What he’s doing here is playing an ‘Urquhart Bray Harp’, made by the specialist harp-makers Ardival, whose website describes it as “typical of those used across Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries”, instantly confirming the lineage and history of this venerable musical instrument. Matter of fact, it might even go as far back to the 14th century, was the harp of choice to any self-respecting Renaissance player, and was known to have been used in Wales well into the 19th century, a fact which I am certain guided Rhodri’s decision, well-informed as he is of his country’s sense of identity, and rightly proud of it too. The instrument is equipped with “bray pins”, wooden pegs which barely touch the strings, but cause a very distinctive buzzing sound when the strings are played. Indeed this buzz or natural drone is what gives rise to the “bray” name – they bray like donkeys. Speaking of historical knowledge, Rhodri Davies also supplies one quote from Ossian Ellis, published in his book The Story Of The Harp in Wales, confirming the detail that the bray pins can be adjusted and pushed as needed when the buzzing effect is required, and further that such a harp could generate a percussive noise when the occasion called for dancing.

So much for the technical aspects of the Telyn Wrachïod, and the history of it. On these 12 gorgeous tracks of beautiful music, we can immediately hear how the musician has already learned all the subtleties and resonances he can produce by depressing his bray pins, and the assurance with which he does so is typical of this strong-willed and innovative player. After all, he’s been “preparing” his harp in a John Cage like manner in an improvisation context for many years, plus made bold use of detunings and the e-bow. To a non-music scholar like myself, much of this album resembles traditional folk tunes; each tune tends to stay in one key, and employs scales which sound ancient in origin. But it’s also very unusual folk music, as if being invented in real time by a primitive futurist who managed to make his way back to our Celtic origins, yet still found musical forms that could express the contours of the modern mind. It takes a special kind of genius to compress such rich statements into short tunes of three minutes in length (on average), but that is exactly what has taken place here, all in the space of a single recording session in August 2023.

Hints of what he can do when he sets off down a road like this have been vouchsafed before, especially in his uncanny performances in the group Hen Ogledd (with Richard Dawson, himself one who could be characterised as embodying a strain of “wild folk” that cannot be easily contained). But neither has Davies forsaken his other musical skills, as indicated on ‘Cildraeth Sienco’; it’s an improvisation, but based on a composition by Angharad Jenkins (reminding us also that Rhodri is no stranger to modern minimalism and has played with Apartment House), and uses alternative tunings as prescribed by Robert ap Huw in his manuscript of 1613. This seminal figure compiled this text in the late medieval period, bringing together transcriptions of music written between 1340 and 1500, and it’s now reckoned as a highly important primary source for understanding Welsh music.

Summa: beautiful folk-inflected music, flawlessly played, the product of what I expect was a period of intense scholarship and research, informed by history and national identity, yet still managing to incorporate many modernist precepts within its frame. How many living artists can claim such integrity, and such a comprehensive sweep within their statement, and manage to embody it all in the music they compose and play? The result is a near-perfect masterpiece; unequivocal recommendation. From 2nd April 2024.

Further reading:
Bill Taylor: Interpreting the Robert ap Huw MS.

The Sound Projector Radio Show
Saturday 29th March 2025

1. Mzylkypop, ‘Future Cartography’
   From Threnodies and Ad hocs, UK DISCUS MUSIC DISCUS 171CD (2024)
2. Deli Kuvveti, ‘In The Summer Dusk’
   From In The Summer Dusk, POLAND SUBLIME RETREAT SR015 CD (2023)
3. Rhodri Davies:
   ‘Agoriad Y Cywair’
   ‘Triban Y Gwyddon’
   From Telyn Wrachïod, UK AMGEN 09 CD (2024)
4. Polwechsel, ‘Quarz’
   From Embrace 3, LUXEMBOURG NI VU NI CONNU NVNC-LP-42 (2023)
5. Orphy Robinson, ‘Nude, Lewd, Rude, Mood Food’
   Phil Tyler, ‘Arthur’s Stone’
   C Joynes, ‘Triban Kill Reddin’
   Anghard Jenkins, ‘Llonyddwch yr Hydref’
   From Relics of the Horsehair Harp, UK AMGEN 010 CD (2024)
6. Camarasa / Foussat / Maffiolo, ‘Milieu de nuit’
   From Seuil de Feu, FRANCE FOU RECORDS FR – CD 58 (2024)
7. Jim Denley and the eternally orchestrating sonoverse, ‘Volcano Body’
   From As Weather Volume 3: Budawang Mountains, AUSTRALIA SPLITREC 33 CD (2024)
8. Faradena Afifi / Steve Beresford / Paul Khimasia Morgan, ‘Sad, bedraggled bee lies in a puddle’
   From bee Reiki, UK DISCUS MUSIC DISCUS 173CD (2024)

