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Martin & Lisa of 9Bach
9BACH Tincian Real World CDRW202
It’s been five long years since the startlingly original inter- pretations of Welsh tradi- tional songs on 9Bach’s eponymous debut album first alerted us to their immense potential. This new release marks the emergence of singer Lisa Jên as a songwrit-
er, featuring seven entirely new compositions, two new musical settings of existing poems and just the one traditional song (Pa Le?)
Recorded in Wales, and with all bar one of the songs sung in Welsh (the exception is in Greek) this music is “worked from the mountainous, mining landscape of Gerlan and Bethesda: the harshness and the beauty, its ever-changing moods and the solidarity of the people who live there.”
These are big songs which tell deep sto- ries, and not all of them local in origin. There’s the aboriginal child snatched from her mother in Plentyn; the joys and anguish of childbirth in Lliwiau and Babi’r Eirlys; the grandmother under the shadow of death in Pebyll and the quarry man leaving his work for the last time in Ffarwel. Lisa Jên’s voice elevates these songs into something perhaps best described as a Cymraeg Fado, capable of transcending language barriers and transfix- ing the listener with her emotion and artistry.
While it’s easy just to eulogise that voice (which first caught my attention via Gruff Rhys’ Candylion), 9Bach is much more than a one-woman band. I once asked Martin Hoy- land how he managed to play electric guitar
Martin Green
all over traditional songs without ever giving- off the slightest whiff of ’70s folk-rock. I hope he took it as the compliment that it was intended to be! On Tincian his atmospheric, song-serving playing is nothing short of out- standing. Ali Byworth (drums), Dan Swain (bass), Esyllt Glyn Jones (harp, vocals), and Mirian Roberts (vocals) all play a full part in arrangements which eschew standard pop/rock structures while successfully incor- porating age-old Welsh touchstone sounds of harp and male voice choir with an irresistible modern dance ambience. A brilliant, genre- defying album.
www.realworld.com Steve Hunt
MARTIN GREEN Crows’ Bones Reveal 036DDX
We are, of course, well accus- tomed to the Great Box Man of Lau going off on weird and wonderful tangents in collaborations with orches- tras, brass ensembles, rock stars and all, but this is some- thing else entirely.
Commissioned by Opera North to put together a show about ghosts, he co-opted Becky Unthank, Inge Thomson and Swedish nyckelharpa player Niklas Roswall and what emerged was this remorselessly dark and unsettling yet brilliantly crafted journey into the spirit world. The same collective subse- quently went into the studio with Calum Mal- colm and Portishead’s Adrian Uttley to restructure the project for a more permanent
format, creating the type of music best lis- tened on your own in an unlit room with phones and all human contact switched off.
Ghost tales are a staple part of the folk tradition – particularly favoured, it seems, by several among the newer generation – but Green’s musical architecture is a wonder to behold, offering a different perspective that uses starkness like an instrument of torture. Modern songs like the shuddering I Saw The Dead by Conor O’Brien (Villagers) and One December Morn by Sean Cooney (Young ’Uns) – Becky Unthank dragging out every syl- lable like it’s a piece of her flesh – fit naturally alongside more familiar traditional fare such as Three Ravens and a hymn-like treatment of Lyke Wake Dirge.
There’s also a very odd original piece
called Some Living escorted in from the ether on a single insistent cello string apparently played on a log (a Green musical invention that he calls…The Log!); while there’s an unmistakeable feeling that Freddy Krueger is lurking in the garden and is about to cut off your head through Some Neither. Add in a Swedish bridal march and an ethereal finale titled Some Dead featuring the trio Ayakhaan from Yakutia playing an Eastern European form of mouth harp, plus some oddball har- monies between the very different, yet bizarrely complementary voices of Becky Unthank and Inge Thomson, and you have a very strange, disconcerting yet thoroughly engaging and somewhat hypnotic album.
With this around the place, every night is
Halloween.
www.crowsbones.com www.martingreen.tv
Colin Irwin
Photo: Judith Burrows
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