Part 1

Name: Andrew Poppy
Nationality: British
Occupation: Composer, pianist, producer
Recent release: Andrew Poppy's Ark Hive of A Live, a 4 CD set and 128 page book with writing by Andrew, Paul Morley, Leah Kardos, Nik Bärtsch and Rose English, is out via False Walls January 27th.

[Read our Nik Bärtsch interview]

Recommendations: There’s always an A and a B roll for me, so:
Books:
Maggie Nelson – On Freedom: four songs of care and constraint.
Ben Lerner - No Art
Painting:
Jean-Michel Basquiat - Tuxedo
Bridget Riley - Composition with Circles
Music:
The Necks - Sex
Morton Feldman - The Turfan Fragments

If you enjoyed this interview with Andrew Poppy and would like to find out more about his music, visit his official website. He is also on Facebook.



When did you start writing/producing/playing music and what or who were your early passions and influences? What was it about music and/or sound that drew you to it?

By chance I’ve just been watching Marvin Gaye perform “Can I Get A Witness” on YouTube. Looks like an early 60s TV show. There is something archetypal in the singer’s call, the preacher’s shout, the owl’s hoot and the rest: “Can I get a witness? Can I get a witness? I can’t hear you”.



Listening, writing, producing and playing seem to be connected to ‘call and response’. The call is reaching out to someone, something else, but it’s also a testing of the limits of the voice. How far can it reach, how far until it bounces off the walls? It transforms itself once it’s bounced off the walls and then is transformed again, electronically, by the microphone and recording technology. The call could be a response to another call, the call of the so-called zeitgeist or even the call of a machine.

Memory seems to somehow record moments of witnessing. The news report on BBC Radio 1 on the evening of the Cuban missile crisis or Kennedy’s assassination. The Beatles on Uncle Mac (a Saturday morning show on the BBC Light Programme, the precursor of Radio 1 before 1967), telling me “She Loves You”. It’s true, she did, she does.

The basic early days facts are: for a moment I played bass guitar in a school band, trying to improvise like Jack Bruce. The Cream’s live performance of “Sitting on Top of The World” being an entrancing wonder.



Around the same time, I make a tape piece inspired by hearing Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge, having read a book about what you could do creatively with a reel-to-reel tape recorder.



I was also trying to make things on the piano inspired by Nicky Hopkins on The Stones’ Beggars Banquet. The things that move me seem to demand a response.

When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening and how does it influence your approach to creativity?

That’s an intimate one. It happens in flashes, from nowhere, I get goosebumps and the hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck thing. Bowie’s vocal in the coda on “Drive-In Saturday”.



It’s some momentary ecstatic shudder. Those chugging low strings and eight French horns beefing up the syncopations in The Augurs of Spring / Dances of the Young Girls in Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. It speaks to the lower parts of the anatomy. And if you’ve seen the Pina Bausch choreography, it literally gets down and dirty in the mud. The sun beats down, the ground is wet and something’s going to happen, something’s going to change. Something that happens in the music changes my state of mind and there’s some kind of sensual response. I don’t need Pina’s cavorting, but it makes it more specifically erotic somehow.



Sound always demands a response, it’s an engagement that happens whether I like it or not. The car outside at two in the morning, just ticking over but making the room throb.

Most of the time I find background music hard if I’m trying to work. But there are exceptions. Some albums put me into some kind of creative trance, especially on repeat. I listened to The Associates’ Fourth Drawer Down on repeat in the early 80s when I was writing the ensemble piece The Object Is A Hungry Wolf.



Something about it just clicked. I think musical experience touches down in so many physical and psychological ways and the time and place are all contributing.

With Ark Hive of A Live, released on 27 January 2023, it’s really trying to be some kind of hybrid. A project length poem. It’s a collection of musical pieces sampling from forty years of musical doing. But then the writing and the book, which are part of the package, build something else into that space.

It’s a story of some kind but not like Disney’s Fantasia, more a John Cage Roaratorio collage thing. There are words and pictures. There’s time-lapse photography over four decades. There are things that travel alongside the music, not explaining but weaving in and out and above each discrete musical piece, like an albatross haunting a journey maybe.

How would you describe your development as an artist in terms of interests and challenges, searching for a personal voice, as well as breakthroughs?