Actually on today’s record Same Place (CUBUS RECORDS C377), the amplified-acoustic balance isn’t really a major feature, although here is Christian Müller credited with electronics, and the splendidly great Rhodri Davies wielding his electronic harp. There’s also Liz Allbee (a personal fave in these pages) on her typical trumpet, Christian Kobi on saxophone, Magda Mayas (piano) and Enrico Malatesta (percussion). The record – the debut release of this combo – gives us five 2022 studio recordings made in Bern and an oblique, allusive text from David Toop by way of liner notes. What struck me on early spins here was how nothing sounded remotely like a musical instrument being played, and it’s as though all five players had entered into a compact to “de-nature” everything. Almost every sound, be it blown, plucked, hit, scraped or otherwise produced from the claws of the condor, emerges as something vaguely percussive; the whole album is like a rich tapestry of unusual clonks. I appreciate that “extended playing” is now an established part of the improviser’s toolbox, so perhaps what we’re hearing is one of the latest outcroppings or mutations of that strand. We’re also quite some distance away from minimalism or reduced playing, because there’s a considerable amount of incident, movement, and micro-bubbling at play – I am trying to avoid using the word “texture” – tempered by the need for mutual respect, quieter playing, and attention to dynamics.

For all this expertise and experience in the room, Same Place fails to excite me much. There seems to be a fundamental lack of tension, no creative spark among the five, nor any real consensus on shared territory. Both Davies and Allbee have been spikier, noisier, and more engaging; but I also admit that such qualities would not be welcome within this particular project, which seems to be positioned in a zone of friendly non-intervention and risk-averse-ness. I’m hoping for more revelations on future spins, and perhaps Toop’s vision of “spaces of imagined airs, untouchable dimensions that invite exploration by listening” will become clearer to me. From 2nd March 2023.

Edited to remove inaccurate statement 16/10/2024

Bulbils are the team of English musicians Richard Dawson and Sally Pilkington, here on Blue Forty. We have a lot of time for Dawson, who I regard as a true original and maverick – he’s part of the Hen Ogledd team who gave us the astounding record Bronze in 2016, with the help of Rhodri Davies, Dawn Bothwell, Laura Cannell and Jeff Henderson. There’s also his Peasant double LP, which I mail-ordered in 2017 when it came out and snagged a copy on yellow vinyl. Besides being a gifted musician, Dawson has a unique vision of the world and society around him (particularly in the United Kingdom) which he expresses through opaque poetry, strange music, and by taking a long hard look at things which most people would rather pretend didn’t even exist. I was aware that during the 2020 pandemic / lockdown situation, Dawson and Pilkington set themselves the task of playing and recording music every single day, and releasing it too (on Bandcamp); their heroic effort resulted in 63 brand-new full-length records being created in a short space of time. Phew.

When approached by Mr Bluetapes for a best-of compilation from this marathon stretch, nobody could reach any decision or make a meaningful selection from this vast outburst of creativity, so Bulbils settled on just one track, ‘Journey of the Canada Grey Goose’, which is their personal favourite and happens to consist of a single 37-minute simple instrumental jam performed in the mode of Neu! Just bass guitar, drum machine, and organ aptly described here as “armchair spacerock”. Listening to it oddly creates an instant nostalgia for the bleak year of 2020 and the enforced staying indoors, assuming anyone wants to relive that particular moment of their lives; I mean there’s something both obsessive and comforting in the playing of this duo, where at times it almost feels like a matter of life and death. They’re afraid to let go. If they stopped playing, the world might come to an end. I’m also glad to note how Dawson was quite dismissive of the explosion of upbeat social media that grew like topsy during this point in time; he hoped these 63 albums wouldn’t be as wearisome. The flipside of the tape contains the more contemplative and pastoral ‘The Easter Bunny’ (bedroom Fripp and Eno with a pseudo devotional chant) and ‘Holy Smoke’, one for the Foxy Digitalis school of unobtrusive drone, percussion and voice. Of the four tapes in scope today, this one I would deem essential.

…although…this oddity by Matt Collins is growing on me like so much fungus, prior to a dip in a good swamp bath…I have the odd feeling I should know more about this Matt Collins, but as far as we know he’s only made three cassettes for the Blue Tapes label since 2012, and in fact today’s item Blue One Plus is a rehash of one of those. Selected for the reissue / rebake treatment no doubt since it’s the first item to have appeared on this label and the owner wanted to celebrate having worked in the “tape game”, as he calls it, for this length of time.

