POPPY ACKROYD - Escapement Visualized

Before treating us to her breakthrough record, “Feathers”, Poppy Ackroyd found time this year to reissue her acclaimed debut album, “Escapement”, in an enhanced edition. It's a bold move, resembling as it does many similar projects out there, except that translating music into visuals is usually a practice reserved for building live shows, rather than for new record releases.

Joining her on this venture is Tom Newell, aka Lumen, a video artist responsible for countless backdrops for live sets (for names including London Grammar and Hidden Orchestra) and lead curator of video contributions for the prestigious Glastonbury festival. The young London-based artist entrusted him with realizing her dream: a visual and performative translation of an album largely made up of pieces originally conceived for cinema, theatre and dance.

Newell's interpretation of a twilit, kaleidoscopic record unfolds across a makeshift cinema screen, on which the artist stages a series of short films, all sharing a misty, autumnal mood, almost echoing the timeless miniatures typical of The Joy Of Box. The chosen setting is a kind of wilder, less unsettling “Twin Peaks”, presented along with its surrounding prairies through the rain-streaked windows of a car in the delightful “Rain”.

There's room for animations, flashes of everyday life, shots of natural elements and (very frequent) wider landscape shots, which however end up reflecting very little of the mood evoked by the record as a whole. A work marked by crystalline clarity and a pronounced chromatic sensibility is matched here with footage from an evocative but decidedly more faded, damp, narrowly London-ish film, one that struggles to reconcile with the music it's meant to accompany.

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27/12/2014