At the Drolma Wesel​-​Ling Monastery

“Consciousness is the only valuable thing. Money is not,” says the Chinese electronic musician Howie Lee. We’re sitting on a bench in the urban garden of the Bois de Vincennes in Paris, France, overlooking the banks of the Lac Daumesnil. Behind us, beyond tall grass and towering oaks, sits the Kagyu-Dzong center, a rather fitting backdrop to meet a producer whose last LP, At The Drolma Wesel​-​Ling Monastery, was recorded in the mountains of northeastern Tibet. After the album’s release in April 2024, the Vajrayana mantras contained within would go on to leave an indelible mark on Lee’s vision of himself as an artist.

“I think Buddhist teachings are like, you open a little narrow door, then you look inside. There is always so much you find,” he says. “Then you go, you become, but in the end, you figure out there’s actually no new knowledge gained. You’ve already had the knowledge all along.” His words echo the doctrine of the “original mind” (aka “buddha-nature”), that learning the dharma ultimately becomes a process of unlearning all the obstructions to the innate purity of one’s consciousness—not unlike the passing clouds covering the sun above us.

For about twenty years prior, Lee had read much about Buddhism and Daoism while figuring out what would later become his artistic voice, developing his spiritual identity while simultaneously deepening his evolving relationship to computer music. Texts like the Heart Sutra contained ideologies that were “really cool for me to understand,” Lee explains. “There is nothing you can really grab hold of. It’s all ever-changing, and nothing is solid.” But his interest remained staunchly within the realm of philosophical inquiry—that is, until a Tibetan friend, the photographer and designer Nyema, called him during the pandemic and offered him the opportunity to visit Drolma Wesel​-​Ling, a monastery with which she had previously collaborated on a residency project.

“The way I came to this monastery, it was sort of magic,” he tells me. Across videos he shared with me, one can see the religious site sitting at the verdant grassland base of a dramatic mountainous peak. In one video, eighteen monastics gather around him playing on a makeshift synthesizer and laptop set up en plein air. They take turns jamming out and laughing as they make music together. In many ways, a work creates an artist as much as an artist creates their work. After his two weeks at Drolma Wesel​-​Ling, Lee continued to follow threads of Buddhism in his own life.

About a year later, he traveled to Indonesia with a Kagyu lama to celebrate Vesak, or the occasion of the birth of Buddha. There, while visiting the ruins of the Buddhist academy where the 11th-century Buddhist master Atisha had once studied, Lee was offered the opportunity to take refuge vows. That was how Lee formally became a Buddhist, though he says that he knew, deep down, that this was always the case. He took refuge once again last year at Mount Jizu in Dali while visiting a local master. Coincidentally, the temple happened to be hosting a refuge ceremony, so Lee joined in and was bestowed with the dharma name 没有, which translates to “none” or “nothing.” 

His album’s ancient incantations, interpolated between propulsive glitches and clattering drums, comprise Lee’s original take on the high-energy genre of footwork, and yet his work hybridizes an even bigger range of global influences—blending the aforementioned Chicago-spun genre with Tibetan mantras and a Chinese club sensibility—with the end result being a contemporary spiritual sound that is uniquely his own. In the years since Drolma Wesel​-​Ling’s release, Lee has moved away from touring, DJing, and his usual club-hopping lifestyle. Instead, he’s been prioritizing impermanent ritual music experiences, like a recent live performance at the Scripture Hall of Kiyomizu-dera, a Buddhist temple in Kyoto, and another at the LAS Art Foundation’s finissage with KUKII (fka Lafawndah) in April of last year. 

At present, Lee asserts, “I’m being very quiet,” explaining that in this new reflective phase of his career, he’s trying to find the balance between improvisation, ceremony, and the concert experiences that have thus far shaped his oeuvre. “I started to realize that creating a secret moment is more important than anything else.”

In the following interview, Lee takes us back to the two weeks he spent at the Drolma Wesel​-​Ling Monastery that laid the groundwork for his breakthrough album and how his musical retreat would go on to influence his artistic philosophy.

This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.

Were there any surprises for you confronting Buddhist monastic life up close? Did you notice many differences between the Buddhist practices you observed growing up and the realities of those residing in the actual monastery? I was very surprised. Drolma Wesel​-​Ling is a huge monastery. They have 300 nuns and 100 monks—and these Tibetan monks are very down-to-earth. They are quite young. Most of the monks are between the ages of 18 and 25. They are university-aged students, and also very open-minded and very curious about everything because that’s the nature of what they study. I think that curiosity is a shared characteristic for a lot of Buddhists. A lot of people have this stereotype about Buddhists—they have to follow certain rules, they are not eating certain things, but these people are very flexible. They were playing computer games after school, although the second time I went to the monastery, the master had banned that. One of the monks, because he’s very close to me, kept asking me, “Do you know this rapper and that rapper?” Because some of these monks are also paying attention to rap music coming out of China.

At The Drolma Wesel-Ling Monastery is a pandemic record but in many ways different from a lot of the more ambient or subdued records that were coming out around that time. Does music have to be quiet or subtle to be contemplative or reflective? What about the genres of footwork and bass music felt so natural to pair with the chanting of the monks and nuns? In China, the pandemic was playing out very differently from what was happening in the West. Before the pandemic, I was doing more ambient and soundscape music, but I came from a club background. Then, during the pandemic, I actually got so many requests to play in the club. I was about to quit before that. Parties during that time were so fun; we set everything up three days before because everything was so uncertain. Sometimes this city shuts down, sometimes that city shuts down. If it weren’t for that time, I wouldn’t have known as many people in the different Chinese scenes because they were all coming to my party series, Do Hits.