Casting his visor back to 2012, his take on cassette releases was that they were “ultra-limited” and “raw-as-hell”, mainly in the genre of noise product – heaven only knows what he’d have made of the tape-trading scene in the 1980s. Today’s record is one long track ‘The Grin Without The Cat Or The Cat Without An Outline’, and we get a 2021 version followed by its 2012 original on the B side. I am pleasantly beguiled by the Collins approach to doing whatever it is he does, and hazarding a guess there may be samples, edits, and various forms of electronica noodling holding it all together like so much turgid seawater. Compared with this balmy, loose-etched and diffuse approach, the collage stencils of Obsidian Shard (above) seem rather stiff and contrived; Matt Collins has an insouciance which I like, combined with what seems to be a genuine thrill of exploration, of taking us out into Terra Jumbo on his coracle. Label notes indicate that this music is considered to be ambient of some sort, but not “straight up ambient”, and besides noting the many changes in timbre and shifts in emotional range, we are directed to note the drumbeats which, far from bringing us back down to land, add an even more surreal dimension to the dreamy melange. If he is indeed attempting to emulate the Cheshire Cat as alluded to in his title, Collins does project an air of cunning and all-knowing demeanour as he poses his paradoxical riddles, and (like said Cat) he floats in the air and is at times only half-visible.

I might add that the two sides are almost completely different to each other; the more rough-hewn original has been revisited in a radical fashion as the composer updates his score and rebuilds his Infant Frankenstein, retaining only a few of the original bolts and inserting a new brain in the cranial cavity.

UK player Patterson from Manchester has been developing his craft for many years now, sometimes appearing in an improvisational context, often showing up on the Another Timbre label, but he’s open to any gig with like-minded mavericks; the Common Objects set with Rhodri Davies and John Butcher was one of many benchmarks. Paul Khimasia Morgan is unstinting in his praise of this highly original man, who seems able to make any household object sing like a canary if the circumstances are right. On this record, he’s credited with “amplified devices” and “chemical and mechanical synthesis”, a wonderful phrase that hints at the alchemical theme which I think is supposed to be a subtext of this weird moaner.

As to Samo Kutin, presumably from Slovenia, impressed us on his 2020 record for Zavod Sploh (with Martin Kuchen), which gave us a chance to hear what he does with his modified hurdy-gurdy and other home-made instruments. Said hurdy-gurdy appears on this record along with more objects and “acoustic resonators” which do much to extend and deepen his unusual actions and gestures. Six tracks resulted from their April 2019 studio sessions, and at one level they can be heard as a sound-documentary or radio play depicting two wizards at work stirring the pot, or alchemists performing their secret experiments in the forge; the titles do much to contribute to this impression too, and David Toop’s sleeve note furthers the conceit. Unlike the GRIFF record also very recently released by this label, Patterson and Kutin don’t seem to have any malevolent intent or a plan to menace the world with their concoctions, and indeed at many levels the results emanating from this clandestine location may turn out to be quite beneficial for mankind. I think the “Universal” contained in the title is one clue to how both these musicians strive to find something as all-encompassing as the supposed “Universal Solvent” or “Prima Materia” which the Alchemists sought; impressively, this is the first time this duo played together, yet they found a lot of common ground in this quest.

The hype sticker on the front tells us it’s the debut collaborative album, going on to inform us “and heeey, it’s crazy!”. Hmph. Well, I do understand the spirit in which it’s meant, but this kind of party-animal exhortation with its implied loopy grin feels utterly inappropriate to the music hereon. That minor gripe aside, an essential release. Released on a sub-label of Inexhaustible Editions. From 28th April 2021.

Today though, here’s something entirely different – it’s the four-piece combo Oscillatorial Binnage, with a record of acoustic drones called Agitations: Post-Electronic Sounds (SUB ROSA SR495). Besides Wilson, the other three players are notable musicians and technicians, i.e. Fari Bradley and Chris Weaver (both long associated with the art radio station Resonance FM) and Toby Clarkson. Oscillatorial Binnage have indeed appeared on Resonance FM more than once since 2013 (or maybe earlier), and have given concerts-cum-workshops at Cafe Oto, cementing their reputation as faves on the London avant stage. I think this is the first full-length record credited to the Oscs, although they have contributed compilation tracks to various projects in the past, for instance the CD The Art Of The Gremlin: Inventive Musicians, Curious Devices which came out on the Electronic Music Foundation label in 2007, where they were in the company of other similar luminaries who have manipulated objects to produce their sound, such as Rhodri Davies, Knut Aufermann (another skilled Resonance producer), and Toshimaru Nakamura.

