Mark Howden – Rained Down: 13th Floor New Song Of The Day

Rained Down is the first single from Dreams, an upcoming self-produced EP from local musician and visual artist Mark Howden.

Here’s the blurb with more:

Rained Down was first recorded in Dunedin at Mark’s home studio in 2017, and completed after relocating to Northland in 2023. It’s a bass-driven song where complex-yet-subtle layers of textural sounds ebb and flow to create a distorted, otherworldly and dreamlike environment for a voice that speaks about reaching through uncertainty to catch your dreams.

Dreams has a double meaning here, an interplay of the surreal unconscious state intertwined with our own personal daily aspirations. “It was inspired by wintery moments waiting after recording in a cold Dunedin studio for it to stop raining so I could get outside for a walk or run and not get hyperthermic in the process.” The allusion here is to wait for the right moments to run or push toward your dreams/goals/visions, and to remember to keep going and trust where and why you’re headed if you feel lost. To stay open to possibilities you didn’t see before or wouldn’t have thought possible, that just didn’t seem realistic. From the second verse — “Ghost-like face, uncertainty, one moment you’re trapped, the next you’re free, a sea of dreams, the people need, and the last thing you can’t see yourself, know, no, know you can’t see yourself.”

Mark is not the type of guy to say much about his music usually. He recoils at promoting it, but he sure loves making it. He’s been around the music scene since the late nineties, as an art-school student playing guitar in bands at venues like Kurtz Lounge/@Luna and Substation, running a sound and video or “non-object art gallery” in Lorne Street, Auckland, working with Bic Runga as her production manager on Beautiful Collision in 2001 (uncredited), producing music from his own “primitive bedroom” studio since 2002, and later managing/engineering at Depot Sound Studio in Devonport from 2008-2013 where he worked at the grassroots with artists as diverse as Lorde, And They Were Masked, Five Mile Town, Jesse Sheehan, Team Dynamite and Homebrew, Flying Nun’s Surf Friends and the iconic Bill Direen (Bilders).

Of his own work he says, “I’m interested in creating music at a distance from “reality”, like in a dream, where there are no real repercussions or rules and at many points things are very stream of consciousness. On this EP I grouped songs that sounded dreamlike, distant, foreign or even slightly alien. Like they are from an isolated separate place, strange but make sense, time is fluid, easy and often peaceful. It’s hard to describe a dream isn’t it?

Difference is really important to me though, it’s central in my music production. I try not to be that influenced by others and just let influence seep into me. I don’t know, but I think my work is a little like an intentionally misspelt or reconfigured word, still recognisable but subtly rearranged. Sometimes that works.”  (This by the way is why his home studio is called ‘waht records’, as in the letters of the word ‘what’ rearranged, and not record as in the media but what is recorded in the studio — so it’s meaning is ‘what records’).

“I’m not trying to invent or reinvent anything though through this approach to music, just that this (creative approach) has been and still is, worth the effort. As an engineer and producer as well, I prefer not to make prescriptive work. When I make something I have to tweak it or twist it a little, I can’t help it, this is hard-wired in my brain. It’s probably a fault and some may say ruins it (he laughs), but it is also what I am compelled to do, and by the way most of the music I listen to has similar qualities, that’s what I like.

My musical journey of 20+ years so far has had a life of its own so I don’t fight it, I just go with it. My songwriting process reflects this also, as I write I enjoy being in the music as opposed to outside in control of it. Then, when I’m further through the production process I often feel as if it’s somebody else I’m mixing, or a different version of myself from another space and time. You basically forget about yourself and just try and make the best work possible without worrying about understanding it too much, meaning comes, that’s kind of the point.”

Website : https://markhowden.org

YouTube profile 

Click here to find Mark on Spotify

Apple Music : https://music.apple.com/nz/artist/mark-howden/1407598776