Howie Lee

With his uniquely “Made in China” aesthetic, Howie Lee is an electronic music visionary – creating a hybrid club sound rooted in the Middle Kingdom but built for our densely interconnected globe. Howie’s debut EP was released via renowned UK tastemaker Trapdoor Records, followed by a 2015 full-length on Alpha Pup. He played the first-ever Boiler Room recording in China, and has clocked appearances at SxSW, the UK’s Shambala Festival, India’s Magnetic Fields, Holland’s Le Guess Who and the Southbank Centre in London. ‘Flame Fighters’ and ‘White Plain’, off 2015’s Mù Chè Shān Chū, have both featured in Apple iPhone campaigns ‘White Plain’ on One Night In Shanghai (2017) and ‘Flame Fighters’ on Shot On iPhone (2018). His 2017 EPs Homeless and Natural Disaster both received critical acclaim from the likes of Fader, Vice, and Dazed, and his intricately produced re-work of Charli XCX’s ‘Boys’ (one of the songs of the year), topped streaming charts in China and was a viral pop confection. His “dystopic and hopeful” Birdy Island album was released in April 2021, described by Pitchfork as combining “traditional Chinese music and historical references with wild electronic experimentation”. Recorded over two weeks in the mountains of north-eastern Tibet, his latest album ‘At The Drolma Wesel-Ling Monastery’ (April 2024) connects Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhist chants/singing with mutating bass/footwork science and glitched-out hyper-rhythms.