Good Hiding by Poppy H

"There’s a funereal sensibility throughout, a kind of hushed gloom; stray voices peek in from the corners at times, while field-recorded room tone peels back the walls to reveal what lies beyond. Release after release, Poppy H’s catalog is revealing itself as a kind of world-building, and Good Hiding might be the most complete picture of his universe yet." Philip Sherburne, Futurism Restated, July 2024

»If you examine the term ‘good hiding’, roll it around your brain until the more obvious connotations loosen, its meaning begins to disintegrate and drift into new places, like pieces of dead skin glistening in the sunlight.

Good hiding: a severe thrashing or beating
Good hiding: righteousness gone to ground
Good hiding: a successful concealment

For British producer Poppy H, this type of ambiguity swirls at the core of his work, previous releases Grave Era and Nothing Is Perfect, Everything Is Perfect operating in the hazy intersection where the spectral spook of fading memory drifts into the polaroid blur of melancholia and longing.

On Good Hiding, he adds into this compelling mixture a sense of distance, of separation; "Mistaken For A Jumper" holds a glass against a brick wall of post-Boards of Canada electronics, straining to hear the everyday clatter which emanates from someone else’s room, while "Scout" peers out of a rain-dappled window, watching strangers float along the street.

A house packed with people is somehow lonely.
A deserted road is full of voices.
The memory slides on the breeze like a feather, dissolving into the rumble gaps of white noise snow.

Poppy H describes Good Hiding as being fuelled by the loneliness of "dodging crowds in the big smoke", and while “si okiron ko” and “Song For Garry B” offer some particularly bittersweet moments, what the record provides above all else is a sense of progress and hope. On “Away, Love”, a hand clap rhythm summons bright birdsong and climatic rumble from the ether, dissolving old hauntings in the sonic exorcism and clearing a space for new possibilities.«
Spenser Tomson

Experimental musician, field recordist and producer using a smartphone as mic and mixing desk.