The work of the Binsters is quite unique in that it’s not electronic music, and everything we hear was recorded acoustically. They do it with found objects (mostly metal) and magnets; the magnets create “force fields” which cause the objects to resonate. There’s also an elaborate system of cranks and gears involved to help the foursome do their manipulations, and you can get some idea of what’s involved by scoping the overhead photo of the happy team at work; there they are seated around a large table covered with clutter, as if sitting down at a family meal. One can’t help but think of food when one sees so many woks and metal pans in view. I suppose the cranks and gears are their equivalent of faders on a mixing desk, and the fact that it’s all done by Newtonian physics adds a very human dimension to the project. Besides the unusual method, which is something I’m fairly certain that Chris Cutler or Keith Rowe (for instance) would recognise and approve, one key factor is the interaction of these four pairs of hands. Apparently it’s a delicate, nuanced business; one false move could upset the delicate balance, and to produce the “evolving drones” and exploit the “chance effects” correctly requires a lightness of touch and a real craft among the team.

This may or may not be one of the reasons why Wilson reports that “it was quite an upheaval to get it recorded”, although he may be referring to other hurdles. I mentioned about the workshops; the Oscs see it as part of their mission to educate us about their work, and perhaps it’s true that a performance may be as much a demonstration as it is a musical experience (though I’ve never seen it); to this end, we have pages of detailed notes in the booklet, describing how “continual permutation of the physical variables steers the network of vibratory interactions”, and they are keen to stress the pre-electronic side of their work, finding antecedents in certain late Victorian inventions. However, Daniel Wilson’s enclosed letter tells another side to the story. He rummages in bins like a badger, and is not ashamed to admit it; most of the objects on this record which make a noise were personally retrieved by his hands from skips, bins, and dumpsters. He often got in trouble doing this, and ended up with “soiled fingers”, but it’s a habit that dies hard. There was a time in his life, he confesses, when he had to steal food from bins just to stay alive. This is why I mentioned the “sitting down at a meal” thing; it’s an image which carries extra poignancy in the context of the life and personal history of Daniel Wilson.

I enjoyed this record, and am impressed by the amount of variety and texture it’s possible to extract from this largely non-musical set-up, although the differences from one track to the next are rather subtle. At times I also wondered why it takes four people to produce this; they don’t seem, like AMM or MEV for instance, to be especially interested in bringing out distinct musical “voices” in their ensemble, and instead the idea seems to be a collaborative merging, largely personality-free, producing these low-key very mesmerising drones. From February 2020.

The piece ‘Boundary Music’ is interpreted by two players, first the estimable David Toop and then Jan Hendrickse, an all-rounder (sound art, improv, composition) who’s at the Guildhall just now. ‘Boundary Music’ was written by Chieko Shiomi in 1963, and it’s a simple text score of no more than a few lines of instruction. I’ve never heard of this prodigy Chieko Shiomi before, which does me no credit; she was part of Group Ongaku in Tokyo (along with Yasunao Tone) and came to New York City in 1964, where for a time she was associated with George Maciunas and the Fluxus thing; some of her compositions performed there were pretty strong on the “audience participation” aspect, which I think was common to much Fluxus-related stuff; it required a collaborative element to complete the work in some respects. However, ‘Boundary Music’ isn’t of that strain, and appears to have something to do with extremely quiet sounds (which may be why David Toop got interested in this project).

The score also contains instructions that are so open-ended, almost philosophical in nature, that it’s hard to know where to find a way in. Hard for me at any rate, but both Toop and Hendrickse turn in something – I’m hesitant to call it a “performance” in the conventional sense – that is both charming and emotionally moving, yet remains true to the very exploratory aspect which I assume is Shiomi’s guiding principle. No description can do justice to either of these nine-minute recordings, but on Toop’s take we seem to hear very distant songs sourced from impossibly rare 78rpm recordings from the Orient, played back extremely quietly. Or maybe, which is much more likely, the sounds are beamed across the time barrier by sheer mental effort alone. It’s about as close to “nothing” that one has heard from Toop, and that’s saying something given his abiding interest in ultra-minimalism for the last 15 or 20 years. As to Hendrickse, his version is slightly more conventional and slightly more eventful, with sounds not unlike what I’ve heard from Rhodri Davies when he twangs the aerial (or whatever it is) protruding from his electric harp. Tiny echoing sounds ensue, vaguely metallic in flavour. Other small sounds emerge from the fingers of Jan Hendrickse in this very open-plan realisation.

