Dark Dispatches From Flat White Land

Poppy H produces pitch-black ambient on a smartphone

Poppy H in studio, photo courtesy of the artist

Remember that Burial album cover with the moody character sitting by the window in McDonald’s at night?

This is what I imagine Poppy H to look like.

Their music doesn’t sound alike, but there are some striking similarities.

Both are from London. Both want to remain anonymous. Both make experimental music that could be considered ‘ambient’, and that evokes images of foggy city streets, viewed from the upper deck of a night bus. And while Burial reportedly produced his early masterpieces on a cracked version of SoundForge, Poppy H records, mixes and masters their music on a smartphone.

Poppy H released their debut album Nothing is Perfect, Everything is Perfect last autumn, to acclaim from The Wire. Their second album Grave Era just came out, and it’s even better.

I’ve found myself listening to the warped pianos, found sounds and ghostly voices of Grave Era constantly throughout the dark days of January.

When I first heard this music, I had no idea how it was made. I was surprised to learn about the primitive production methods. Sometimes extreme limitations can lead to an outpouring of creativity.

Listening to these unsettling lo-fi beats, I feel reminded of the ‘Isolationism’ movement in the mid-1990s. At that time, ambient music – mostly in the form of trip-hop and downbeat – suddenly popped up in car commercials and on cheesy coffee-table compilations.

In an effort to reclaim and expand the genre, Kevin Martin (alias The Bug) coined the ‘Isolationism’ term in an article for, you guessed it, The Wire. In 1994, he curated the groundbreaking compilation Ambient 4: Isolationism, a journey through the dark side of the genre.

Though released on the major label Virgin Records, this ‘asocial music’ wasn’t meant to invite people – and definitely not to trick them into mindless background consumption –, but rather to push those away who weren’t interested in listening deeply.

The music of Poppy H would have fit right in with Martin’s vision of Isolationism, and we’re actually facing a similar – if not worse – situation today.

The mid- to late 2010s saw the so-called ambient boom. Some great records were (re-)discovered and surfaced by artists, journalists, even algorithms. During the COVID years, the market was flooded with generic lo-fi beats to study to, 31-second rainfall tracks, exchangeable synth drones and other ‘functional music’. Ambient turned into a synonym for ‘capitalist productivity music’ (Huerco S.).

Grave Era is an antithesis to all of that. To quote the Bandcamp blurb, these tunes are dispatches from “a world where overpriced flat whites and skinny lattes are served against a rolling backdrop of death, destruction and displacement”.

The person behind the Poppy H project agreed to answer a few questions. You will find the transcript, slightly edited for readability, below.

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