Andrew Poppy’s Ark Hive of A Live continues to be met with enthusiasm and delight. As False Walls’ most ambitious release to date (4 CDs, plus book and slipcase), we’re sharing some extracts from reviews and social media below. Over an hour of the Ark Hive can be streamed here. 

 

Robin Rimbaud on Instagram:
Ark Hive of A Live by British composer Andrew Poppy (b.1954) has just arrived and it’s an absolutely beautiful production. I first became familiar with Poppy’s work when he was part of seminal British ensemble, The Lost Jockey, whose work still stands tall today. I went to hear them perform live several times in the early 1980s and still own their sadly limited discography – one LP, one cassette and a 12” vinyl. Their work shared an attraction towards the minimalism school of American music, from Terry Riley, through Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Poppy then signed to Trevor Horn and Paul Morley’s Zang Tumb Tuum Records (ZTT) in 1984 and released the extraordinary The Beating of Wings album which I thoroughly recommend anyone take a listen to. I even contributed sleeve notes to a box set of recordings from this era at one point. Since then he’s released a truly vast body of inspiring work. This new 4 CD set, accompanied by a handsome 128 page book, acts as a place for unreleased music, apparently recorded live but treated, processed, added to and manipulated. I love that his work slips between genres with such ease, from electronica to ambient music, to operatic explorations to contemporary classical music. At points cranky cowboy guitars meet piano diversions, whilst percussion batters away, and synths softly float around the scene. Or cinematic strings go into battle with honking brass, and rapidly rolling lilting melodies chase them down. The publication is also fascinating as it features an an introduction by Paul Morley, and additional writings from Leah Kardos, Nik Bärtsch and Rose English. Definitely a release to treasure, and apparently it’s out officially today, which I never even realised writing this. And let’s be honest, his hair is a work of art in itself. I’ve heard that it even has its own postcode in London!

 

Brian Morton, Wire magazine:
The animating spirit is Poppy’s protean musical imagination, as light as wings beating one moment, thunderous and dark the next. … It’s not just an archive [but] otherwise unreleased works caught in live performance and gently transformed in the editing suite into the components of four well-shaped albums. … Poppy’s music is like Madagascar — you discover species there you don’t find anywhere else.

 

Downtown Music gallery, NYC, USA:
Each of the four CDs included has a different theme and different personnel with Mr. Poppy playing piano, drum machine, percussion, etc. There is quite a bit to take in with four discs and informative notes to read through. Disc or ‘Volume One’ begins with “Goodbye Piano Concerto” for piano, keyboards, guitar & percussion, all played by Mr. Poppy. It is an eerie, somewhat skeletal, minimalist piece with a slow central pulse which we can’t hear but it is there, buried below the surface. Although this piece is minimal, it does have a strong, suspense-filled vibe running throughout it. “Attempt at an Ecstatic Moment” and “Chewing the Corner” come from a larger piece called “Horn Horn”, six pieces for two solo saxes and orchestra. These pieces aresomewhat dark yet haunting, a bit solemn yet most stirring as well. “Chewing the Corner” raises the bar to a more uptempo, magical landscape with a stream of dreamy flutes and percussion plus some complex, kaleidoscopic orchestral parts. “Almost the Same Shame” is for piano and orchestra. The piano part sounds like a sped-up Philip Glass-like minimalist work. “Weighing the Measure” is for piano, drum machine percussion with bass clarinet & accordion. The music contains a series of drones, both soothing and a bit eerie. I still have to listen to the other three discs. I must admit that I am most impressed with the disc that I’ve heard and the great artwork & preparation that went into creating this lovely box set.

 

Freq:
Not listened to any Andrew Poppy until now and l’ve got to say I feel like l’ve been missing out, as this compelling four-disc excursion aptly demonstrates. A superb series of endeavours embracing classical and avant flavours, Ark Hive Of A Live is full of improvised sparks and juddering disposition, the enclosed write-up full of fascinating insight.

