Grave Era by Poppy H

"Philip Sherburne's Record of The Week
...Last week, in Berlin, I met up with my old friend Heiko Hoffmann, the former editor of Groove magazine, and he told me about his friend Stephan Kunze’s Substack, Zen Sounds. I wasn’t familiar with it, so I subscribed. The first issue I read was about an artist I wasn’t familiar with either, Poppy H. So I listened, and I was blown away.

Poppy H—a London-based artist whose anonymity seems much more tied to their exhaustion with social media than to any desire to be mysterious—makes music that doesn’t sound like anything else I can think of right now, a suggestive swirl that’s too uneasy to be called ambient yet doesn’t fit neatly in any other categories. The defining aesthetic is a kind of electroacoustic collage assembled from field recordings, guitar, piano, and who knows what else..."
(Philip Sherburne, Futurism Restated, Feb 2024)

"Almost want to call this delicate, fragile, it isn’t though, this is quietly strong, rather beautiful, soothing, some of it is deliciously minimal, the almost dusty sound on Shahid & Irfan is wonderful, it all is actually. Brilliant production, if production is the right description, real art of sound, minimal, painterly, about the space around the sound as much as the warm sound itself, kind of Super Eight feel to it. Gorgeous." (The Organ)

"Woozy, ultra lo-fi ambient field recordings, simultaneously distant yet inviting." (Heavy Metal Kids)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Multi-instrumentalist, field recordist and producer Poppy H captures sound and music via an openly recording phone, before mixing and mastering on the same device. This ultra lo-fi approach befits H’s improvisational and instinctive tendencies on this,his follow up to debut album "NOTHING IS PERFECT, EVERYTHING IS PERFECT", which The Wire described as showing that "true strangeness comes in the minutiae of unexpected places, the rattle and hum of analogue media or the hubbub of childhood memories."

"GRAVE ERA" draws a line in the sand between domestic and global conflict; in a world where overpriced flat whites and skinny lattes are served against a rolling backdrop of death, destruction and displacement. A class war rages externally and internally as H moves around the UK capital voyeuristically bottling fleeting exchanges, an outsider looking in, before heading to the eastern most point of the country to chant aloud, and onto his own living spaces where the familiar assault of modern appliances and construction work meet melancholy and hauntingly hopeful passages of improvised and crafted electronic and acoustic compositions.

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