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After a summer’s sojourn in Beijing I’ve returned to Wales, with a little something in my
suitcase. I’ve brought Linda Yi with me, a fabulous researcher who I met in
China.
Linda and I are perched around the kitchen
table at Geraint and Tracey’s house, planning our next steps on the Cerdd/ed
project. Sadly, the band I was working with were unable to continue with the
project, and so we’ve been revisioning what the piece will look like.
I’ll be taking Linda out to see the town, meet
some of the people involved in the project, and see some of the places that the
music is based on. She’ll be interviewing people and taking inspiration from
walking in the landscape and mixing this all up with the work I did in the
primary school last year. Add to this, poet Mark Parry who will be creating
lyrics based on these ‘inspirations’ and we have the beginnings of an
interactive site specific piece.
Musically, I will create a bed of found
sounds, and interview clips, which will be triggered by the children, using
miners lamps and a light sensitive camera wired to a sampler which I am
building in my laptop. Over this landscape, I will weave an electric fiddle,
and acoustic fiddle, to bring together the past and the present of the town,
and two voices, one singing in Welsh and one in English. This will be
accompanied by local musicians, Geraint Roberts and Tracy Hayles, on Welsh
pipes and ‘cello, plus friends from their traditional music circle.
So my role is to rescore the band piece for
the traditional musicians, turn Mark’s poetry into lyrics, turn found sound
into sculptural noise, select the interview snippets, sculpt them into phrases
which weave together, build the electronics patch which will allow the children
to control the samples via the miner’s lamps and rehearse the piece with the
musicians and children combined.
October is looking like it will be busy but
lots of fun!
