Howie B & Hiraki Sawa - 3 Sticks

Originally conceived as an East-meets-West hybrid audiovisual project for Wonderfruit Festival (Pattaya, Thailand) in 2024, veteran producer and remixer Howie B and Japanese born, London based visual artist Hiraki Sawa see the resultant music cut to vinyl and digitally released by Dogtooth Records for 2026. Two long-form, constantly evolving pieces as indebted to early 70s glassy minimalism and film OST’s as they are 90s breakbeat are bookended by a much shorter but no less evocative composition pairing emotive bursts of brass which coalesce around repetitive synth stabs that pulse around the stereo field.

If ‘Stick 2’ acts as the breathing point between the duos much longer A/V forays for the live performance, ‘Stick 1’ is the cinematic glue that begins by conjuring images of Thailand's rice fields, bringing an almost metronome-like consistency upon which Howie adds and subtracts synth layers and FX, eventually shifting into gear with a downtempo beat and treated breaks around a third of the way in. The final piece of the puzzle, ‘Stick 3’, kicks off with echoes of golden era Robert Leiner or Spacetime Continuum, back-room ambient techno propulsions building up tension before a similar downtempo beat drops in and gets us swaying. There’s also a bit of a horror synth / soundtrack atmosphere at play, crawling at a steady sub-100 bpm as the pressure builds with subtle modulations and synth tweaks before everything winds down a bit to an icy, subtractive wet descent as we approach the 20 min mark.

The concept of 'Zero / Infinite' works as both a homage to the teachings of the Zen Buddhist philosopher D.T. Suzuki and a welcome update on classic dance music adjacent motifs from the heyday of the 1990s.

Howie B & Hiraki Sawa - '3 Sticks' is released on the 7th of September via Dogtooth Records.