Howie B – Turn the Dark Off (1997)
By Rafi Mercer
It’s strange how a record can sound like midnight even when you play it in the afternoon. Turn the Dark Off, released in 1997, has that rare power — to bend time, to tint the room. Within a few minutes, everything feels slower, warmer, slightly out of focus in the best possible way.
Howie B — the Scottish producer who seemed to orbit every corner of 1990s sound culture — made an album here that doesn’t belong to any one world. Too textural for club music, too playful for ambient, too soulful for electronica. It exists in that twilight space between genres, where listening becomes instinct, not intention.
The first time I heard it, I was working in a shop that closed late. Someone put it on after hours, and within a track or two the fluorescent light felt softer, conversation quieter. It didn’t demand attention; it just changed the temperature of the room. That’s what Howie B does — he alters the air pressure of sound.
The opener, “Phunk,” sets the tone with loose drums and rubbery bass that rolls like a tide underfoot. It’s imperfect, deliberate, human. Then “Take Your Partner by the Hand,” his duet with Robbie Robertson, arrives like an apparition — spoken word and dub texture, folk and trip-hop shaking hands across time. It shouldn’t work, but it does, because Howie understands that emotion hides in imperfection.
What’s remarkable is how unhurried it all feels. Every beat, every loop, every sigh of synth arrives with purpose. There’s space around the sound, as if each frequency has been given permission to breathe. Through a good system, the mix feels sculpted — sub-bass humming like memory, hi-hats panned like distant traffic, organs fading into dusk.
Turn the Dark Off is a study in tone. The rhythms are dusty but clean, grooves built not from drums but from gestures. You can hear fingers sliding, faders easing, reverb tails left to dissolve naturally. It’s music that trusts process more than perfection.
“Control” carries that same quiet swagger — bassline steady, keys barely touching the surface. “Cook for You” brings warmth and humour, with its soft funk and gently absurd title. It’s as if Howie is smiling at the whole idea of genres, taking what he needs from each and leaving the rest behind.
And that’s what makes this record endure: its refusal to be categorised. It came out on Island Records during a time when everyone was defining “trip-hop,” yet Howie sidestepped the label entirely. His beats were too loose, his sense of space too patient. He wasn’t chasing cool; he was building character.
There’s a painterly quality to how he uses sound. Colours blur into one another, textures overlap, accidents become design. You can hear the tape hiss, the mic bleed, the human noise left in on purpose. It’s production that values feel over fidelity — the same spirit that would later shape the listening-bar aesthetic years before anyone called it that.
Listening again now, nearly three decades later, it still feels remarkably fresh. The basslines are tactile, the percussion earthy, the melodies slightly bent but always beautiful. It’s not nostalgia; it’s timing. He knew exactly how long to let a groove breathe, how slowly to turn a corner. That’s a form of confidence no software can replicate.
There’s also a subtle emotional arc across the record. Beneath the humour and the groove lies melancholy — a sense of someone looking back through sound, testing what still holds meaning. The warmth is real, but so is the weariness. You can feel the hour — that strange 2 a.m. point between thought and drift.
The title, Turn the Dark Off, sounds like advice. But it’s more like an invitation: to sit in the half-light and let the room glow from within. It’s not about banishing darkness; it’s about learning how to hear inside it.
That’s what listening albums often forget — they don’t all need to whisper. Some can hum, sway, and even stumble. Howie B understood that imperfections make the rhythm breathe. He built an album that reminds you sound doesn’t have to be perfect to feel whole.
Through a pair of good speakers, the low end rolls like fog underfoot. You hear the dust on the tape, the laughter behind the mix. It’s an album that lives in the corners, in the air between hi-hats and heartbeats.
When it ends, it doesn’t really finish — it just leaves. The silence afterwards feels changed, as though the room has absorbed its pulse. You realise how rare that is: music that doesn’t decorate time but inhabits it.
Turn the Dark Off is exactly that — a record that doesn’t turn out the lights, but changes the way you see in the dark.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters.
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