Poppy Ackroyd Shares Stunning New Video ‘Suspended’ by Jola Kudela
Album ‘Pause’ out now via One Little Independent Records
Brighton based performer and composer Poppy Ackroyd released her acclaimed latest album, ‘Pause’, in November. A selection of solo piano works written during the pandemic and shortly after the birth of her first child, the title refers to the feeling of normal life being temporarily put on hold.
Single ‘Suspended’ is lonely and removed in its presentation, with plucked notes that drift effortlessly and longingly. She tells us “It’s about the eerie quiet of a city in lockdown. Walking through Brighton in the early hours of the morning, often with the streets to myself, I found myself imagining what the bird’s eye view of the city would be like. Everything was so still, time almost felt suspended. This track was my attempt to capture that feeling. It is performed with both hands inside the piano, using the instruments strings rather than the keys. The left hand gently hammers the strings repeatedly from above, while the right picks out a plucked melody that floats over the top.”
Once again partnering with respected videographer Jola Kudela, the visuals for ‘Suspended’ capture this feeling perfectly. Jola says; “I knew about the genesis and Poppy’s intention when I started working on the video – empty quiet city, deserted by covid. But I live in London, not in Brighton, so I was experiencing anxiety rather than quietness created by this artificial state of suspension. That’s why I imagined a mysterious presence walking through the city, something that had taken the ownership of our space. But what at first seemed menacing became salvation and escape.
From a technical point of view, I shot the video in the post-lockdown era so it wasn’t easy to find empty streets anymore. So I based most of the process on still images that I projected into simple 3D forms and moved the camera in that space. This process is called camera mapping. The clouds where generated based on VDB objects (OpenVDB is an open-source library comprising a hierarchical data structure and tools for manipulation of sparse volumetric data discretized on three-dimensional grids). It required 3 weeks of rendering at a render farm of 8 computers. It was quite a technical challenge for me, working on my own, but it was very fulfilling to achieve the final result.”
A visually stunning film that accompanies this dramatic and rich instrumentation. The film utilizes that feeling of intimacy, solitude, and lonesomeness all of which are exaggerated by the striking and resonating keys which flourish throughout the harrowing journey. A remarkable and moving track intensified with the sublime video.
As individual stories ‘Pause’ is compelling and ambitious but in its entirety it’s a flawless snap-shot of its time, highlighting the highs and lows of the period as well as a unique and challenging era for its creator. It carries with it a host of stages we’ve all found ourselves working through and has done so with gorgeous, poetic lucidity, all the while expanding on the sounds usually expected of a solo piano record.
Poppy Ackroyd’s debut album ‘Escapement’ was released in December 2012 and a DVD – ‘Escapement Visualised’ – featuring bespoke visuals by Tom Newell for each track on the album, was released in September 2014. ‘Feathers’, her second album, followed in November 2014, and builds on the concept behind her debut, with most of the sounds again coming from the violin and the piano, however this time the tracks also feature other keyboard and string instruments. In 2017 she released her acoustic solo mini album ‘Sketches’ followed by ‘Resolve’ in February 2018 and ‘Resolve Reimagined’ in 2019, which featured remixes from Max Cooper, Hidden Orchestra, Hauschka and others.
In 2015 Poppy and Ainslie Henderson won a ‘Best Animation’ BAFTA for their collaboration ‘Stems’. A project with acclaimed director Jola Kudela became a short film for 2017 single ‘Trains’ which won 12 awards, including the Gold Movie Awards and South London Shorts. Most recently her music has been used by the New York City Ballet. Poppy is also a member of Joe Acheson’s live project Hidden Orchestra and has worked on numerous projects with other musicians, artists, filmmakers, animators, dancers and actors.
No Comments