Snippets from the past carry distinct audio aromas, and varying balances of bitter, sweet and bold, here interfused with new touches. On Wadham Lodge, many moods have been coalesced, balanced and optimized to bring out nuanced sonic flavors.
A rich mélange of spice-filled dreams
I love the idea of recycling the detritus of our own lives, of putting old material into the creative compost pile, adding some fresh leaves, some water, and a few other ingredients to see what emerges. Musicians with boxes of tapes and CDs and folders on hard drives have a lot of potential work ahead of them. This is the kind of homemade material Poppy H has composted and the results are given stunning new life in the refortified musical soil of Wadham Lodge.
“Physical recordings of the artist’s music — old and unreleased — are played and mixed live simultaneously – and accompanied by original live improvisations and compositions. The process is captured by a mobile phone and mixed on the same device.”
It sounds simple, but the result is a rich mélange of spice-filled dreams. There are many philosophies about what dreams are. I’ve had enough experiences in recording my own dreams over long periods of time to think they connect me with something beyond myself. Yet there are certainly periods of time when the material churned around in dreams is like sifting through the rubble of past days and reordering it. Poppy H goes from the act of reusing and shuffling old musical memories and reaches into the beyond with rich imagination. It’s a very satisfying experience. Especially if you like things with a surrealist touch.
This is like an audio version of an exquisite corpse, except instead of making a collaborative drawing with others, he makes collaborative music with himself as he was in the past and as he was in the recent present (now past). He collaborates with this younger self and refines it into something through playfully messing around with it all. It’s a hallucinogenic fever dream. These songs seem to have been captured like butterflies in a net of hypnagogia while journeying through the land of nod.
“By unifying various component parts – once separated by time and place – it is hoped a greater meaning and deeper experience can be unlocked – and sense made of incomplete memories of old.”
It certainly all gels together, fused in a mutation of melted time. Beats, voices, the warbling of a diverse array of who knows what from who knows when, congeal into a grilled cheese sandwich of transitory moments. I like the fact that all the fixing of this together, all the gluing of these disparate pieces into a new kaleidoscopic design, took place on his phone. There is a simplicity to that -though I don’t really know if the process was at all simple. Such an approach does away with excuses for getting new work out their. New gear isn’t always needed. Sometimes its just old recordings and apps on the phone.
Tracks like “Balloon III” have a wabi sabi aesthetic. Jangled guitars frayed with distortion laze through a mist of electronic mire. (That’s a good thing by the way.) It’s imperfectly played, its incomplete, and like a dream shifts into the next thing without warning. “The Invention of Synthesis” features a bubbling pond of arpeggiated synth chords in a garden of gravel and rocks, breathing, tones, textures. Noise skims the surface of “Skinning a Cat” with buzzes and wobbulations, while underneath strings resonate causing ripples across a distorted mirror. Other tracks traverse a similar terrain moving from the known into the defamiliarized.
Audio that would have otherwise faded with neglect and be left alone on its storage medium is here overgrown with moss. Just as a melody requires different notes, so must a balanced and harmonious blend of past music use just the right tones. Snippets from the past carry distinct audio aromas, and varying balances of bitter, sweet and bold, here interfused with new touches. On Wadham Lodge, many moods have been coalesced, balanced and optimized to bring out nuanced sonic flavors.
Poppy H is available on Bandcamp.
