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Written in fRoots issue 343/344, 2012


LLIO RHYDDERCH & TOMOS WILLIAMS
Carn Ingli
Fflach Tradd CD331H (2011)

For me Llio Rhydderch of Anglesey/Ynys Mon is at the heart of Welsh music. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s as if, for Irish music, Turlough Carolan was alive and playing now. Or like the greatest of west African kora griots, music that’s the memory of a people. Yet, astonishingly, she still doesn’t seem to be known about and cherished as she should be.
     It’s not just that she’s the greatest living player of triple harp; it’s her ability to create melodies and variations, and to listen and improvise with the finest of subtlety and luminosity, as those who’ve had the privilege of playing with her will know. Until now her own albums have only featured harp, but here she duets on some pieces with Tomos Williams’ mistily muted trumpet or flugelhorn. Not the most obvious of counterparts, but Williams is sensitively minimal, just accentuating or responding to melody lines, giving this album an elegiac wistfulness.
     There are very occasional light touches, too, of texture from another instrument: drumkit. Only brushes lightly stroking a skin, or a tish of cymbal, but I could do without them; they evoke the wrong images, an intrusion, albeit slight and not too distracting, into the airy, natural world of Llio’s harp, into which the trumpet manages to enter without breaking the spell.
     But it’s really all about Llio’s thought-filled, rippling, offsetting notes on the three parallel rows of her tall harp’s taught nylon strings. When we recorded together back in 2003, as she played she was watching, through the big window of Jens Schroeder’s then Dreamworld Studio in Pembrokeshire, evening flocks of starlings wheeling in front of the last streaks of sunlight on darkening hills. That’s my lasting image of her music.
     This album is again finely recorded by Schroeder, and its title and the artwork reflect another similar inspirational view, of the slopes of the north Pembrokeshire iron-age hill-fort of Carn Ingli near which it was recorded. Music of wind-blown sky over sweeps of grey-green and long shadow, coupled with an almost courtly stateliness, but full of humanity and devoid of pretension, that reaches back over the centuries.
     Just listen, to this or any of her albums. Or better still, if the chance ever presents, encounter her in person; just you, and her, and the harp, in a quiet room with clear, low winter light streaming in through the window.

     www.fflach.co.uk


© 2011 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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