Of course it’s striking how one simple text instruction has resulted in two very different interpretations here. Seems to be a lot of mileage in those few lines of text. Both pieces seem like symphonies from inside a doll’s house, with a tiny tea service made of porcelain. I’m still trying to figure out the “boundary condition” element that’s embedded in Shimoi’s score; the music here seems to have no boundaries, and suggests endless possibilities. Will do you a ton of good to enter this virtual space and walk around a bit.

That’s the A side. Flip it over to hear two performances of compositions by Cath Roberts, ‘Off-World’ and ‘March of the Egos’, both performed by CUEE – the City University of London Experimental Ensemble. Based in London, Cath plays the saxophone and composes, is part of the bands Sloth Racket, LUME, and Ripsaw Catfish, and has been active since 2011 if not earlier. I think the score for one of these pieces is what we see printed on the insert to this LP; it’s busy. There are bubbles, squares and shapes all joined together by arrows, and inside the shapes are printed text instructions, musical notes not attached to a stave, and abstract doodles and squiggles.

While this approach may lack the direct simplicity of the Shimoi score, it’s still feels very open-ended to a non-musician like me, and I’m certain that given the right amount of prompting and verbal direction from Cath Roberts, one could be reading this flowchart from Planet X as surely as a page from the Evening Standard. As to the music, it’s kind of like diagrammatic big-band jazz, a sketchy version of what the Sun Ra Arkestra would sound like if Sonny Blount forgot about his Fletcher Henderson roots and led the players down an even more experimental path. I like the way the music is determined to stay away from conventional linear development (if indeed that is the intention) and remains resolutely unpredictable, even if this results feels slightly contrived at times.

Some listeners may prefer the lively and sparky Cath Roberts side to the cryptical and stark Shimoi side, but the whole LP works very well. If there’s any overlap or common ground between the two, it might be that Cath Roberts pushes at the “boundaries” by breaking down the conventions of musical notation and allowing a great deal of leeway in interpretation in her scores. From 3 May 2019.

The next thing to note is that each track is timed at less than a minute, generally aiming I think for the 45-second mark; there are 30 tracks on this 10-inch LP, and in terms of durational minimalism this one ups the ante on The Residents Commercial Album, still for me the benchmark of this sort of exercise with its precisely-configured 60-second tracks. The guest musicians include a lot of our friends and favourites, such as Simon Whetham, John Chantler, Jerome Noetinger, and even Rhodri Davies, the Welsh emperor of post-modern harp improvisation. There are also numerous turns by Jaap Blonk, that zany Dutch vocalist, lending his penchant for absurdity to the high-jinks captured on vinyl. I should say there is evidently a large “fun” aspect to Slotmachine, as evidenced by the Dadaist titles such as ‘Weird PTK Machines’, ‘Ghostly Fireworks Scratch’, or ‘Long Hoghorn Commercials’ – these titles are typically three-word salads, and they echo the wacky aliases chosen by the guest musicians for these let-your-hair-down styled contributions.

Even this isn’t the whole picture, though. If you want to get the full-on random experience of Slotmachine, you need to spend some time on Kuhzunft’s interactive website, where you can create your own three-track combinations from the base resource of 158 separate recordings, and generate your own bag of pick-and-mix sweeties for 45 seconds of playful fun. To put it another way, this LP release sets in stone just 30 possible combinations out of a possible one billion. Zepezauer has a fascinating CV in fine art activities which includes film-making, paintings, a radio show, as well as his own electronic music performances; and he seems to have been preoccupied with vinyl records from an early age, hence this “virtual jukebox” high-concept idea. Even more intriguing is his “Cardtalk” project, a record player made of cardboard (???) which can play CDs with sounds carved into them. From 18th December 2018.