There have been lots of breakthroughs. Playing Philip Glass’ Music in Fifths as a solo piano piece in a public concert while I was still a student in 1978. The first performance of 32 Frames for Amplified Orchestra with Goldsmiths Contemporary Orchestra conducted by Rupert Bond in 1981, which I recorded for The Beating of Wings album in 1985.



Sitting in the hall at the first performance I could not believe that it worked as well as it did. Having never played in an orchestra, I realised that all the listening to contemporary music, along with score reading and analysing of orchestral music, had somehow imprinted something into my imagination. I could write some kind of outsider orchestral piece.
 
Ark Hive of A Live is another breakthrough. It’s been a long time since I worked with an independent label. When CJ Mitchell from the False Walls label called and said he wanted to release my 2020 digital Ark Hive project as four CDs with commissioned writing, I knew it was a special opportunity. The Ark Hive of A Live presents the first and often only live performances of un-released music. And it’s the first time since The Beating of Wings that I’ve been able to release music for large ensembles.
 
Tell me a bit about your sense of identity and how it influences both your preferences as a listener and your creativity as an artist, please.

Tricky one. We’re negotiating influences all the time, don’t you think? It’s a very fluid thing. What I hear becomes what you see. What I am to me is in some struggle with what you want me to be. “There’s no squaring it!”

This question sort of asks me to psychoanalyse myself. In the context of the creative work, that’s a game for the listener and anyone who is interested, commentating on what I’ve done. But it’s not in any definitive way knowable anyway. I think creativity is in some ways a response to a need and doubt.

When I made a tape piece at school, my music teacher, who was a big-band musician, got very excited. I’d never had any response like that from piano lessons. I was fifteen, so from the beginning I was interested in exploring what composition was or could be. That, along with a contradictory desire to be a recording artist.

That contradiction drove a lot of my early decisions and aesthetic without me realising they were contradictions. In the early 80s I moved through lots of different but related roles. Musician, composer, arranger, recording producer, recording artist. Then, after 1984, being signed as an artist and composer by Trevor Horn, Jill Sinclair and Paul Morley at ZTT Records, and making two significantly different records, it sealed the contradictions, wrapped them in plastic somehow. There’s no going back from those significant moments.

Making stuff is a way of taking control of materials and making something of what you’ve got. It’s like a ball game. You test yourself in a safe but demanding space. So, I think that identity is a performance that everyone makes but no one is completely in control of. And it’s something that grows and changes over a lifetime.

When a professional photographer takes a promotional photograph, you can’t really control what’s going to happen. Every photographer sees you in a different way. And then once the image is out there, they live their own life. Ark Hive of A Live has portraits from 1985 to 2020. They reveal more than ageing. What they reveal is an open book.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and art?

The last answer answers some of this. It’s something intuitive that drives the journey. But, looking at the four different volumes of the Ark Hive, it would seem there’s a movement towards traditions and then away from them. There is the Orchestral (Almost The Same Shame and two movements from Horn Horn)



the Oratorio (Something in the Air)



and the Opera (Uranium Miners). And at the other end of the pendulum swing are more hybrid textures with electric guitar, drum machines and electric organ (Weighing The Measure, Eleven Word Title, and More Matter Less).



There is another swing from instrumental music towards song and the voice (Mouthing the Words) and that is the thing that’s preoccupied me on the last four albums. It’s a place where, inevitably, the language is going to start to mess with the formal desires and imperatives of instrumental music. The presence of language challenges the values of an instrumental project.

When I try to get an overview of what’s happened for me over the last forty years, it seems there is an engagement with established cultural institutions like the Liverpool or London orchestras, the Estonian Male Choir, the National Theatre and The South Bank Centre. And then there is another way of doing things. Those hand to mouth projects; individuals or groups of individuals who almost spontaneously come together to make things and performances happen – like the Birmingham-based Nosferatu and the Dublin-based Crash Ensemble. Both these types of engagement are represented on Ark Hive.

In some ways, independent labels like Rough Trade, ECM, Crepuscule, Mute, Mode, New Albion, Tape Worm, False Walls and even ZTT, are like these independent ensembles. They are labours of love; often started as the vision of one person. It’s a very positive sign that they are still emerging against all odds and possibility of financial success.

Having said all that, I’d like to think the material of each piece isn’t defined in some ultimate way by those things. And over a lifetime, the moves that get made almost seem themselves to be the material of a curious road-movie. Which is what is suggested by the Ark Hive. I don’t see it as a static library-type collection of old documents but the coming together of the Ark and a Hive, with all the fecund life that those images suggest.