Creiriau y Delyn Rawn / Relics of the Horsehair Harp
Maverick Welsh harpist Rhodri Davies invites speculative interpretations of his 2020 solo album from likes of Laura Cannell, C. Spencer Yeh, Pat Thomas, Orphy Robinson, Phil Tyler and many more with wonderfully imaginative results.
In ‘Creiriau y Delyn Rawn / Relics of the Horsehair Harp’ Rhodri fields 18 variegated responses to his solo album ‘Telyn Rawn’, requesting a coterie of peers to imagine that his improvisations were made in the medieval period, and they were answering the call down the centuries. In a playful process riffing on notions of speculative fiction, uchronics, and pluralities of musical language, Davies effectively filters his work via a mix of Welsh, Irish, British, and international musical voices with results remarkably faithful to the original material - mostly acoustic, folkwise, but with some more daring examples that jog the listener’s imagination to farther out places.
The idea for ‘Creiriau y Delyn Rawn / Relics of the Horsehair Harp’ was seeded in the title of Edward Jones’ tome ‘Musical, Poetical, and Historical Relicks of the Welsh Bards and Druids’ (1802), and the set follows to outline a series of imaginary musical histories in a sort of pseudo-ethnomusicological sense that lends the musicians ample artistic license. At their most radical, we find noise shredder C. Spencer Yeh (Burning Star Core) scrambling his fiddle into a glitch matrix on ‘Aaddffddaa’, and Ko Ishikawa - a master of the show, Japanese bamboo mouthorgan - returning a spellbinding light show of shifting, reedy harmonics that resemble electronics, as does the burning drive of Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh’s viola on ‘Sealbh An Fhortain Air An Each Bhuidhe’, and cranky medieval modem-esque convulsions of Pat Thomas’ ‘Maddad.’
However the majority of the set is relatively more avant trad in its outlook, shaping up a sort of folk pastoralism subtly inflected with the motion sickness of time travel, as embodied in the recorder fanfare of Laura Cannell’s slant on ‘The Tattered Skies Above’, and her emulation of alien owl hoots in ‘A Horse Head for Luck’ that bookend the set, while Blue Note alum Orphy Robinson transposes Davies’ gestures to marimba with with joyous Afrorhythmelodic results in ‘Nude, Lewd, Rude, Mood Food’. Davies’ longtime spar Richard Dawson most beautifully takes the task to heart on a bucolic, nature-bathing duet with the birds in ‘A Garden Farewell’, and Davies’ fellow Welsh harpist Lilo Rhydderch signs off with the lush flourish of ‘Morluniau O Fy Ffenest’.
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Maverick Welsh harpist Rhodri Davies invites speculative interpretations of his 2020 solo album from likes of Laura Cannell, C. Spencer Yeh, Pat Thomas, Orphy Robinson, Phil Tyler and many more with wonderfully imaginative results.
In ‘Creiriau y Delyn Rawn / Relics of the Horsehair Harp’ Rhodri fields 18 variegated responses to his solo album ‘Telyn Rawn’, requesting a coterie of peers to imagine that his improvisations were made in the medieval period, and they were answering the call down the centuries. In a playful process riffing on notions of speculative fiction, uchronics, and pluralities of musical language, Davies effectively filters his work via a mix of Welsh, Irish, British, and international musical voices with results remarkably faithful to the original material - mostly acoustic, folkwise, but with some more daring examples that jog the listener’s imagination to farther out places.
The idea for ‘Creiriau y Delyn Rawn / Relics of the Horsehair Harp’ was seeded in the title of Edward Jones’ tome ‘Musical, Poetical, and Historical Relicks of the Welsh Bards and Druids’ (1802), and the set follows to outline a series of imaginary musical histories in a sort of pseudo-ethnomusicological sense that lends the musicians ample artistic license. At their most radical, we find noise shredder C. Spencer Yeh (Burning Star Core) scrambling his fiddle into a glitch matrix on ‘Aaddffddaa’, and Ko Ishikawa - a master of the show, Japanese bamboo mouthorgan - returning a spellbinding light show of shifting, reedy harmonics that resemble electronics, as does the burning drive of Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh’s viola on ‘Sealbh An Fhortain Air An Each Bhuidhe’, and cranky medieval modem-esque convulsions of Pat Thomas’ ‘Maddad.’
However the majority of the set is relatively more avant trad in its outlook, shaping up a sort of folk pastoralism subtly inflected with the motion sickness of time travel, as embodied in the recorder fanfare of Laura Cannell’s slant on ‘The Tattered Skies Above’, and her emulation of alien owl hoots in ‘A Horse Head for Luck’ that bookend the set, while Blue Note alum Orphy Robinson transposes Davies’ gestures to marimba with with joyous Afrorhythmelodic results in ‘Nude, Lewd, Rude, Mood Food’. Davies’ longtime spar Richard Dawson most beautifully takes the task to heart on a bucolic, nature-bathing duet with the birds in ‘A Garden Farewell’, and Davies’ fellow Welsh harpist Lilo Rhydderch signs off with the lush flourish of ‘Morluniau O Fy Ffenest’.