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be like, I’ve never heard of that. I’d go into panic mode, thinking they’re all going to be forgotten.” Lisa is animated as she talks, heart on her sleeve, her eyes alight and her voice full of dynamic energy: “It’s a traditional folk song! You’ve never heard it before? Oh my God, that’s really scary. Gotta take them out of their boxes and let these songs breathe again. I need to make them accessible so my friends, who are into the same kind of music as me, so they will like them, ie no fiddle in sight!”
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Mart’s unfamiliarity with the formal structures of Welsh traditional song, and his own musical sensibilities, collided hap- pily with Lisa’s vision. His is a grounding presence: “I had no preconceived idea of what Welsh folk song was or how it should sound. Not understanding the language at the time of the first album, a lot of it just fell down to conveying the emotion in the music because of the emotion in Lisa’s voice. You can feel it in her voice.”
here is nothing hackneyed about 9Bach’s 2009 eponymous debut album on Gwymon, a subsidiary of the Welsh label Sain. Its sparse trip-hop take on
traditional Welsh folk songs shook out some potentially-staid classics (Lisa Lan, Bwthyn Fy Nain, Pontypridd) and hung them out to air. A thing of brooding, atmospheric beauty, Lisa’s vocals were set in a sympathetically space-conscious soundscape – ambient Welsh harp, groove-driven bass, buzzing neon guitar riffs, simple glockenspiel melodies. Call it what you will – psych-folk and alt-folk flags were all waved. It took the songs to a new audience, and garnered the band a cult following from their debut appear- ance at Green Man Festival.
Lisa: “I don’t like putting music in cat-
egories. It’s my pet hate. But I don’t know what we are any more. I took psych-folk- dub off our Twitter account recently, because I thought we are not really that… well, maybe the dub. It’s very abstract I think. I loved what one of my best friends said about one of the tracks on Tincian. She said ‘This isn’t a song, this is a piece of art!’ I loved that.”
The recording for the new album Tin-
cian has taken its time, recording and mix- ing (with Colin Bass) in Wales before being licensed to Real World.
Lisa: “It’s been a strange old process
recording Tincian in that we’ve recorded it in four different studios in chunks over a long period of time.”
Mart: “I think that was a bit of excite- ment on our part! We did it in chunks because Lisa had started songwriting, and as soon as she had three songs we wanted to get together and get it recorded. It was too exciting. We didn’t want to wait until all the songs were written.”
“I think the way Lisa writes demands interesting things of the music. They are not standard songs. We don’t really adhere to the verse-bridge-chorus structure of standard pop or rock music. This demands something different from the drums, bass, and guitar. We like to leave space for the vocals and the harp. We don’t like to do music by numbers. There’s a risk in the stu- dio that you become formulaic with it. But here, every line has to justify itself. With every part, we check if it’s saying some- thing… complementing… or in the way.”
In many ways, the band’s musical arrangements are more aligned with the principles of electronic/dance music – with
grooves and loops, hooks and effects, ten- sion and release – than with a folk tradi- tion, but with real instruments, with the skills of the players coming into play to provide the light and shade.
Lisa: “We did a live take of Wedi Torri the other day and Es just went off on one on the harp… up and up and up! It was beautiful. I was in tears.”
Mart: “Everything is the wrong way
around. We have a Welsh harp, probably the most traditional Welsh instrument there is, but it’s not played in the tradition- al way. It’s played with feel, and heart, and it’s very conscious of the song, played around the vocals, rather than being the main focus. It’s very atmospheric. Es is so clever. Technically fantastic… but a lot of technically fantastic players are not sympa- thetic to the song, like extreme jazz! She’s so in tune with what everyone else is doing, particularly the voice.” Economy is the key, or as Lisa puts it: “No-one gets to show off! If in doubt, play less!”
The line-up is now well-embedded and well-travelled (veterans of both Womad and Womex – where they first caught Real World’s eye). The geographi- cally-disparate ‘family’ is made up of Lisa (vocals, harmonium, piano) and Mart (gui- tar) along with his lovable-rogue best mate, London cabbie Ali Byworth (drums); Cardiff-based siblings Dan Swain (bass) and Esyllt Glyn Jones (harp, vocals); and glamorous Gwynedd born and bred/Lon- don-based actor/singer Mirain Roberts (vocals, piano).
