Rhodri Davies (Bandcamp)
There’s a breadth of vision to harpist Rhodri Davies’ music. It brings together minimalism and free improvisation, noise and simple pentatonic and modal note-patterns, avant-gardism and tradition. The same applies to the tools he makes it with, which range from the modern pedal harp to the medieval telyn rawn (more later), not to mention his use of electronics to modify the sound. This compilation of eight solo albums – a record of over twenty years of music-making – captures that breadth.
Davies has been a fixture on the free improvisation scene since the late 1990s. The first album in this collection, trem, brings together a series of recordings of solo performances made at St. Michael and All Angels Church, London, in 2001. The spacious sound-world of the first track, ‘cresis’, exploits the impressive acoustics of the venue. The title of the second track, ‘undur’ (the Welsh word for ‘unity’) begins with luminous, microtonal waves of sound which broadens out, finally settling on a darker, brooding static point before returning to a place reminiscent of the beginning. The next track – the title track, ‘trem’ – is fabricated from long strips of pink noise (almost certainly radio static: on this album, Davies’ pedal harp is supplemented with percussion, radio and tape recorders). The fourth track, ‘beres’ returns to spacious world of the first track, to be followed by the surging drone of ‘plosif’ (‘plosive’) and the sonorous harmonics of ‘berant’ (‘parent’). The final track, ‘atam’ (‘to me’), is an exploration of near-silence.
The second album in the set, Over Shadows, is a very different beast. It was made with a lever harp (smaller than the pedal harp of the first album) played with Ebows. Ebows are electronic devices that emit electromagnetic pulses that cause an instrument’s strings to vibrate (much as the wind agitates the strings of an aeolian harp). Played with an Ebow, a string instrument can produce sounds not unlike a synthesizer. Over Shadows consists of an single, thirty-six minute track. There are long periods of stasis, alternating with periods of movement, although the music is never fast. It struck me, listening, how the former prepare the mind for the latter. After long periods of no change, change becomes a thing of wonder.
The third, Wound Response, is very different again. It was made using a lap harp with amplification and overdrive. In place of drones we have agitated, minimalist patterns. The overdrive makes the harp almost electric-guitar like, but not quite. The album is prefaced with a quote from Russian Supremacist artist Kasimir Malevich: ‘And may the freed bear bathe his body amid the flows of the frozen north and not languish in the aquarium of distilled water in the academic garden.’ It’s easy to see how a musician who puts music together the way Davies does would be drawn to Malevich, an artist who believed the artist should be free from any idealised preconceptions of what life and art should be like. (That said, alongside its radical edge, there is a deep sense of tradition in Davies’ music, as we shall see later). The album itself is an exploration of one musical idea, most clearly stated in the sixth track, the appropriately-titled ”pivotal’ object’.
Wound Response revolved around the notes of a modal minor scale. The next album in the set, An Air Swept Clean of All Distance, revolves around the pentatonic scale. As David Toop said of it, ‘there is a static character to the playing here, rising and falling, arrested and stuttering, rolling and tumbling…returning compulsively to the same passage as if caught in that same tangled web of strings once violently cut, now reconstituted into a set of revenant problems.’
In the fourteenth century, the Welsh bard, Iolo Goch wrote a satirical poem mocking the fashion for the stringing of harps the English way, with gut. A medieval Welsh harp (a ‘telyn rawn’) was traditionally strung with horsehair. Sadly, despite Iolo Goch’s advocacy, the English, gut-strung harp came to supplant it and the telyn rawn was largely forgotten.
Davies has researched the instrument and, in 2016, commissioned one to be made. He went on to use it to make the next album, Telyn Rawn. which he prefaces with a quote from Iolo Goch: ‘wise is the easy lively expression of the harp of shining black horsehair.’ If, in places, the music sounds like a galloping horse, this is no coincidence: as Davies has said about his research, he ‘engaged with historical texts and poetry, learnt the techniques and music from the Robert ap Huw manuscript, and researched the importance of the horse and horse cults in Welsh culture’. Using a horsehair-strung harp to invoke the sound of a galloping horse is a potent magical idea. The close relationship between music and shamanism, never far from the surface in Davies’ music, is explicit here, as it is the next album.
Davies first encountered the improvising double bass player and composer Simon H. Fell in 1994. He became, as Davies put it later, ‘a portal for me into improvised music’. Davies and Fell joined forces with cellist Mark Wastell to form the improvisation group IST. The group performed together for over two decades. Their collaboration was brought to an end by Fell’s death, from cancer, in 2020. The solo album Davies created in response to this tragedy, For Simon H. Fell, is a ritualistic, profoundly-felt meditation on loss. Single sounds are imbued with emotional power. The texture is often sparse – even in the more sustained sections, you get the feeling silence is never far away. The gamelan-like section (from 29:00 onwards) of Part 1 represents, for me at least, some of the most potent music Davies has ever created.
Dwa Dni (‘Two Days’) consists of a collection of tracks Davies recorded at home during a covid lockdown. The Polish title (all the track titles are in Polish, too) reference the fact that he was learning the language at the time. He was also studying the Robert ap Huw Manuscript. The earliest-known collection of notated harp music, it dates from the seventeenth century and is written in a form of tablature. All the tracks on Dwa Dni are improvisations based on a list of alternative harp tunings listed by ap Huw in the Manuscript.
The final album in this compilation, Telyn Wrachïod (‘Witches’ Harp’), is also the most easily approachable to anyone unfamiliar with Davies’ work. Much of what he does is influenced by folk music and traditions and on this album, the folk element is very much to the fore (nowhere more so, perhaps, than in the track ‘Yr Hen Dôn’) . In the album notes, Davies describes the third track, ‘Cildraeth Sienco’, as ‘an improvisation based on an amalgamation of the notation and structure of Angharad Jenkins’ Brandy Cove with the alternative string tuning of ‘Cywair yn Nghywair y Wrach’ from Robert ap Huw’s manuscript’. More generally, Davies has talked about how his style of playing (often compared to late-twentieth century minimalism) has been influenced by jamming along to folk music without simply reproducing it.
On the first of these eight albums, trem, it’s often difficult to tell, from the sound-world Davies creates, that he’s actually playing the harp! By the time we reach the later albums, though, his preoccupation has shifted to exploring the essence and the traditions of the instrument. All I would say is, for anyone interested who is coming to free improvised music for the first time, the later albums are perhaps the best place to start – you might want to begin with Telyn Wrachïod and work your way back. That’s a lot of listening, but it’s well worth the trouble.
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Dominic Rivron
LINKS
WYTH:
https://rhodridavies.bandcamp.com/album/wyth-8-x-solo-album-set
Rhodri Davies remembers Simon H Fell:
https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/simon-h-fell-1959-2000-by-rhodri-davies
IST:
https://confrontrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/a-more-attractive-way
Soundmaking Podcast: Rhodri Davies talks to Matthew Shlomowitz about the album Dwa Dni:
https://shows.acast.com/soundmaking/episodes/soundmaking-ep-77-rhodri-davies-dwa-dni
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