Hywel Davies is a rarity -- a composer who has developed his own natural voice, and on top of that, trusts in it. In an artform filled with "-ists" and "-isms", Davies' work is honest and compelling, eschewing artifice and protocol.
Gregory Oh, Artistic Director, Toca Loca
Nothing in the classical canon quite prepares you for Hywel Davies…Davies has long combined natural sounds with more conventional sound sources. Davies recordings have revealed a capacity for considerable diversity…the album [Natural Language] contained an invigorating collage of material, both deliberately arranged and aleatoric.
Louis Gray, The Wire
There is an innovative playfulness that immediately strikes
you when
listening to or performing one of Hywel's works. His writing is unencumbered
by ego, and his keen observer's eye allows him to draw inspiration from
his
environment and life, finding the extraordinary in the ordinary with
refreshing enthusiasm. Deceptively uncomplicated, Hywel's music demands
that
the performer take responsibility for lifting the music off of the page,
which can only be done well with energy, commitment and dramatic
sensibility. From the audience's and performer's standpoint, the challenge
is well worth the effort.
Maria Gacesa, Producer/Performer, Meduse
Hywel Davies is a composer and installation artist who creates rich and evocative site-specific sound installations. He has written music for the concert hall, dance, and television. His works also include studio collage of found material. These works often use elements of chance and repetition to enhance or reinterpret the nature and resonance of a particular building or location. Installations combine musical composition with other elements such as recorded natural and ambient sounds and speech.
Utilising a significant degree of participation on the part of individuals or communities with links to the locations these subtle but highly engaging works create highly atmospheric environments that explore the relationship between music, sound, memory and the sense of place.
Philip Smith, Head of Visual Arts, Arts Council England South East
Defining Davies' work is no simple matter. His compositions defy generic boundaries and resist attempts at easy classification. Formal discipline and tonal acuity sit alongside mischievous humour and the probabilistic open-endedness of improvisation. Davies' palette of instrumentation is necessarily eclectic, spanning string quartets, cement mixers and discreet digital encryption, often drawing the attentive ear to pattern and texture at the very thresholds of perception. 'Apus apus', an acutely evocative assembly of flute, basses and curvaceous Fender close-ups recorded for the acclaimed Emit album series in 1997, demonstrates how even Davies' more abstract and experimental work retains an emotive tug that, although often ambiguous, is difficult to ignore.
Davies' subsequent album for Emit, titled 'Natural Language', draws together many of the threads of his earlier work, with contemporary composition and disassembled jazz sitting alongside collaged transformations of found sound. That the album unites spectral cellos, disembodied voices and a playful slant of the perils of the live jazz circuit with effortless plausibility is testament to Davies' adventurous ear and singular ingenuity.. This diversity of form and suggestion confounds idle expectation and encourages the listener to experience the work free of prejudicial filtering and reflexive associations. At a time when so much modern music now employs the peripheral fixations of posturing and fashion to steer its audience toward a role that is ultimately one of passive consumption, Davies' work invites a more active and expansive engagement.
A recurrent theme in Davies' work is a paradoxical sense of stillness and animation. From the high wire balance of 'Pianoduetbook', in which melodic figures hover between stability and free-fall to the haunting, hesitatnt interplay of 'Not Going Gently', Davies demonstrates a masterful grasp of pace, detail and dynamic. At times, the resulting tensions are extraordinarily poignant, at others, the listener is immersed in an audio environment that is complex and hypnotic. For his latest installation, 'Waldscenen', Davies draws on an enviable catalogue of source material and compositional experience, creating an ambitious multimedia puzzle for the senses. The points of contrast and connection are enormously diverse and suitably ambiguous, with visual clues and ersatz radio broadcasts inviting listeners to intuit narratives of their own. In a climate of lowered expectation, in which music is routinely reduced to a mere soundtrack of lifestyle accessory, the work of Hywel Davies will generously reward the absorption it requires.
From Hywel Davies: Suggesting the intangible by David Thompson.
First published
in Waldscenen (Gallery Catalogue, ArtSway)