#Aibhe Nic Oireachtaigh

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Various Artists — Creiriau Y Delyn Rawn / Relics of the Horsehair Harp (Amgen)

Imagining new music is nothing new. Individually or collectively, spontaneously or through painstaking craft, research, and development, legions of music-makers have tried to come up with something sufficiently novel out of sounds and (sometimes) words that it hooks listeners’ attention. You can be sure that someone’s at it right now. But you probably won’t lose the farm if you bet it on the notion that the sequential imagining that went into the conception and execution of Creiriau Y Delyn Rawn is an unprecedented process that has yielded a remarkable outcome.

The Welsh language title translates into English as Relics Of The Horsehair Harp. It was produced by harpist Rhodri Davies as a companion to Telyn Rawn, a solo album that he released on his Amgen label. Telyn Rawn is named after the instrument that it introduced, a horsehair harp that Davies commissioned to be made by a couple harp makers and a leatherworker. Harps have a particular cultural resonance in Wales, since despite the instrument’s popularity, the art of making them nearly died out before making a comeback as part of a larger resurgence of Welsh culture. The original telyn rawn was made from wood and equine byproducts. After the sturdier Italian triple harp made it to the British Isles in the 1600s, it replaced the telyn rawn so thoroughly that for a couple centuries the triple harp was actually known as the Welsh harp (it was replaced by the pedal harp in the 20th century) while its predecessor was practically forgotten. When Davies, whose wide-ranging music encompasses free improvisation, modern composition, Konono-inspired junkyard noise, and rock and roll, got curious about those early harps, no one knew how to make one. The instrument on Telyn Rawn was designed using descriptions in early Welsh poetry and a couple pages addressing harp-tuning practices in a 17th century manuscript by Robert ap Huw.

When Davies finally set about playing the thing, he did not revive antique repertoire; he improvised short pieces equally informed both by his research and his own practice of playing freely, alone and with musicians like John Butcher, Andrew Leslie Hooker and the trio IST. Intricately plucked or vigorously bowed, some of the album’s eighteen tracks hinted at folkloric models, while others undid dense knots of sound that burst with harmonics and radiated overtones. Telyn Rawn came out during that first COVID summer, which was bad for many things, but was not so bad for spending some of that time that one wasn’t gigging cooking up new ideas. After its release, Davies reached out to friends and associates with this request: “I asked each contributor to imagine that the musical material improvised in 2020 was an ancient musical form that had fully existed in the medieval period, and that each of their responses were to have happened centuries after the imagined formation of the Telyn Rawn pieces.”

Such a brief can be taken in many directions, depending on the respondent’s experiences, equipment, and willingness to dig a new network out of someone else’s wormhole. Sixteen participants gave a response to one or two specific tracks from Telyn Rawn. Laura Cannell’s  opening piece, “The Tattered Skies Above,”  wastes little effort on interpreting Davies’ “Penriwh.” Instead, she constructs a fanfare from overdubbed recorders whose jolting sonorities and processional air establishes a through line linking a span of fantasized centuries. Next up, Orphy Robinson makes like a free-bopping jazz man. On “Nude, Lewd, Rude, Mood Food” he transfers bits of Davies’ intricate “Gorchan Sali” to a salaciously bulbous-sounding marimba, accelerates the tempo and lets it rip. Jem Finer plays “Y Geseg Fedi” pretty faithfully, simply transposing bowed harp to hurdy-gurdy; guitarist C. Joynes is similarly respectful to “”Dygan tro’r Ebill.” Credited as playing computer and mouse, “C. Spencer Yeh” visits a cut-and-splice surgical strike upon Davies’ recording of “Afon “Dewi Fawr;” Pat Thomas might do something similar on the turbulent electronic eruption, “Maddad.”

Not only does Davies have a strong musical personality that transcends the particular harp he plays and the century his head’s in; he has picked his emissaries wisely. Despite the disparity of instrumentation and approach exhibited by the sixteen contributing musicians, Creiriau Y Delyn Rawn feels pretty cohesive as it carves out an imaginary timeline of musical evolution.

Bill Meyer