 |
1 | cresis | 8:42 |
| 2 | undur | 5:14 | |
| 3 | trem | 8:29 | |
| 4 | beres | 6:14 | |
|
5 | plosif | 3:07 |
| 6 | berant | 5:55 | |
| 7 | atam | 3:37 |
Rhodri Davies
Trem
I / For Richard Rowlands, Pioneer
Telyn bedal / Pedal harp
* gyda offer taro, radio a pheiriant tâp / with percussion, radio and tape recorders.
Radical harpist Rhodri Davies revives his 2003 debut solo release 'Trem' with a reissue on his own label as a stark reminder of his uniquely inventive brilliance.
"
One of the UK’s most vital, versatile, and combustible improvisers since the late ‘90s, Davies has earned a reputation as a fearless explorer of his historic instrument’s range, as applied on recordings with everyone from Apartment House to Richard Dawson & Hen Ogledd, Derek Bailey and even Charlotte Church. On ‘Trem’ we catch fire from a series of concert recordings made at St. Michael and All Angels Church, London, 2001 that manifest his prowess in multiple ways, making the harp gurn, shriek, rasp and sing in forms practically unheard previously from the stringed instrument that has been around, in some iteration or other, since 3000 BCE.
Without prior knowledge of context, you might be hard pushed to identify that Davies is even playing a harp, such is the dynamic range he elicits across ‘Trem’. His opener ‘Cresis’ makes haunting use of the church’s acoustic character in an unpredictable play of echoic negative space ranging from bat sonar like pips and half formed melodic structures resembling tortured choirs, thru to more gnarled evocations of doom metal, whereas the rapid plucks and vamps of ‘Undur’ hint at the instrument’s middle eastern provenance, and the album’s titular highlight also wields tape and percussion in a disorienting blizzard or noise masking its origins. In the tantalising high register tone and struck body of ‘Beres’ we hear traces of Romanian spectralist settings, and again a return to metal gnar in the buzzsaw grind of ‘Plosif’, while rupturing passages of near silence in ‘Berant’ and simmering it down to circling embers on ‘Atam’. " - Boomkat
* gyda offer taro, radio a pheiriant tâp / with percussion, radio and tape recorders.
Recordiwyd y cyngherddau yn fyw yn ‘All Angels’ Llundain.
Live at All Angels, St Michael and All Angels Church, West London.
1, 2: Mai / May 10, 2001.
4, 6: Tachwedd / November 22, 2001.
3, 5, 7: Rhagfyr / December 7, 2001.
Recordiwyd gan / Recorded by Tim Fletcher.
Ail-feistrolwyd o DAT gan / Re-mastered from DAT by Sam Grant.
Dylunio gan / Design by Anna Peaker.
Darlun gan / Drawing by Jean-Luc Guionnet.
Rhyddhawyd Trem yn gyntaf ar CD gan Recordiau Confront, Confront 11 (2002) ac yna ar finyl gan Alt Vinyl, av055 (2014).
Trem was first released on CD with Confront Recordings, Confront 11 (2002) and on LP with Alt Vinyl, av055 (2014).
Diolch i / Thank you to: Graham Thrower and Mark Wastell.Radical harpist Rhodri Davies revives his 2003 debut solo release 'Trem' with a reissue on his own label as a stark reminder of his uniquely inventive brilliance.
Rhodri Davies is immersed in the worlds of improvisation, musical experimentation, composition and contemporary classical performance. He plays harp, electric harp, live-electronics and builds wind, water, ice, dry ice and fire harp installations and has released six solo albums. His regular groups include: HEN OGLEDD, Cranc, Common Objects and a duo with John Butcher. He has worked with the following artists: David Sylvian, Jenny Hval, Derek Bailey, Sofia Jernberg, Lina Lapelyte, Pat Thomas, Simon H Fell and Will Gaines.
For the last ten years Davies has been closely associated with the pioneering composer Eliane Radigue performing seventeen of her pieces. She composed OCCAM I for Davies in 2011, the first in an ongoing series of solo and ensemble pieces for individual instrumentalists in which a performer’s personal performance technique and particular relationship to their instrument function as the compositional material of the piece. New pieces for solo harp have also been composed for him by: Christian Wolff, Carole Finer, Philip Corner, Phill Niblock, Ben Patterson, Alison Knowles, Mieko Shiomi and Yasunao Tone.
In 2008 he collaborated with the visual artist Gustav Metzger on ‘Self-cancellation’, a large-scale audio-visual collaboration in London and Glasgow. In 2012 he was the recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grants to Artists Award, he was a Chapter Associate Artist (2016-19) and in 2017 he received a Creative Wales Award. He is a co-organiser of the NAWR concert series in Swansea.
