- As a musician that exists in a surreal world between electronic experimentation and classical minimalism you hear Andrew Poppy played in some pretty varied places. I last heard him on Radio 1 as part of a celebratory mash-up of the early recordings of his futurist record label, Zang Tuum Tumb. But you are just as likely to hear his work on Radio 3, on their experimental show Mixing It.
Clubwise, it’s the same story. In the last few month’s I’ve heard Andrew Poppy’s music spun in the mainstream by Rob Da Bank and sandwiched between Miss Kittin and Laibach in the bizarre leftfield world of JL_Taxxu at Bartok’s Language Lab in Crouch End! If you haven’t heard his work before then now is the time – a three-CD box set has just been released covering all of Poppy’s highly influential material from the Zang Tuum Tumb period called – rather unimaginatively – Andrew Poppy on Zang Tuum Tumb.
The first disc is pretty random. You’re hit with a rollersocaster of classical workouts, electronic dub and full-blown industrial clank-works all floating around the island that was Poppy’s first pivotal work, the piano/electric piano dialogue Cadenza. On Disc Two things move one stage further – the tense (45 Is) sits alongside the eerie (Goodbye Mr G) bookended by the joyful (two rare versions of The Amusement).
All of these various ideas and styles are pulled together on Disc Three, which comprises completely unreleased material from the vaults of both Andrew Poppy and Zang Tuum Tumb. The Passage (Parts 1, 2, and 3) is a white-knuckle ride that will leave you short of breath and wanting more, even after it dies away after 20-odd minutes.
Other Andrew Poppy works and recordings are becoming available this year. Like Another Language (a piano/vocal album with Propaganda singer Claudia Brucken) and Levitation And Fall (an “Oratorio with electronics” for the 50-piece Grammy award-winning Estonia National Male Voice Choir). All of which are as diverse as the DJs that play his music. But the exciting thing is that as these projects emerge – 20 years after the sessions on this box set – all the threads are finally drawing together into a style and body of work that is as compelling as it is unique.