Having lost out on the previous Sylvian artefact on Mark Wastell’s Confront label, Playing The Schoolhouse – his collaboration with Jan Bang with contributions made by Toshimaru Nakamura and Otomo Yoshihide – not once but twice (due to my own tardiness, admittedly); panicked, I bought There Is No Love at the beginning of the year direct from the Confront website on the very day it became available. Five months later, a copy for review plops onto the doormat. So I’ve already had a good long time to formulate a coherent opinion on this record? Yes? Yes… Actually, I’ve been finding it hard to formulate a coherent opinion of this record. I should say I’m still finding it hard. Why is that? Is it because the way Sylvian works now seems so different from what he has done before? Different even than his recent projects with London improvisors? Maybe it is not so far away from Uncommon Deities, his 2012 collaboration with Jan Bang, Eric Honoré, Sidsel Endresen and Arve Henricksen, where he narrates text in a similar way. Perhaps Playing The Schoolhouse provides a link that I’m not currently aware of. On initial listens to There Is No Love, I actually found it a little hard to listen to. That is to say, I found it challenging to listen to, rather than unpleasant. Far from unpleasant. And I must say I wasn’t necessarily expecting a challenge. The upfront way Sylvian’s voice is mixed; the fact that he talks not sings; apart from repeating the title phrase “there is no love”, he recites text by Bernard Marie Koltès. Like everything Sylvian has put his name to in the past, it is great to listen to, but: the content is unsettling, confrontational; mildly uncomfortable in places. And that in itself startles and surprises me.

“Koltès’s work, based in real-life problems, expresses the tragedy of being alone and of death. His writing style accents the dramatic tension and the lyricism of his plays.” – Wikipedia

Rhodri Davies and Mark Wastell start proceedings, with bright, held tones. It is six minutes before Sylvian’s first utterance of the phrase “there is no love”. It subsequently reappears here and there, sampled and triggered by a machine or app of some sort; possibly processed after the fact. Two minutes later, Sylvian begins to recite the Bernard Marie Koltès text. This in itself is a physical shock on first listening – Sylvian’s voice is mixed unexpectedly loud. Rhodri Davies is credited with playing lap harp, table harp, vibraphone and radio. Sylvian with voice, vocal treatments and electronics. Wastell utilizes his tam tam augmented with cracked ride cymbal, chimes, Indian temple bells, singing bowls and metal chains. Interestingly, a recording of Wastell playing tubular bells and concert bass drum made at Surrey University in 2006 is also utilised. And Toshimaru Nakamura completists will be keen to learn that a 2012 recording of him performing with his no-input mixer in Montreal, Canada is also integrated into the work. All this material-gathering creates a dense matrix of sound and seems typical of the way Sylvian likes to work these days. By choosing to involve himself with Wastell and Davies, he has placed his ouevre in two pairs of very capable hands. Indeed, Wastell is credited with “compositional structure” which involved arrangement of pieces of recordings made at very different times and places. Sylvian committed his voice to tape in LA in 2014; the main instrumental parts were recorded in February 2017 in London, and then, taking into account the additional parts by Nakamura recorded by Sylvian and Steve Bates in 2012 as well as his own material from 2006. A sonic jigsaw.

Ultimately, it is hard to separate Sylvian, a man with a career in music that spans five decades – perhaps professionally, a recluse of sorts these days? – from his own pervading charisma. There is a mystique there that he, like others such as Mark Hollis or Aphex Twin, have arguably used to their advantage. The interest in experimentalism that he has developed in the latter part of his career is still based upon the saturation of the pop sensibility of his youth. Those of a certain age will remember how avant-garde much of Japan’s sound seemed to be in the early 1980s.

As a post-script, I’ve just learned that Mark Wastell performed There Is No Love live with the One Day Band – Wastell on percussion, Jennifer Allum and Mandhira de Saram, both playing violin and a disembodied David Sylvian via his pre-recorded vocal part at Raven Row in East London – at the end of 2018. I would have liked to have seen that. Perhaps it will happen again in the near future? Keep your eyes peeled.

Your editor had a wonderful time at Listen To The Voice Of Fire held at Ceredigion Museum last Saturday. Seven acts, ten performers, at an event which turned out to be a mix of minimal electronics, free improvisation, noise, avant-folk drone and controlled feedback. Plus there was a projection of computer-based visuals in motion. Double plus, the entire happening was themed around the concept of Japanese ceramics…how many shows give you all that in less than three hours? No wonder the event had sold all the tickets, with eager fans reportedly lining up around the quay to make their way in.

