Matt Howden has now been writing, performing and recording under his ‘Sieben’ alias for nearly a quarter-century, and the fundamental recipe remains constant. Voice, violin and electronics. However, this apparently limited set-up has never been a constraint. On the contrary, it’s acted as a springboard for a relentlessly restless artist, allergic to repeating himself, hurtling into new territory with each release. This latest album is one of his fiercest: angry, heavy but fuelled by bass and beats. One foot on the dance floor, the other kicking the door down.

This time round, the Sieben sound has ‘fused’ more tightly than ever, with the lines between virtuosic violin parts and the surrounding loops and layers now blurred into irrelevance. We can hear Howden playing up a storm, but his swirling patterns and solos are treated and processed into riffs that take on a near-metallic heft. Take the siren-stateliness of ‘Programme of Entertainment’ or the hit-from-hell chaotic catchiness of ‘Snow Burial’ as prime examples of Howden’s ability to create a new kind of abrasive, accessible protest-punk music.

The album brings fresh lyrical intrigue too, as the direct, sniper-sharp mantra attack of recent Sieben records is here seasoned a little with unsettling, mystical imagery that chimes more with some of his work from back in the day. The resulting, brilliant effect is like listening to a nuclear-powered shaman, half Camden Underworld, half Speaker’s Corner. Strange and savage. Essential.

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If you’re a regular ArtMuseLondon reader, or even if you’ve just stumbled across this piece, I’m sure you agree how important it is to support artists as far as you are able. There are two particularly effective ways to support Sieben.

First of these is Bandcamp. For those unfamiliar, Bandcamp is a website that gives musicians and independent record labels a place to host and sell their music. Everything on there is available digitally (with high-quality files available for audiophiles alongside the usual MP3s), but many artists also use the platform to sell CDs and vinyl to those who want them (you normally get the digital files, too), t-shirts and various kinds of exclusive merch.

Howden has made almost the entire Sieben back catalogue available on his Bandcamp page, here. Twenty-odd recordings, going back nearly 25 years – with CD versions still available for all the albums from 2009 onwards. Following Howden’s career for 20 of those years has meant constant surprise and delight with each new album, change of direction and sonic innovation: but seeing the whole body of work laid out in its entirety for the first time might be daunting. With this in mind, please see my ‘buyer’s guide’ below, allowing you to tailor the Sieben experience to suit you…

Once you’ve become fully-fledged devotee, the second way to keep these amazing albums coming is to support Howden on Patreon, here. Patreon works differently to Bandcamp, in that instead of paying for the past work, you are helping to fund its future. The artist opens up a channel of communication with their fans, and often you will get an insider’s view into their working process and previews or early versions of the material. In return, you make a regular financial commitment to the creator at a level you can afford – usually ranging from a small monthly amount to paying enough to become a sponsor of sorts – and you receive ‘rewards’ accordingly.

You can sign up to Howden’s Patreon for as little as $7 a month, and you will immediately be witness not only to his new material as and when he writes and arranges it, but also his incredible work ethic. Videos for songs, beautifully mastered recordings of live sessions – Howden hesitated for some time before exploring any kind of crowdfunding as he wanted to give proper value for money, but there’s no doubt that he offers that here, with a wealth of extra information and insight beyond the music in itself. Please check the page out, and join up if you can.

Recommended listening

As I mention above, Howden’s set-up has never held him back from constantly experimenting and evolving his sound, songwriting and subject focus. Accordingly, following him in ‘real-time’ has always been a rollercoaster ride. Taking this opportunity to step back and think about how to navigate such a catalogue when it’s all (so far!) available at once, it’s possible to see phases and patterns… But overall, what comes across is a singular vision, a fully-formed idea of how to assemble this unique audio framework, which is still flexible and versatile enough to fire off in endlessly different directions.

Certainly, if you are after some classically-charged fuzzed-up fury, the new album is a great place to come on board. But where next? I haven’t tried to plot a single journey through Sieben country: you might want something similar, you might want more of a change – Howden’s discography provides all the options. Instead, I’ve flagged some of my highlights, and I hope they encourage you to explore the riches on offer.

Sex and Wildflowers / Ogham inside the Night

Sieben emerged in – for want of a better description – the ‘dark folk’ scene and lent his demon fiddling skills to numerous collaborations as well as finding his own sound. Alongside the unusual instrumentation, Howden developed an unashamedly progressive facility for lyrics, stimulating the head as well as the heart: ‘Sex and Wildflowers’ in particular – as the name might imply – forged almost a new love-song language incorporating plant names and references.

At first, the music on these records will seem more mellow and introspective than the current record by some distance, but that is to underestimate their ritualistic, cumulative power.

By the way, these records don’t make up a ‘twin’/‘double’ album (so don’t expect a dual experience like ‘Kid A’/‘Amnesiac’, ‘Sons and Fascination’/‘Sister Feelings Call’ or even ‘A Night at the Opera’/‘A Day at the Races’). However, Sieben fans of a certain vintage may treasure the memory, as I do, of ‘Ogham inside the Night’ coming with a bonus CD of ‘Sex and Wildflowers’ plus bonus tracks – a two-hour Sieben festival! If you ever come across a second-hand copy of this lovely thing in the wild, resistance is futile. In the meantime: Bandcamp.

Desire Rites

After a sequence of pastoral-themed releases, Howden turned his unblinking lyrical focus on himself (among other concerns). I often feel this record always deserves more attention than it gets – it’s an early sign of the musical turmoil we hear more of in the later albums without abandoning the intricate delicacy of what went before. It features an astonishing power move on the listener in the opening track, and later on you get one of Howden’s most satisfying, soaring masterpieces, ‘Missolonghi Sky’.

The Old Magic / The Other Side of the River

These records do make a pair – they marshal the tracks from a series of EPs into a ‘main’ album, plus a bonus disc with alternative versions and deeper cuts. Taking advantage of releasing bitesizedigital clutches of tracks with no restraints (not to mention an increasing arsenal of equipment),Howden created a series of expansive epics (some stretching to around 10 minutes). At their most intense, these songs achieve a cavernous, magnetic power, grinding, driven – the two title tracks are perhaps the most extreme, exhilarating examples.

20:20 Vision

We enter the ‘world’s going mad’ years, during which Howden has morphed into a satirical, unsparing chronicler of decline, pushing his fiddle to its furious limits (he now plays an electric Kevlar violin – or ‘Kev’, who has acquired his own disruptive ventriloquist-dummy persona) and turning his linguistic skills to rhyming wordplay. This album has a simmering feel, tracks like ‘Vision’, ‘You, My Cult of Blight’ and ‘Death Tape Updated for 2020’, sustaining a constant tension, even as the earworms enter your brain.

Lockdown Sieben

Total immersion! Howden diligently entertained his fanbase throughout the pandemic by staging weekly online concerts from his garden. Over so many gigs (and presumably an unexpectedly thorough phase of self-examination and re-discovery), he found time to re-record over 100 songs with his latest set-up. Perhaps not for the uninitiated, but it is the ultimate deep-dive: what might have first seemed folly became a re-statement of aims, a mammoth celebration of the joys of creation and reinvention (Howden has already revisited older tracks, but not on this scale). Once you start listening – and, perhaps inevitably, playing compare and contrast with the originals – the extent of Howden’s mastery of arrangement and assembly become apparent. Sample in separate volumes on Bandcamp, or visit Howden’s website to buy the handsome CD boxset.

AA