 

Nieuwe Noten / New Notes:
A beautiful edition by the way, consisting of an extensive book and four CDs, together in a sturdy slipcase. A ‘must have’, as we say. And Poppy’s music fits perfectly into what I’ve been paying attention to for several weeks now: the minimalism in the music. Poppy also shows himself a descendant of this genre, although he is by no means limited to it.

 

Post-Punk Monk:
The price of the package all but demands its purchase as one rarely sees a package this luxe at an affordable price like £30.00. There will be 500 of these dispersing through the world and fans of the beauty that Mr. Poppy brings to the music would do well to invest …

 

Ark Hive of A Live is a 4 CD set of recordings by Andrew Poppy, along with a 128 page book, including writing by Andrew Poppy; an introduction by Paul Morley; other writing by Leah Kardos, Nik Bärtsch and Rose English; and archival photographs.

More detail here:
https://www.falsewalls.co.uk/release/ark-hive-of-a-live/

 

 

From the International Times review: “If, as the False Walls website says, ‘Ark Hive is an ironic meditation on the archive’ which ‘brings together elements of biography and materials from a lifetime of creative endeavour in sonic, language and visual forms’, then I would like to suggest that it is much more a celebration of being alive, of being persistent, tenacious and single-minded. Of being a wonderful composer, performer and musician … a superbly designed package … “
https://internationaltimes.it/different-places-everywhere/

 

 

The launch event for Ark Hive of A Live is on 4 April 2023 at Century Club, Soho, London. At the event, Andrew will be in discussion with the author Travis Elborough, and perform ‘Almost the Same Shame’ in person; the conversation will be accompanied by a selection of video pieces compiled by his long-term collaborator Julia Bardsley.
https://centuryclub.co.uk

 

 

A new interview with Andrew is also available here:
https://15questions.net/interview/fifteen-questions-interview-andrew-poppy/page-1/

 

Henry Dagg and Evan Parker’s new album THEN THROUGH NOW was launched at The Hot Tin, Faversham, on November 20, 2022. The event included support from Filter Feeder, an improvised performance by Henry and Evan, and a Q&A session with Henry and Evan facilitated by CJ Mitchell of False Walls.

Listen to and / buy the album here.

 

 

Mark Bandola on Facebook reported: “Outside, the elements were lashing fiercely autumnal, but inside a lucky crowd of music fans were blissfully being transported to a technicolour meeting of heavens and terra firmas spectaculaire, thanks to two musical mavericks, Evan Parker and Henry Dagg, playing a concert in their mutual stomping ground of Faversham, Kent, at the beautiful, inspiring The Hot Tin (literally a vintage church made of tin!!). The show was a benefit for this valuable alternative entertainment venue, and a showcase for the superb new album by the duo called ‘Then Through Now’, an unprecedented merging of the (BBC) radiophonic tones of Dagg’s “Stage Cage” with the highly expressive arpeggios of Parker’s saxophone – both artists are of the intuitive notion of re-acting rather than merely acting, so the lush waves of harmonics and mysterious melodic tumblings were both adventurous and heartfelt – and the crowd were focussed and appreciative.”

 

The following gig photos were taken by Simon Shaw Photography.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Henry Dagg and Evan Parker’s new album THEN THROUGH NOW is released by False Walls on November 25, 2022. The album captures Henry and Evan’s improvised performance as part of the Free Range series in Canterbury, Kent, on December 2, 2021. For that performance, Evan played soprano saxophone, and Henry developed a new electronic instrument called the Stage Cage, to both process Evan’s live sound as well as generate its own sounds. A conversation between Henry, Evan and performance artist Karen Christopher is included in a 20 page booklet which accompanies the release. Here is an extract from the conversation:

 

 

Karen: It’s clear that both instruments – the saxophone and the Stage Cage – have their own affordances, or things that they allow you to do, and ways that you have to interact with them in order to make it happen. I was aware of how the manner of producing the sound was also constantly becoming the sound: Evan’s finger movements, the way that the pads sound on the saxophone keys, and Evan’s breath sounds, and then also all the things you’ve built into this Stage Cage apparatus, are part of the sound making the sound.