People were squeezing themselves into this narrow time frame, coming to the club just to dance and to realize that life was still going on. I figured I was needed, and that’s why I was very influenced by this understanding of my DJing by doing this particular album. These were my tools. Before the album, I had been playing the recordings of chanting by themselves in my DJ sets, just without a beat. The owner of the record label Mais Um called the monks “MCs” and thought that their “raps” were amazing. These nuns and monks have great voices. I think mountain people have the best voices.

Could you explain this theory of yours a bit more? There are a lot of caves in Tibet, and, in the ancient times, a lot of communications had to move through the curves of the mountain, and so they had to sing. Tibetan singing can have this very high-pitched timbre that doesn’t exist in other folk music traditions. Mountains also give an environment this loneliness as well. This loneliness drives you to use your body as a vibrator. You have to vibrate with your body to conquer this great loneliness, especially in Tibet, because its environment can be harsh. It’s nice in the summer, but the rest of the year it can be cold, and because of the altitude, there are lower oxygen levels. It can be hard to find food. I think that’s why the chanting comes naturally, because all the music is not just coming from nowhere.

Many in the pandemic experienced a closeness to death they had rarely experienced in their lives before, with some even having a near-death experience themselves. Did you have either of these experiences around the pandemic? What is it about being so close to death or experiencing an NDE that opens the mind to new possibilities or helps the mind to break through previous identities? Two of my very close family members passed away during the pandemic, but not from the virus. It was because of the hospital system; it was overpacked at the time. This left a very strong impression on me, and I saw their bodies and how their bodies were so different from my previous impression of them before they died. I think that’s also why I started questioning whether this life is an illusion, but I was always questioning that. It all just gave me this understanding that, OK, they all will pass away. All of us will pass away.

Can you tell me more about the founder of the monastery, Tuga Rinpoche, who was an amateur musician? Basically, he studied through this lineage of Kagyu, between Nyingma and Kagyu. He’s mainly a Tibetan doctor. He cures the people. I think most of the people there that are considered musicians are not like what we consider musicians or artists. I don’t think they have a particular artistic vision. They just want to write songs. I think most of the Tibetan rappers I know or the rinpoches coming here, they want to write songs about how great their teacher is or how great the Buddha is. They all use music to send goodwill to their master. It’s just like their ancestors had done before them, creating Tibetan folk songs.

Are you aware of the varying chanting styles in broader Buddhist traditions? The Gelugs, for example, have a renowned, throat-centered approach. How would you describe the specific style of chanting you heard at the Drolma Wesel-Ling Monastery? Have you ever seen the sheet music of Tibet? They have these amazing beautiful syllables, and they have this sheet music of their chanting. It’s called dao ge. So in dao ge, they have melodies that slope up and down, like the curves of mountains, and they use that as a guide. It’s also very beautiful. It’s like calligraphy in a way.

How did working on the album and spending time with the monks shift your relationship to and understanding of the mantras being chanted? A few months back someone was telling me that the Indonesian electronic duo Gabber Modus Operandi were playing my music in the infamous Berlin club Berghain, and it was amazing because that place has this huge energy. A dharma instrument and a great sound system can give you the same kind of feeling. You come to this place, and it’s such a God-ish thing; the sound is coming to you, and no matter if you are in a monastery or in a temple doing the ceremonies, you get this wall of sound, the wall of these patterns.

Since the album, you’ve further explored ritual and ceremonial music, like with LAS Art Foundation’s finissage with KUKII (fka Lafawndah), and a live performance at the Scripture Hall of Kiyomizu-dera, a Buddhist temple in Kyoto. How have you taken your Buddhist learnings and continued to interpolate them into your creative practice? I always come back to the idea that whatever Tibetan practice or Chinese practice or Indian practice I am undertaking is ultimately trying to lead me back to my own practice, and my practice is music. It’s more the sound that I practice. So the deep lesson is to be able to capture even the subtlest sound, and these are my new ceremonies. I’m doing these improvisational ceremonies with my gestures, and it’s more like body music, but we play super, super quiet. Our principle is the player, the performance is about everyone. So because the listeners are pointing their consciousness to the improviser, the improviser could do their thing. If their mind is tuned together, you can go with this quietness mode that no sound is needed, but once there’s no sound, you find the vibration of yourself.

All this thing, my music, my production, my electronic approach, is all going back to my own body. Then you go back to being invisible. The true way is always invisible.

You start to listen to the body of your surroundings, your heart rate, other people’s heart rates, then you can try to synchronize it all together. You have forty people synchronizing their beat. That’s a DJ, so that’s why everyone is a DJ. DJs go to a club to read the crowd. They have to read the crowd to react and to synchronize with the crowd. But in my mind, the crowd’s behavior is synchronizing itself.

More and more, I think of myself as a folk singer because there’s nothing you need, nothing else. All this thing, my music, my production, my electronic approach, is all going back to my own body. Then you go back to being invisible. The true way is always invisible.

Watch video footage Lee took at the Drolma Wesel-Ling Monastery below.