about

Calamateur is the moniker used by singer / songwriter / general noise-maker Andrew Howie. Based near Inverness in the Highlands of Scotland, Andrew has been recording and releasing his own music since 2000.

He has released 1 single, 5 EP's, 2 mini-album's, 2 full length albums, a collaboration album and curated a compilation. He has been likened to artists as diverse as Elliott Smith, Sparklehorse, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Damien Rice, Guided by Voices, Susuma Yokota and The Blue Nile.

His music has been played by John Peel, Radio 3's Late Junction, the Scottish Evening Session on Radio 1, Beat 106's The Beatscene and local radio / internet radio the length and breadth of the country. Here's what some people have to say:

"...nothing short of brilliantly absorbing..."  - Is This Music?

"...bloody good..."  - The List

"...stunning... a work of beauty...what took Snow Patrol's 3 albums and 4 people to accomplish, Calamateur's Andrew Howie manages straight off with songs of desolate beauty underpinned with a savage hope..."  - John Earls, Planet Sound

"...the aim is true and the heart is strong in this beautiful little record. 4/5."  - The List

"...providing one of those moments where your head says nothing really out of the ordinary happening here but your heart suggests otherwise, trembling as if touched by something altogether magical...."   - Losing Today

 

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Old Bio 1
oxygen 43 kg (61%, 2700 mol)
carbon 16 kg (23%, 1300 mol)
hydrogen 7 kg (10%, 6900 mol)
nitrogen 1.8 kg (2.5%, 129 mol)
calcium 1.0 kg (1.4%, 25 mol)
phosphorus 780 g (1.1%, 25 mol)
potassium 140 g (0.20%, 3.6 mol)
sulfur 140 g (0.20%, 4.4 mol)
sodium 100 g (0.14%, 4.3 mol)
chlorine 95 g (0.14%, 2.7 mol)
magnesium 19 g (0.03%, 0.78 mol)
iron 4.2 g
fluorine 2.6 g
zinc 2.3 g
silicon 1.0 g
rubidium 0.68 g
strontium 0.32 g
bromine 0.26 g
lead 0.12 g
copper 72 mg
aluminum 60 mg
cadmium 50 mg
cerium 40 mg
barium 22 mg
iodine 20 mg
tin 20 mg
titanium 20 mg
boron 18 mg
nickel 15 mg
selenium 15 mg
chromium 14 mg
manganese 12 mg
arsenic 7 mg
lithium 7 mg
cesium 6 mg
mercury 6 mg
germanium 5 mg
molybdenum 5 mg
cobalt 3 mg
antimony 2 mg
silver 2 mg
niobium 1.5 mg
zirconium 1 mg
lanthanum 0.8 mg
gallium 0.7 mg
tellurium 0.7 mg
yttrium 0.6 mg
bismuth 0.5 mg
thallium 0.5 mg
indium 0.4 mg
gold 0.2 mg
scandium 0.2 mg
tantalum 0.2 mg
vanadium 0.11 mg
thorium 0.1 mg
uranium 0.1 mg
samarium 50 µg
beryllium 36 µg
tungsten 20 µg,

housing a returned-to-sender soul.

A decision. A surrender. A promise (A-Z). Slow development of trust.

A lot of help (you won't do this on your own).

A denial of self, the sound of honest praise.

 

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Old Bio 2
Andrew Howie lives in an abandoned portastudio on the muddy banks of the Beauly Firth in the north of Scotland. He makes up songs using pieces of drift wood and the corpses of dead birds. Strange men steal them away in the night while he's digging for scallops or sleeping on the old couch behind the eight track. In the morning he has no songs and has to start all over again. Sometimes he dreams that he's actually married, living in a nice two storey flat over a mini market and has turned the spare bedroom into a high-tech recording studio. Since it rains a lot in Beauly and the roof of the portastudio leaks, he usual wakens from these dreams to find his face is wet and the song stealers have left the door open again.

Andrew has the knack of building songs from apparently disparate parts; delicately picked acoustic, soft harmonies, feedback, distortion, electronics, montages of samples, thunderous bass, rock guitar, and found sound; which make sense as satisfying, haunting wholes.

Reviews are found liberally scattered across the web and in various high falutin' music journals. There should be a sheet of impressive quotes attached here, but if you take a look at each Calamateur release on the Autoclave Records website you can read them in context and realise we weren't just extracting the juiciest lines. It really is fair to say "Critically Acclaimed". So we do.

Richard Vernon
Founder and Co-visionary, Autoclave Records