Rhodri Davies self reissue of Wound Response originally released by Alt Vinyl in 2012. Reissued alongside the solo acoustic 'An Air swept Clean Of All Distance', Wound Response is loud, distorted and forms an attempt to work with rhythm and pitches in an open and fluid way.
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Wound Response was first released on LP with Alt Vinyl, av038 (2012) and formed a radical departure for Davies’s solo work. Inspired by the ‘Destruction in Art Symposium’ (1966). Davies used two main techniques: over-articulate the strings (what harpists are taught not
to do) and attack the strings with a plectrum, forcing the tuning into new relationships until the strings eventually broke. This is the first time that this album will be released on CD.
“Wound Response is a raw recording scored for solo lap harp, overdrive, volume pedal and twin amplifiers. The fuzz is particularly cranky here, giving Rhodri’s obsessively repetitive harp soundings the kinda scorch of solo Masayuki Takayanagi.”
David Keenan, Volcanic Tongue 2012
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AMGEN CD002
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.
