Paperclip Minimiser is a project of John Howes, a Manchester producer, sequencer designer and boss of the Cong Burn label. The alias houses his ambient and dub techno experiments, built on a deliberately restricted rig of vintage Nord Modular G2, Elektron Machinedrum and Monomachine hardware performed live rather than heavily edited. His records for Peak Oil sit in a lineage running through Chain Reaction, Mille Plateaux and Schematic, pairing bass-forward steppers with glitchy, weathered textures. Across a decade-plus discography that also runs under his Howes name, he has moved between individualist dance music and expressive sound art, releasing through Melodic, Youth and his own Cong Burn. Live he improvises from a fixed pool of sounds using a self-built digital workstation, letting each element breathe in its own space. He stands as one of the UK underground's most distinctive voices for early-digital, systems-based electronic music.