Friday 22 March 2019, 7.30pm
“Rhodri Davies is my longest collaborator and Gwenno will weave her magic on some of our earliest recordings together.”
Delighted to present a three-day residency curated by London-based, Welsh violinist, Angharad Davies, as a result of the OTO Projects UK Artists Residency Fund. A phenomenal improviser, Angaharad has also amassed a considerable body of work within the fields of composition and performance. Her approach to sound involves attentive listening and exploring beyond the sonic confines of her instrument, her classical training and performance expectation.
This residency is one of three at OTO for UK-based artists/groups at a vital point in their creative development, thanks to the support of Jerwood Charitable Foundation.
Angharad Davies is a Welsh violinist based in London working with free-improvisation, compositions and performance.Her approach to sound involves attentive listening and exploring beyond the sonic confines of her instrument, her classical training and performance expectation.
Much of her work involves collaboration. She has long standing duos with Tisha Mukarji, Dominic Lash and Lina Lapelyte and plays with Common Objects, Cranc and Skogen. She has been involved in projects with Tarek Atui, Tony Conrad, Richard Dawson, Gwenno, Roberta Jean, Jack McNamara, Rie Nakajima, Tim Parkinson, Eliane Radigue, Georgia Ruth and J.G.Thirlwell.
Most of her records are released on Another Timbre but she also has releases on Absinth Records, Confrontrecords, Emanem, Potlatch and winds measure recordings.Her first orchestral piece was commissioned by LCMF in 2019.
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.
Gwenno Saunders is a sound artist and songwriter from Cardiff, working in live performance, radio, studio recordings, and theatre.
Her work explores themes of language as landscape and cultural identity through songs and soundscapes. She has released two highly critically acclaimed solo albums: Y Dydd Olaf (2015) with lyrics written in Welsh and Cornish, and Le Kov (2018), which is entirely in Cornish. Y Dydd Olaf won the 2014-2015 Welsh Music Prize. Most recently she has written and produced 'Edrica' (2018) a part-improvised performance responding to hand drawn animation by Tad Davies based on the life and work of patchwork quilt artist Edrica Huws, in collaboration with violinist Angharad Davies, harpist Georgia Ruth Williams for the Wales Millennium Centre's Festival of Voice.
