Traw/Rhodri Davies - Cwymp y Dwr ar Ganol Dydd

Confront Collectors Series
CCS06

Vaguely reminiscent of the extensive folding process used to form fine steel. Rhodri Davies created a number of improvisations on his harp utilizing the e-bow and sent the results to the three members of the Welsh electronics trio, Traw. They each, individually, took this music back home and transfigured it according to their wont. The four musicians then reconvened for a studio recording, Davies playing along with his reconstituted self, Traw (Richard Llewellyn, Owen Martell and Simon Proffitt) doing live sampling of this by now multiply split Davies-ian sound world.

The outcome of this project, the six tracks presented here, are uniformly lovely, not a bad apple in the bunch. As might be expected given the initial source and the general demeanor of Davies’ music, the pieces tend toward the roughly consonant with ringing overtones abetted by percussive jangles that might have ultimately derived from interaction with the harp’s frame. But it’s the layers of tonal washes, their interference patterns and the resultant throbbing colors that make the music here. Gentle pulses emerge within beds of tiny bristles, a kind of ambient sound, often very misty, often offset by brief, harsher intrusions, always gorgeous. Sometimes the fluttering gets rather rapid, as on “Sgwd yr Eira” (the Scrabble hound in me wishing that Welsh words other than “cwm” were acceptable in that game) but the general tone of the pieces is one of mildly agitated repose and contemplation. There is something of a similar nature in the tracks, not a bad thing as each is very fine on its own, though if I had to pick a winner, it’d be “Y Pannwr”, a somber piece with muffled “bell tolls” and ambient percussive chatter that eventually dives into deep, deep dronage.

Very good stuff; check it out.

(Not sure how available this is through Sound 323 (it didn’t come up on the site’s search engine) but it’s certainly so through ErstDist