 

Henry: Yes, that was part of my responsibility at any given moment, to decide whether I’d just let Evan do his thing, and augment it in some way by treatment, or add to it with something of my own, or to obliterate Evan with something of my own, or to try and come up with something where you couldn’t quite make out if it was Evan or me that was coming up with this weird combination of sounds. And of course, to that end, I did my best in places to try and emulate Evan’s technique on my very modest range of key controls.

 

Evan: The whole thing functions in a way like a sampler, but pre-computing sampling. And with the variable speed organised for the tape recorders, and the moveable heads between the two, it’s a very different way of being sampled and played back into the mix. Because there are two aspects to speed, the speed of articulation and the speed of presentation, and Henry’s thing was completely hard to predict.

 

Karen: Yes, it’s growing like an organism, instead of just absolute replication.

 

Evan: I gave up any hope of being in control of that aspect of things.

 

Karen: So how does that work for you?

 

Evan: Well, it’s great. Maybe an analogy would be with surfing, not that I’ve been a surfer, but it’s like these giant waves which sometimes are longer and bigger, and you’re waiting for a wave to come in, and launching yourself on a particular wave. Some of what I was hearing from Henry gave that impression of very powerful natural forces, which I couldn’t ignore, I had to go with it –and now would be a good time to do less, or now would be a good time to do more. Which all makes it sound a little bit simplistic, but there are basic decisions like that to be made in the course of trying to play for nearly an hour.

 

Karen Christopher is a performance maker, performer and teacher; her company, Haranczak/ Navarre Performance Projects, is devoted to collaborative processes and has been making a series of duets over the past decade.

 

“I came to Cindytalk by way of It’ll End in Tears, the 1984 album by This Mortal Coil on 4AD Records. Gordon Sharp’s vocals were a highlight, particularly on a cover version of Big Star’s ‘Kangaroo’ – no mean feat given that Elizabeth Fraser, Howard Devoto and Lisa Gerrard also sang on the record. The record sleeve helpfully credited Gordon as a member of Cindytalk, and as he notes in the interview below, many came to discover the comparably darker world of Cindytalk this way.”

That’s the introductory paragraph to an interview I carried out with Cinder for Stride Magazine in 2010, which can be read here:

http://www.stridebooks.co.uk/Stride%20mag2010/oct%202010/cindytalk%20int.htm

 

 

Many years later, I’m thrilled to be releasing Cindytalk’s new album Subterminal on False Walls, with artwork by Paul Tone (some of which is shown here). Cinder’s recent solo and predominantly electronic albums have continued to resonate in many poetic ways for me. More details/listen here.

 

 

The first album review, from International Times, includes: “Each of the four tracks is long enough to allow the listener to be sucked into the abstract landscapes which are evocatively conjured up here. Sound is sustained, drifting through changes of texture and dynamics, other noises echo and fade, interrupt and disrupt, feedback starts up then immediately ceases. It is disturbing, intriguing stuff, music to drift and dream in.” https://internationaltimes.it/a-poetry-of-noise/

— CJ Mitchell, False Walls

 

 

Helena Celle’s Music for Counterflows has been reviewed in various places — here’s a round up:

 

The Wire:
“ … an elongated and amorphous soundscape, fogged in reverb and scattered with unsettling percussive detritus. Issued by Faversham, Kent based label False Walls, the piece is a rumbling roam through dimly lit corridors that, over the course of 60 minutes, feels like being swallowed into the belly of reverberant catacombs. Around melodic xylophone-like percussion, [Kay] Logan establishes that this is high fantasy rather than realist terror, melodramatic synth cutting through ferric warble to create a hypnagogic, almost fairytale feel.”
— Spenser Tomson, in July 2022 edition

 

