Rhodri Davies
Rhodri Davies is a harpist, improviser, composer and multidisciplinary artist. He plays harp, bray harp, horsehair harp, electric harp and builds wind, water, ice, dry ice and fire harp installations and has released eight solo albums. His regular groups include: HEN OGLEDD, Common Objects, IST (with Mark Wastell and Caius Williams) and duos with John Butcher and Mark Sanders. He has worked with the following artists: Derek Bailey, Hamid Drake, Simon H Fell, Will Gaines, Jenny Hval, Sofia Jernberg, Theodora Laird, Lina Lapelyte, Nicole Mitchell, Butch Morris, David Sylvian, Pat Thomas and Otomo Yoshihide.
Davies was closely associated with the pioneering composer Éliane Radigue performing eighteen of her pieces. She composed OCCAM I for Davies in 2011, the first in a series of solo and ensemble pieces for individual instrumentalists in which a performer’s personal performance technique and particular relationship to their instrument functioned as the compositional material of the piece. New pieces for solo harp have also been composed for him by Philip Corner, Carole Finer, Alison Knowles, Catherine Kontz, Phill Niblock, Ben Patterson, Mariam Rezaei, Mieko Shiomi, Yasunao Tone and Christian Wolff.
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 Abertawe-Swansea.