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Apr 16, 2026
Paperclip Minimiser: Sentient Programming
Based in an undisclosed corner of Northern England known for UFO sightings, John Howes’ Paperclip Minimiser project is an enigmatic force. His two mystery-shrouded records have arrived via Peak Oil, perfectly embodying the Los Angeles label’s penchant for no frills innovation.
Howes’ latest full-length, II, hovers somewhere between glitch, downtempo, and dub. The album employs an eclectic, scrappy approach and leans heavily on plug-ins and software, created by Howes’ own company Cong Burn. It all might seem like the output of a zany recluse, but Howes is affable and animated in conversation — waxing about ambient techno classics one moment, before going deep on arcane Max/MSP systems the next.
We recently caught up with Howes to discuss the journey to Paperclip Minimiser, programming his own DAWs, and his inventive workflow.
What was your road into music like?
I’ve been making music with Ableton since I was 15. I’m 32 now. My first few releases were all on modular synths. I did a couple 12-inches and some tapes. While that was going on, I was doing shows and DJing. I used to run a label and NTS show called Cong Burn. We put out six 12-inches and a bunch of tapes.
Also, I was a PR back in the day and I worked for record labels. I was a booker for an independent venue in Manchester for three years, so I was running club nights and promoting. When I got to the end of that, I was, like, “The only way for me to stay in the game is to start working on the music that I’m really not into, or just be poor for the rest of my life.” I quit the industry at 28 or 29 and taught myself programming and web development over the course of two years.
I started releasing plug-ins. Now I’m in a loop where the software development I do is all audio stuff, and that feeds into the electronic music that I make. Three days a week, I’m making studio-quality compressors as a freelancer. And then the rest of the week, I’ve got this scrappy little DSP environment that I’ve built in Max/MSP using the Ableton DSP objects. That’s how I make music now. I make a bunch of prototypes — devices and bits of instruments and effects. Then I make a record with them. Once the record’s done, I take all the prototypes and try to build them into plug-ins.
Your music almost possesses a sentient quality. I’m curious what production processes you use to get that feeling.
One of the things that I like to do is have the system that’s generating the sounds have a feedback loop inside of it – not a delay feedback loop, but an observation feedback loop. What this means is that you build an intelligence into the patch, where it responds to its own activity. When you put it in a chaotic feedback state, you get these complex sounds that come out of it. It’s not necessarily random — I actually don’t use any random processes in my music. Everything is system-based, and everything consistent happens for a reason.
This ties into the way that Strokes works. The modulation system is open, in the sense that, whenever you have a kick drum happen, you can have everything else respond. So the pitch of the kick can also control the frequency of a hi-hat or the likelihood that there’s a snare. You build these relationships within the structure of the track, so everything is responding to one another.
“That’s how I make music now. I make a bunch of prototypes — devices and bits of instruments and effects. Then I make a record with them. Once the record’s done, I take all the prototypes and try to build them into plug-ins.”
Everything runs live. There’s no overdubs or multitracking. There’s a lot of complexity built into the system, but because it’s not random and it’s all deterministic, it has this alive feeling. When you collapse all that complexity down and you’re faced with the sound, all this stuff about relationships between voices and complexity strips away. You let it wash over you.
On this LP, all the tracks were recorded in real time. The version that you hear on the record is the first time I ever heard that version of the track. And if I played it again, it would sound different. A lot of people might make this feeling by adding a lot of complexity and layers, whereas everything that I’m doing is ingrained in the environment. You get the complexity for free.
I make prototypes. Then I make tunes. Then I make plug-ins that have a response to an approximation of those prototypes.
The first ever version of Strokes was on a modular synth. It was this crazy, huge Doepfer system with two huge cases. It had really simple voice architecture, but it was basically an analog computer full of logic switches. I converted it over to Max/MSP as a Max for Live device that was a free download. I gradually worked on it over the years and started developing it more. When it first started, it was just a drum sequencer. You had different drum lanes and you’d key in the notes and that was it. And then I added analog style sequencing. So each one of these drum patterns has a sequence attached to it that responds to drum triggers.