Monolith Cocktail:
“I regard Celle as more of an alchemist than an academic. She transfigures time and place and transforms rhythm into the irrhythmic. She improvises and hypnotises and experiments from an electronic playbook less-leafed.”
https://monolithcocktail.com/2022/08/10/our-daily-bread-535-helena-celle-music-for-counterflows/

 

On the fringes of sound:
“Part of a rapidly growing body of work, Music for Counterflows is an ambitious album from Glasgow-based artist Helena Celle that is comprised of a single hour-long track, effectively filling an entire compact disc by itself. The work itself is surprisingly varied in its composition despite maintaining the same instrumentation practically through its whole runtime. Hazy and reverberated sounds ping around and play off one another to create a hypnotic atmosphere that ebbs in and out. There is a certain theme that the song starts out with and periodically revisits throughout. The composition actually ends with a wildly mutated version of this theme that slowly falls apart until we are left in the silent stillness of the end. It’s mesmerizing and peculiar in its approach but makes for quite the experience as it never wears out its overarching themes.”
https://www.onthefringesofsound.com/post/rounding-the-fringes-july-21

 

Compulsion Online:
“Whether composed, improvised or programmed, Music For Counterflows is mischievous and fun, disrupting form and order…Consider it an album of outsider inventiveness or one that pushes a technology to its extremes, either way it is a delightful, demanding piece of work that is worth hearing from a multi-talented sound artist.”
http://compulsiononline.com/helena_celle_music_for_counterflows.htm

 

The Skinny:
“Music for Counterflows is a top-drawer production that pushes at the edges of a particular technology in a considered, engaging and beautiful way.”
https://www.theskinny.co.uk/music/reviews/albums/helena-celle-music-for-counterflows

 

Plus, some tweets:

“Listening to Helena Celle’s Music For Counterflows. This is great! It kind of sounds like forgotten 90s techno played on a broken cassette player, or a haunted PSX game”

“It’s an absolute cracker.”

“Highest recommendation for this amazing Helena Celle (@free_musick) album on the @falsewalls37 label, “Music For Counterflows” – an hour of captivating mutating loop structures. Booklet has an interview with HC conducted by @Stewfsmith which makes the physical an absolute must.”

For the 2021 online edition of the Counterflows festival, Glasgow-based Kay Logan (aka Helena Celle) created the hour-long electronic Music for Counterflows, accompanied by an interview with Stewart Smith. For the False Walls CD and digital release in July 2022, the music has been mastered by Stephan Mathieu, and the interview along with visual artwork by Kay are included in a 20 page booklet.

 

 

The following three digital releases come out on January 28, 2022:

 

 

Uchihashi Kazuhisa and Gene Coleman: Storobo Imp. (fw04)

“Gene Coleman’s work as a bass clarinetist and as a tireless promoter of genre-defying music is exemplary, and this set of seven improvised duos with Uchihashi Kazuhisa is superb. Uchihashi has been unfairly overlooked in recent times… but he’s been quietly perfecting not only his use of electronics but also the daxophone, a wild and wonderful instrument invented by Hans Reichel that sounds like a couple of walruses fucking in a plastic bathtub. Together with Coleman’s fruity bass clarinet, it sounds magnificent.”
Paristransatlatic magazine

 

 

Molar: The Time and Motion Studies (fw05)

“Peculiar electronic music with strange flowing qualities… Instead of familiar melodies and recognizable song structures, the trio instead opts to create musical soundscapes that evolve odd waves in the brains of the listeners. Particular beats and rhythms are infrequent and/or subtle as the players bend and mutate their oddly layered compositions… Plenty of excellent mental material here.”
babysue.com

 

 

Goat Island: “What would your shadow do?” (fw06)

Goat Island was a Chicago-based collaborative performance group, 1987–2009. The company produced performance works developed by its members for local, national and international audiences. The company also researched and wrote collaborative lectures for public events, and often subsequently published these. “What would your shadow do?” was originally commissioned for radio broadcast as part of the 2002 Outer Ear Festival of Sound in Chicago. The piece combines text recorded live at the Nightwalking Conference (London, 2002) with additional sounds and audio effects.