By Amanda Nowinski

WRITERS ARE OBSESSED with words; musicians are obsessed with sounds; but producers, what the hell do they do?

Before dropping out of the real (and stable) world to pursue the chain-smoking hell of journalism, I was a producer. Not a music producer, mind you, but a hack TV-commercial producer with a cell phone and a never-ending list of stoned production crews to boss around. By definition, a producer organizes entities and tells them what to do. So I've never understood why the electronic music realm likes to refer to its artists as producers – unless, of course, it's because the purported producer simply orders engineers around to create the art he or she imagines but could never single-handedly manifest.

For the record, Lee Howard is not a producer. He is a musician's musician who constructs his beats and tones and words from ground zero all the way up to the final high, using synths, samplers, an acoustic and electric guitar, an electric bass, a Fender Rhodes, and "not much software," he says. He claims to have the "attention span of a gerbil," but that's just his modest way of explaining his refusal to box himself into yet another favored term of the electronic music island: the genre. He says "fuck it" to rigid marketing expectations by making use of nearly every style, and that irreverence buzzes through his recently completed second full-length, How to Build a Windmill, and latest three singles. Jazzy, spaced-out drum 'n' bass, straight-up club-kid house, dirty funked-out down tempo, melancholic soul, sentimental folk, and hissing, staticky experimental – it's all in there, and if you place your ears snugly within a set of headphones, you can hear each influence melt into the next. In other words, it's all good in Lee's moody-sounding, complex world.

"I'm not a junglist; I'm not an anything-ist; I just like music," the 26-year-old Birmingham, Ala., native says. "Recently I've been working mostly on drum 'n' bass and house, and I like having sounds carry over from song to song, style to style, by sharing sounds that fade, like bass, horns, and synth. I've always done both. Within electronic music I can't choose just one genre because making just house would drive me crazy."

But genre consistency is something our gerbil-minded friend admires in his peers. "I just heard a song of Alex's [Abstract of Phunckateck] the other day, called '3 Step,' a drum 'n' bass track, and it's brilliant," he says. "And I think the reason he's so good at what he does is because he eats and breathes drum 'n' bass. And there's a lot to be said for that. My stuff isn't as strong as it could be because I can't eat and breathe one genre at one time."

But "Marscarter," an upcoming release on Tweekin' Records under the moniker Bernard Leon Howard III (his real name – no joke) suggests that if Lee isn't eating it, then perhaps he's been breathing some damned good house. Vocalist 80, who also sings on How to Build a Windmill (released under the name "the Infinite Posse"), croons like a laid-back jazz diva over Howard's fierce, pumping East Coast-flavored sound. The track rolls with the buttery finesse of a longtime house scientist but messes with the typical program by adding a tougher drum 'n' bass edge: lots of heavy, heavy bass, warm synth pads, and crunchier beats. His two tracks on the S.F.-based True Intent, the country's first strictly atmospheric drum 'n' bass label, reveal his ethereal-toned break-beat prowess. "The Real" and "Into the Light," produced under the moniker Howard Hughes, swirl with dreamy ambient distraction and sophisticated jazz fusion over tumbling syncopated beats and deep, undulating monster bass lines.

Howard's ability to play all the distinct fields keeps him apart from the rest, but he maintains that within drum 'n' bass circles, this combination of loves is really nothing new. "It's true that most people stick within the same genre, and I think it's a shame," he says. "But the Phunckateck crew is actually really diverse. Noel is a great example of someone who came from house, but then UFO! came from hip-hop, and Sage came from punk, pop, and techno. That's what drum 'n' bass is all about: an evolution of all these genres into the 21st century, into an urban setting."

Howard's own foray into electronic music began seven years ago while he was a student at Birmingham Southern University in Alabama, where he studied under electroacoustic composer Charles Mason. Influenced by his raving expeditions to Georgia, Howard soon began to work on beats, and by 1996 he'd already released his first two tracks, one house and the other drum 'n' bass – certainly a pattern of things to come. Later that year he mailed his music to the S.F.-based label Sunburn, and soon after, he bid the South farewell, packed his bags, records, and plethora of equipment, and moved to the land of foghorns and hills. In 1998, Sunburn released his first full-length album, The Stereo Couple (which was also the soundtrack for last year's MTV Real World). Since then Howard's created tracks for local labels like Domestic, Ubiquity, and, of course, Sunburn, True Intent Recordings, and Tweekin'.

But unlike most electronic musicians, Howard has never pursued the DJing route, mainly because he values all those tiny hairs inside his aural cavities. "DJing really kills my ears, and my ears are more important than gigging," he says. "I love to do it; it's one of the most Zen things on the planet, and it is somewhat glamorous, but it's also a hard life. I know people who travel all the time, and the glamour of that wears out very quickly."

And that's why Howard has opted for much less glitzy bread and butter: that of a 9-to-5 computer programming gig. "For me, holding down a jobby-job and doing my music on the side feels like an OK compromise," he says. "I'm not immersed 24-7 in it, which I somewhat regret, but at the same time, not being immersed 24-7 enables me to not burn out, and that makes up for it. Club life is not super healthy, and you can see that. You see people drop out and burn out all the time. And ultimately I want peace of mind, even more than I want to make music. Because if I have that, I can always come back and make music."

For a San Francisco artist, achieving peace of mind isn't currently the easiest task. It may seem redundant to mention the rental crisis, but it's a predicament of which every artist community is acutely aware. "Most of the Phunckateck guys and girls live in one house and have a great landlord, but those are few and far between," he says. "It's going to drive the music community out, and it feels like rape. If I moved out of my place, where I pay very little, I'd be fucked."

Howard would like to see the dance music community be more included in the local art scene at large. "Arts are arts, and ultimately the rents are going to fuck every genre of art in S.F.," he says. "Look at what's happening to the dance studios in the Mission. Whether those communities come together consciously or not, they should be communicating. A friend of mine dances with the Portland Ballet and has used one of my songs, and they've used a Future Sound of London song. It's absurd not to have a connection. People who choreograph ought to have people who make electronic music create compositions for them. It doesn't have to be boom-boom-boom. I think musicians are up for the challenge, and it could be absolutely beautiful. It's natural. Although a lot of people are old-fogy about how they like their art."

Perhaps the new-world technological aspect of dance music keeps the more traditional communities apart? "That's asinine," he says. "All books are written on computer; does that make them any less of an art form? It's simply another way of working. If Mozart had a sequencer, he probably would have used it. Mendelssohn was lucky enough to be a rich shit, and his father bought him an entire orchestra so he could practice his compositions. Those who aren't so lucky do what they have to do – and so we do."

For more info on Lee Howard's releases, go to www.tweekin.com, www.trueintentrecordings.com, and www.sunburn.org.

more noise | return to top | sfbg.com