When I quit the music industry, I had this two year period where I was doing some freelance web development. I taught myself C++ programming over that time. I pulled over the Max for Live version of Strokes to a VST. That opened up a whole new range of possibilities and let me do this as a job. Over time, I added in the synth engines from Mutable Instruments’ Plaits, which is a callback to this modular system that it came from. It’s a really versatile oscillator. I added samplers and this crazy performance view that has morphing states based on the patch mutator. You can create a pattern here, a pattern there and blend between them. The core design of Strokes hasn’t changed much over the last 10 years. It’s the foundation of every track I make. With most equipment, you hit the point where you’ve done all the tricks. With this, I find new things to this day.
“I’ve spent so long making music in weird ways that I feel like part of my job is to share that with people.”
Stacks was a similar idea. For a couple years, I was doing these live performances where I would take a modular synth case and add an echo, reverb, and looper. I’d turn up to every gig with nothing prepared at all and start with a single sine wave oscillator and layer in and strip it all away. This idea of having a sequencer that runs at the same rate as a looper and this open palette of sounds was really inspiring for a couple years. It was one of those patches where I didn’t buy new modules for two years. I didn’t take patch cables out. I could look at the position of all the dials and tell you what sound it was making. I got to know that system really well.
When I finished Strokes, I was, like, “What’s my next plug-in going to be?” And the only thing I’d spent time on was this looper modular system. I literally made a port of the exact same oscillators that I had in this Eurorack system — a 2-D wavetable oscillator and a Buchla-esque wavefolding oscillator. This was all fed into a low pass gate and spring reverb and delays. With all my plug-in work, I’ve had this workflow over a number of years. I’ve gotten multiple records out of it. I know how to use it. I turned it into a plug-in that other people should experience. That’s why a lot of my plug-ins are different from a lot of things out there. I don’t really like making new delays and new reverbs. It’s, like, “Here’s an entirely new workflow situation that I’ve tried and tested.”
I need another big plug-in idea, but I’ve kind of rinsed those two core workflows. What I’ve decided is I need to stop making plug-ins until I’ve made some new prototypes.
Working with Strokes inside of Ableton Live
Are there any ways you intend your software to exist within Ableton?
100 percent. If you go back to the first version of Strokes in Max for Live, there’s a workflow in mind. One of the concrete things that I did with the Strokes plug-in is there’s a custom Max for Live device that comes with it. You get MIDI note triggers on the different sequencers. There’s also this layer of parameter sequencing. The Max for Live device that comes with Strokes is literally designed to extract all the sequencer signals from the plug-in and it translates them to the map buttons that you get on the Ableton Live LFO. It works the exact same way that the modulation system in Live works. That’s something that I’ve built just for Live.
There’s another thing that I’ve made that I didn’t mention called Dispatch. It’s another Max for Live device. Before Ableton 12, there was this limitation in Live where you couldn’t assign two modulators to a single dial. If you put an LFO on one dial, you couldn’t put another LFO on that dial. It wouldn’t let you map it. I developed Dispatch, which was this global modulation matrix for Live. You could take all of the different LFOs and mix them down into a single modulation bus and assign that to different parameters. What that means is you could have a side chain signal being mixed together with an LFO signal being mixed together with a sequencer signal. I’d say 90 percent of my users are in Live. The first system that it has to work in is the Ableton system.
The other thing I’ve done is integrate with the Push 2. It’s a pretty amazing device. You’ve got the screen, the pad, the dials. There’s some stuff out there that lets you hack it. I got into that and basically made an entire controller for Strokes on the Push 2. It takes over and has a custom display that I draw on. There’s different pages, so you might be on the sequencer page and you flip to another page. It looks like a native Live thing, but it’s not actually using Ableton at all. It feels like you can turn Strokes into a hardware device. There’s a lot of people who struggle with approaching Strokes because it’s quite esoteric in its design. But as soon as I put it onto the Push, it was, like, “This makes sense now. Here’s channel one, here’s channel two.” The Push 2 is something that I’m going to keep in mind for all of my work going forward.
