Gwen Sion (AKA catHead): Women Make Music
Llwch a Llechi, a live audio-visual project for concert venues
Gwen Siôn is an award-winning composer, producer and multidisciplinary artist working with sound, sculpture, DIY electronics, video and installation. She creates multi-instrumental, vocal and electronic compositions, and designs and builds her own handmade instruments and experimental sound devices by recycling found objects and natural materials. She is interested in the relationship between sound and environment, ecology, mythology, ritual and synaesthetic crossover, particularly the dynamic between colour and musical notation. Gwen often uses non-traditional composition methods inspired by reading the landscape as a score, field recordings, hydrorecordings, and collects physical fragments of the landscape to create both acoustic and electronic instruments.
Gwen will use her Women Make Music grant to support the development of Llwch a Llechi [Dust and Slate], a live audio-visual project for concert venues exploring connections between music, landscape, tradition and ritual. Llwch a Llechi will be performed at the Wales Millennium Centre by an ensemble of 10 orchestral musicians, one of Wales’ oldest choirs – Côr y Penrhyn (originally formed as a quarrymen’s choir for workers at Penrhyn Quarry, Bethesda), and Gwen using live electronics, including her own hand-built instruments made from recycled natural materials (slate, oak and yew). The project combines elements of experimental electronic music, contemporary orchestral composition, choral composition (specifically informed by North Wales’ working-class tradition of slate quarrymen’s choirs), field recordings and moving image to create a unique and engaging live performance piece. Llwch a Llechi takes inspiration from folklore motifs, socio-political histories, industrial heritage and the cultural relationship between music and landscape.