This is the third event under the aegis of Voice Of Fire which Dafyyd Roberts has staged in Wales; last year he didn’t do music, more of a “symposium and concert-alchemy in sound art” where the invited guests discussed pertinent topics. Dafyyd is thus continuing to pursue his long-standing interest in the esoteric field of alchemy, a subject on which he has published. Matter of fact we mentioned alchemy when most of the assembled company sat down on Friday night for a tasty Indian meal at Light Of Asia. Alchemy, I mused out loud, with its strange visual emblems and concealment of abstruse chemical processes within poems, dialogues, metaphors, and fantastic tales full of images of snakes and lions, could perhaps be regarded as an early form of “encryption”, keeping the secret arts hidden from non-initiates. This seemed to strike a chord with my host Roberts, although the “fire” theme in this instance is certainly more applicable to the processes by which ceramic art is baked and glazed in the kilns. This had given Roberts the idea for an ‘object score’, based on the Japanese ceramics held in the Ceredigion Museum’s collection; this angle helped secure funding for the concert (thanks to the Daiwa Anglo Japanese Foundation and Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation) by giving it more intellectual heft, and ere long the famed Japanese performer and composer Toshimaru Nakamura was signed up for the project. He undertook a brief residency for this collaborative recording project and performance package, culminating in the show on 10th March.

“I feel really humbled,” announced Dafyyd to the audience by way of introducing the show, as he toggled between Welsh and English. “I thought maybe five people would come!” Instead, the event was a sell-out, every seat filled with enthused music lovers giving their attention to the music on offer with an admirable degree of respectful silence and engagement; audiences in London, who I often suppose are growing blasé with the array of good experimental music at their disposal, could learn some humility. Indeed it’s this metropolitan ennui that Rhodri Davies has been trying to bypass, as he confided to me around midnight after the show. “Critics are too ready to label our music,” was the strength of his lament, reaching for the terms like Onkyo or Berlin Reduced Playing or Glitch without really engaging with their ears, “and then they complain when what we do doesn’t fit their labels.” For him, it was an emotional time to be returning to his own turf to perform, and his sister Angharad Davies wrote me that it was “exciting to experience that buzz in my home town”.

Swansea, where Rhodri is currently based, is also the HQ of Jenn Kirby; it had been fascinating to watch her set up her equipment, which to my naive eye looks like two boxes with long orange strings, attached to black gloves which she wears. In performance she uses her arms and body to pull the strings and trigger samples, while also singing into her headset and occasionally playing her Danelectro guitar with a violin bow. The sounds she made are a mixture of stuttering signals, ethereal voice wails, and something which I have in my scrawled notes as “scrapey flute in a cavern”. But the unusual sounds are just one part of it. It’s important to see musicians doing it live; one that struck me instantly was how Jenn’s body movements shape her music. The arms move, she squats and bends at the knees, she stands up and down slowly, she circles on the spot. This is to assist the triggers from her orange-stringed device I assume, but it persuaded me I had better pay attention to each performer’s “body language”.

This observation certainly was apt for Ed Wright, a unique performer whose work is completely new to me. To better apply himself to his pedal set-up, he squatted down in a kneeling position like the world’s most determined gardener about to do battle with a troublesome bed of weeds. One free hand then swiped and sawed the air around him, and I felt he was controlling a very angry Theremin with his wild stabs. Spitty, sporadic noise bursts resulted; and a drawing of the very angular ceramic piece he was attempting to “play” in sound was visible to him in his open notebook nearby. Wright rose to his feet to bring his jet-black violin into play, but continued to operate the electronic sputterings with his shoeless foot. This was almost a physical attack; Ed Wright is one step away from a karate or savate expert in sound, and it’s faintly alarming to behold.

Dafyyd Roberts bucked the trend in “interesting body movements” by sitting completely still at a table for his performance, but his focus and concentration was evident in the intense noise that soon emerged and enveloped the audience, soon creating a hypnotic effect with its internal rhythms and rise-and-fall structure underneath the waves of abstract texture. From my viewpoint I couldn’t see much of his set-up though, and guessed he was maybe sending sounds from a laptop through a mixing desk (which I think is now a pretty orthodox way of working and not as shocking as when we first saw the Mego boys bringing us the gospel from Vienna some 18 years ago). Towards the end he gave us a flavour of that “uncontrolled chaos” that used to characterise his feedback experiments as Our Glassie Azoth in the late 1990s.

“So many effects,” observed a young man sitting behind me, noting the presence of pedals and mixing desks all around the performance area. Did I mention the players were all set on the floor of this former Edwardian cinema / theatre? We were surrounded by exhibits from a golden age of popular entertainment, including a chiming clock which continued to strike the hour and adding its percussive voice to some of the quieter moments of music. The duo of Barrett’s Dottled Beauty had travelled all the way from Aberdeen to perform at this event, and Alan Wilkinson and Gayle Brogan evidently share a taste for melody and mystery in their heavily folk-inflected music. Brogan’s main contribution is her voice, for which terms like “other-worldy” spring to mind; she has to sit on the floor and keep her eyes closed to work her way into a very personal space, while a hand-held microphone suddenly appears to have attached itself to her head. Later she bends into a near-foetal position, whimpering a song whose semi-audible lyrics may have something to do with frost, crops, weather; staple images of agricultural folksong, in fact. Throughout, Alan is the near-exact opposite to Gayle’s free-spirited floating, standing steady and stable like a navigator behind the wheel as he plays. Yet his minimal guitar playing doesn’t feel out of place in tonight’s experimental company, and his turquoise device blowing on the strings (along with Gayle’s loop effects) are admissible as contributions to some sort of post-Cagean experimentation. Barrett’s Dottled Beauty offer us a sort of modernist deconstruction of folk idioms, yet still allow melodies and songs to shine through.