Can you talk about your new record on Peak Oil? I know it was a long road to this one.
I made 80 percent of another album in Ableton. That was using this method where I’d record individual stems and try mashing them together. I ran out of steam. I was adding stuff, producing stuff, remixing stuff, bouncing stuff into one project and then copying into another. It was starting to become soup. Everything was merging into one.
In Max 9, they added in this thing called ABL DSP. All of the things you get in Ableton, you can use in Max. You get the Live Compressor, Drum Bus, all the different filters, reverbs. Tom Hall from Cycling ‘74 gave me a demo of it on a stream. I was, like, “This is really outrageous. Now we can get a good compressor in Max, a good reverb.”
With this workflow that I hatched in Ableton, where I had the Max for Live devices hooked up to Drum Racks and all the parameter modulation, I wanted to see if I could rebuild that entire structure using the Ableton DSP objects as a helping hand to get me reverbs fast. But how do I build the whole system from scratch so it works exactly the way that I want it? That’s what the process was for this record. I rebuilt the setup around my plug-in Strokes in Max/MSP.
Download Paperclip Minimiser’s free cb_rainer device
*Requires Live 12 Suite
Can you talk about the downloadable device you’re providing?
It’s a port of a granular synth that was developed in the early 2000s as part of this Max/MSP library called PPOOLL that included a couple of “rainer” devices. There was kk.rainer and there was gg.rainer. gg.rainer is basically a granular sample playback thing. The approach is completely different to Granulator. It’s also quite a naive approach to granular synthesis. I’ve built the big granular synthesis in a real plug-in, so I know what the general shape of a granular synth looks like.
When I was messing around with the PPOOLL version of this, I was, like, “This sounds like Tim Hecker records from the early 2000s” — clicks and cuts. When I talked to Brian [Foote, head of Peak Oil] about it, he was, like, “Oh yeah, Tim used this back in the day.” The things that make it different to the usual granular synth are that PPOOLL didn’t have the idea of playing it back as an instrument — where you do runs up and down the keyboard and there’s a VCA. It’s more parametric. So you set the pitch on a dial. You can choose multiple different scales that you can lock to. There’s just so many esoteric things built into it that give it so much character. It is a naive implementation of granular synthesis, and not really the way that you’re supposed to do it. But in doing that, it has created one of the most beautiful granular synths of all time. It’s actually lush.
cb_rainer being put through its paces
My port is not really a clone, it’s kind of a reimagination of the whole system. I literally reprogrammed the whole thing from scratch. I made it so that each of the grains runs on its own thread. It’s fully multi-threaded, which means you get a much better performance out of it. I kept some of the initial junk that was in there. For instance, originally, the pitch scaling was meant to be used in octaves and fifths. But they got the calculations wrong, so it’s microtonal in this beautiful way. I didn’t realize it was doing microtonal weird shit until I had listened to it for a couple months, and then I was, like, “Why can’t I get anything to stay in tune with this?” It was, like, “Oh, because I’ve been listening to some weird scale that doesn’t exist anywhere else and my brain’s gotten used to it and enjoys the sound of it now.” I added in correct pitch quantization. Originally, the grain envelopes were all in a really naive, linear way. So I’ve added in modern envelopes. I wanted to keep it so you can get the original 2001 Tim Hecker flavor, or you can have the correct Granulator III behavior. The sample rate and bit reduction thing is per voice, so different rings come through different levels of crush, which just sounds outrageous.
My goal with porting it over was to try and give people access to this thing that sounds like all my favorite records from the early 2000s, but try to make it accessible to people. You can deal with all the junk if you want, but you can have a clean modern version of it. I’ve spent so long making music in weird ways that I feel like part of my job is to share that with people.