinnest foldable full-colour touchscreen display”. Flesh made mech, mech made text.

Seas stretch in four dimensions.

Howie Lee’s latest is pure Sinofuturist pastiche, a ’20s Shanghai flapper simulation made in China [ca.] 2185. It’s modular, designed to disintegrate and disperse in a hyperstitial onslaught of WeChat gifs. It’s machining the ghost.

Howie’s 无家Homeless EP is out on May 26 from Do Hits.

Chocolate Grinder

CHOCOLATE GRINDER is our audio/visual section, with an emphasis on the lesser heard and lesser known. We aim to dig deep, but we’ll post any song or video we find interesting, big or small.

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