Photo: Nikita Laganovskis

With nothing but magnificent releases under her belt, it’s no wonder that we’re always excited to hear new music from Poppy Ackroyd. The tremendously talented multi-instrumentalist and composer is back with an intimate new album titled Liminal. Releasing on June 5th through One Little Independent Records, it sees her returning to the violin for the first time since 2018’s Resolve, in addition to also playing the piano. “Melody, harmony, rhythm and texture are all extracted from the physical bodies of the instruments themselves”, describes the press relese, “from bowed and plucked strings to percussive elements.”

Liminal arrives following a period of upheaval and transition. “In the last three years everyone I loved most in the world needed me, all at once,” she explains. “There has been new life and death, heartbreak and many other things that are not my stories to tell. I have also moved across the country to a part of the world I have never lived in before.”

Despite being born out of some turbulent chapters in her life, the album carries an undercurrent of steady determination, and Ackroyd later found herself listening to the album and being surprised by a lightness she hadn’t felt in the studio. “I had such a chaotic few years, but the only way to cope was to allow things to be messy,” she reflects. “Embracing the messy and imperfect but still getting things done. I decided to apply this approach to my music making and I found that I still maintain the same attention to detail but without the pressure, and I fell in love with making music again in a whole new way.”

Ahead of the album’s release, Ackroyd has shared the beautiful and wholly enveloping ‘The Unknown’. The single comes paired with an accompanying video made by Tom Newell. Watch it below.

A longtime favourite of ours, incredibly talented multi-instrumentalist and composer Poppy Ackroyd is set to release a new single, ‘Notes on Water’, on March 26th through One Little Independent Records. A deeply personal track, it marks the first collaboration between Poppy and her late father, Norman Ackroyd, a renowned British landscape artist and etcher. Composed by Poppy during her father’s final months, the piece captures the vitality and passion he embodied throughout his life.

Inspired by their shared journeys to remote islands, the piece mirrors the fluidity of the ocean and their shared love for nature, the sea, and their bond as artists. Poppy comments:

“‘Notes on Water’ is our first collaboration, an effort to capture moments we have spent together traveling around the British Isles, both on land and at sea. Our journeys have taken us to Orkney and Cape Wrath, as well as more remote destinations like the Skellig Islands and the Outer Hebrides – the most memorable trips were to the Flannan Isles and North Rona – traversing both turbulent oceans and glassy seas. Although we worked in different mediums, we both expressed ourselves through a collection of black ink marks on paper. This project is a celebration of our love for nature and the landscape, for the sea and its birds, but most importantly, for each other.”

With its dynamic and fluid piano composition, the track embodies the vitality and zest for life that Norman carried until his passing in September 2024. The release will feature both a solo piano version and one of Norman’s final etchings, his final artistic work before passing away in September 2024. This collaboration also serves as a tribute to Norman’s memory, with proceeds from the single going to the Norman Ackroyd Foundation, supporting printmaking and the arts.

Speaking about the piece, Poppy adds:

“This is the best way I could say ‘I love you’, speaking his language, through our work, which is where we always met. He was so thrilled to do this piece. Even at 86, he was young at heart, still exploring new things. It’s a celebration of his passion, our shared experiences, and the unspoken bond we had through art and music.”

Beautiful, radiant and poignant, ‘Notes on Water’ is after your ears.

Last month saw the release of Poppy Ackroyd‘s Pause, her magnificent fourth album comprising 10 solo piano works that came to life during the pandemic, following the birth of her first child. The extraordinary multi-instrumentalist and composer Poppy Ackroyd has shared a new single from the record called ‘Suspended’. She had this to say about the track:

“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.”

‘Suspended’ comes with a gorgeous video by videographer Jola Kudela, who comments:

“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.”

Watch the video below.

Pause is out now through One Little Independent Records.

This November will see the release of Pause, the new album from talented multi-instrumentalist and composer Poppy Ackroyd. After sharing the delicate and delightful first single, ‘Seedling’, she has unveiled ‘Release’, a stunning new track said to be “about the feeling of wanting to run free, and embracing life and love”. ‘Release’ is offered  with a video made by designer, creative technologist and long-time collaborator Tom Newell. Speaking about the visuals, he explained they were “made by melting ice with a hair dryer under a macro lens, then using different light sources and a rotating plate to capture different movement and reflections, this video is an attempt to capture some of the beauty of this natural reaction”. Here’s the video.

Pause is out on November 12th through One Little Independent Records.

The tremendously talented multi-instrumentalist and composer Poppy Ackroyd has been a favourite of ours since the release of her debut album, Escapement, in 2012. So we´re excited to know she has a fourth album on the way entitled Pause. A collection of 10 solo piano works, the record came to life during the pandemic, following the birth of her first child. Poppy explains:

“For previous albums almost as much of the creative process was spent editing and manipulating recordings as it was composing at the piano, however after having my son, I struggled to spend time sat in front of a computer. The only thing I wanted to do while he was still small, if I wasn’t with him, was to play the piano. In fact, much of the album was written with him asleep on me in a sling as I used any quiet moment to compose.

It therefore made sense that this album should be a solo piano album. I used extended technique – playing with sounds from inside the instrument – like I do in my multi-tracked recordings, however it was important to me that every track on the album could be entirely performed with just two hands on the piano.”

Along with the album news, Poppy has shared the delicate and delightful first single ‘Seedling’. The track is offered with a fittingly gorgeous video by videographer Jola Kudela who offered some insight into it:

“I was trying to imagine the process of nature waking up, beginning with a seed, that then slowly transforms itself into a seedling. So, we begin with a frozen environment that encapsulates the seed – it seems trapped and immobilised by the icy world. Then gradually it starts to warm up and defrost, fighting with the power that has been holding it frozen.

I collected small pieces of plants and leaves, submerged them in water and put them in my freezer. Then I observed the process of defrosting, filming it in time-lapse. The technical approach has turned into a form of meditation and confrontation with time. Time-lapse by its nature involves recording long periods of time and changes that happen within the period wouldn’t be normally visible to the naked eye. So in a way it transforms the standard perception of time. You need to sit tight and wait, almost meditating for hours in order to see your final shot.

The second part of the video when the music grows was filmed in time-lapse with the infrared camera. By using infrared I wanted to push the idea of a seed perceiving the world around it even further: IR light isn’t visible to our eyes. The IR filter had cut out most of the visible light (400-700nm) and I was left with a fraction of it (720nm), visible only by extending the exposure time to 2 min per frame. As a result I was able to see a very narrow spectrum of light which is close to the infra-red frequency: a different aspect of electromagnetic radiation that surrounds us.

The post-production process was made on Autodesk Flame and I used a shader to project and manipulate images mapped inside a sphere. It completed my idea of simulating a point of view of a little seed.”

Pause will see the light of day on November 12th through One Little Independent Records. Now wrap your ears around ‘Seedling’.