After the interval Tatsuru Arai, making his debut in Wales, had joined us from Berlin in his fine blue suit and carrying his laptop and projector set-up. From what I could see of his screen, there was an array of squares and rectangles floating about along with seemingly random streams of numbers and letters; a Jasper Johns painting in digital form. I could make out the word MATTERS-TON in black letters, which may have been the title of the piece. Heaven knows how anyone could have used this foreboding data to create what he did, but soon CGI images appeared on the screen on the stage and started moving and changing rapidly in time to his abstract digital noise. As to body language, Arai sat completely unmoving as he gave all his attention to the screen of his device. Well, I can dig the cosmo-science themes of his presentation, whose imagery was very reminiscent of planets, supernovas, star clusters and such; themes which were endorsed by the textual messages and robotic voice messages about radiation, mass, energy, and dark matter in the universe. But his heavy avant-techno beats and aggressive noise felt out of place in tonight’s company, and the remorseless repetition of flickering noise and jagged geometric shapes shifting in unnatural ways became very numbing to the eyes and ears. However, I suspect that is the raison d’etre of his work.

At this point I began to sense that Listen To The Voice Of The Fire had enough talent in the room for two quite discrete shows – one complex and noisy, the other quiet and contemplative. Andrew Leslie Hooker may have fallen into either category, but probably the former. I had a chance to speak to him on the morning before the event, and it turns out he’s been involved from an early stage, discussing ideas and concepts with Dafyyd and helping to shape the direction of Voice Of Fire; he’s an unofficial pillar of support. As I heard him play I remembered we now seemed to be quite some way distant from the original “let’s all try and play a ceramic” concept, but I’m not sure if that matters. Hooker’s achievement here was that he produced some intense, extreme and pretty wild noise from his mixing desk (not unlike the set-up used by Toshimaru), without once descending into Merzbow harsh-noise suffocating Hell. Some very surprising pops, clicks and whoops appeared to be leaping out of the speakers, while a pained whine and stuttering sound made it seem like Hooker was almost bending the sound like sheet metal with a pair of pliers. As to body movements, the elbows were doing all the work – his arms darted in and out as he sliced away like a very pro-active surgeon. I could see Toshimaru paying rapt attention to this highly engaged performance (see sketch). Andrew said he likes to “scramble” his mixing desk just before he goes on stage, turning all the knobs to a random setting so he won’t know what EQ will result. I understand about half of that, but I do appreciate a man who knows when to let go; we already have enough control freaks in the world who tweak the life out of their overly-manicured music.

The headline act was the trio of Toshimaru Nakamura, Angharad Davies and Rhodri Davies, playing (respectively) the no-input mixing board, the violin, and the prepared harp. I wish I could convey something about the sheer beauty of their performance. Clearly there’s a lot of human depth behind it; experience, respect, collaboration, friendship, family. Everything just aligned perfectly from the opening moments and got better from that point onwards. I think the assurance and sheer craft in the playing of all three was one thing that came over strongly, but it’s rare to get this degree of interlocking, the sense of moving-as-one-body in perfect harmony. After a while it’s as though the instruments themselves disappeared; just three bodies making small still and deliberate movements in the zone of concentration. Even the moments before they started playing were something to savour; it’s that moment when you can see the music welling up inside the performer, before a note is made. Music is as natural as breathing. I’ve only seen that happen a few times, and must assume it’s something that’s rare, and hard-won. If any of this makes it sound like the music was cold, stiff, and intellectual, let me assure you it wasn’t. My mind kept going back to the voice of Toshimaru, who had gone out of his way to order the hottest item on the menu at the Light Of Asia – he went for the full-strength Naga, and the waiter said he’d instruct the chef to pull out all the stops. Was Toshimaru satisfied? “It’s good,” he smiled as he enjoyed his meal. “The heat is good! The heat is good!”

Sketches by Ed Pinsent. For proper photos of the event, see Dafyyd’s site.