Lisa: “We argue like husbands and wives, and brothers and sisters and best mates, because that’s what we are! We go through the spectrum of family! We’ve all individually got a lot going on: actors, speech therapists, looking after children, taxi drivers. We learned from our friend Lou Bennett, of the Black Arm Band, that it’s so important to feel a sense of place and fami- ly before getting on with work. There’s a lot of belly laughing and connection. We’re a cloud, a cluster, of beings that sit down and connect and eat and chat before any- thing else, then everything falls into place.”
Mart: “It’s more productive in the long-run.”
This symbiotic connection shapes the band sound, even more so with the origi- nal material on Tincian. Lisa: “9Bach are always at our best when we’re all in the room together. Live is what does it for us. We recorded three live songs in one day at Real World the other day and we were feeding off each other, lots of eye contact, and the feel was captured brilliantly.”
Although they may make up what Mart refers to as a “Bemusing Triangle” geographically, the beating heart of the 9Bach sound is still in North Wales. Wan- dering the mountains, and immersing her- self in the natural drama of the landscape, has long provided spiritual and creative succour for Lisa.
“I have travelled and lived elsewhere, but these mountains are magnetic. They suck you back. The shape of the quarry, its silhouette has changed so much over the years, that purple slate. I still see the colour purple when I close my eyes. It’s in you; you have no choice in a way. Every- where you turn it’s mountain, quarry or forest. It does mould you.”
9Bach’s music suggests stories borne out of this landscape, on many different levels. In Lisa’s haunting singing voice, in the poignant musical ambience, in the
song lyrics themselves, even in the raw and real physical images they have used to con- vey their musical vision.
Old press shots have shown Lisa immersed in a mountain river, part inspired by the many watery-themed songs from the tradition. “I love swimming in rivers, the way the water washes away your problems. We had a song on the first album, Yr Eneth Gadd EI Gwrthod, about a woman from Llangollen way, pregnant, out of wedlock. The guy left her, parents didn’t wanna know her, turned away from the church door. She goes down by the river, watches the fish hiding under a stone in the river and she wishes she could do that. The poor girl ends up drowning her- self and her unborn child of course! In the last verse, she is found face down in the river, with a piece of paper in her hand, saying ‘Don’t make me a tombstone or a grave, don’t remember me, because I was the girl who was rejected.’”
A more recent shot shows Lisa hacking into a block of slate with a gordd (old quar- ry sledgehammer) as a suited and booted Mart holds back, looking on. And on the front cover of the new album, Lisa – tired, haunted, real – stands in front of an old stone barn, looking directly into the cam- era, a handwritten Tincian sign around her neck, redolent of old black and white quar- ry worker photographs perhaps, maybe a criminal act, but suggestive of a story.
“My dad is really desperate for me to look pretty in my photos, but for me there always has to be a purpose! There has to be a story behind it. That picture of me and Mart up on the mountain, it looks we’ve been up all night – that kind of morning after the night before where you just do mad things. And it’s significant because of the slate and that gordd, that connection to the mountains. And it also tells a story about women, gives a sense of overcoming hardship. Look at me, I’ve been through two childbirths, come through things, out the other side.”
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Tincian oozes with this sense of drama, brooding with portent as well as serenity. The groove and direction of the 9Bach sound is fully embedded and self-assured. Mart explains: “A lot of the confidence in our sound now comes from what we achieved with the first album. We had a template: grooves, beautiful melodies (coming from the folk songs), the harp being the main instrument. We wanted to develop the three part harmonies, carry on with the grooves but take more risks. It was quite scary because we’d picked what we thought were the best ten folk songs, so the challenge was to write songs as good as that! We’d set the bar high! I think Lisa’s done that brilliantly with the songs of Tin- cian, and they fit in the folk tradition.”
he opening of the songwriting floodgates for Lisa highlights the internationalist outlook of the band. Lisa reflects on the first album: “With the folk
songs, I’d thought why would I need to write any new songs when you’ve already got all this?” The facilitator of change, the perspective shifter, was a collabora- tion and exchange with Australian aborig- inal collective the Black Arm Band in 2012 on Mamiath (Mother Tongue). It was part of the British Council-funded BT River Of Music (itself part of the Cultural Olympiad) which focused on a celebration of language and culture through shared experience as well as the struggle to keep their respective languages alive.
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