Poppy H – Good Hiding
»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
Good Hiding is released as a postcard set featuring 12 audio tracks of experimental music producer Poppy H and 12 postcards with images by visual artist Meneh Peh.
Poppy H is an experimental musician, field recordist and producer using a smartphone as mic and mixing desk. He already has an outstanding and diverse catalog of releases on labels such as Cruel Nation Records and his own Bandcamp site.
Meneh Peh is a visual artist from Spain. Her works include experimental analog photography and collages. She is also part of the music project Emilia and curator of the Rottenman Editions music label and art studio.