Experience magical sounds from Wales at Temple of Peace

The Cardiff Music City Festival series: Interviews celebrating the pioneering Welsh artists performing at our capital’s fortnight-long extravaganza of music, beginning this Friday. 

Jude Rogers

In Cardiff’s Marble Hall at the Temple of Peace for three days starting today, new sounds will reimagine this stirring space, including analogue synthesisers, magical acoustic and electronic sounds, spoken-word passages and field recordings. In a building conceived as a memorial to soldiers who died in the First World War and to promote peace and justice, Richard James’ Evolution of Beauty installation will show what music can offer us in tough times: time away from the world for contemplation and a profound sense of magic.

A fascinating addition to the fortnight-long Cardiff Music City Festival, James is putting the finishing touches to the installation as we speak, a week before the doors open, at home in North Pembrokeshire. He’s been a stalwart of the Welsh music scene since he was a teenager, as a lynchpin of one of Wales’ most feted experimental pop groups, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci.

His move to gorgeous acoustic music in solo albums like 2006’s The Seven Sleepers Den morphed into explorations in wider composition and sound installations. In the last year, he’s worked on a fascinating project in the prehistoric Wogan Cavern under Pembroke Castle, and as part of Hotel El Al, with Angharad Van Rijswijk (Accü and Trwbador), responding live to exhibitions by Linder and Kameelah Janan Rasheed at Swansea’s Glynn Vivian Gallery.

For the Cardiff Music City Festival installation, James was intent on not relying solely on pre-recorded music. “I wanted to do something that involved more of a live performance, that morphed from daytime going into early evening.” He’ll be taking acoustic recordings made in Wogan Cavern by him and Van Rijswijk and other brilliant Welsh musicians, including folk singer and guitarist Gareth Bonello and composer and free improvising harpist, Rhodri Davies, and adding his own live synthesiser melodies, drones and loops.

The story behind the Wogan Cavern project closely relates to the Evolution of Beauty idea. James was considering the genesis of music-making by people in caves, and he did research into anthropology and archaeology about how the body of the homo sapiens evolved to make music, and how humans first created music together through communal working.

Digging deep into musical cultures that have since been diluted or disappeared, he was also fascinated to hear early Australian indigenous recordings that had similarities with Brazilian recordings. “I got me thinking about whether these cultures had a shared root, or whether it’s because we’re part of the same species, physiologically and cognitively, so musical similarities will evolve because of those elements. It’s fascinating!”

Live music will loop and twist around these improvisations, using the natural resonance of the stunning Marble Hall. “It’ll be the sort of musical equivalent of visiting an art gallery,” James explains. “You can come in, lose yourself in the music and sound, and then leave – come and go as you please.” He didn’t want to overwhelm the room with sound either, so when they enter, things begin gently, and people can stay for a few minutes or a few hours, listen closely, move around, or sit and read. “I didn’t want people to be surrounded by speakers and just completely engulfed. You can also choose where to stand or sit too – and we’re going to have some floor cushions as well!”

James has become “more and more interested” in long-form instrumental music over the years, he says. He reflects warmly on the “broad tastes” that shaped Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci’s brilliant output from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s, “how we’d all sit down and listen to lots of different things together that we really enjoyed”. He lost the “passion and excitement” for writing guitar songs after his first solo albums, he reflects, and instead became interested in integrating his love of pop melody and harmony with more long-form ideas.

His big inspirations include the 1970s German kosmische duo Cluster and their group with Neu!’s Michael Rother, Harmonia, who worked with Brian Eno and made beautiful, ambient, repetitive electronica. “They showed me alternative things you could do with sound, rhythm and expanded repetitive music that also retained a pop music sensibility.” These days he also loves listening to composer Richard Skelton, dark ambient music online radio station Grey Clay Radio, and Mexican artist Vica Pacheco, who blends, as James describes it, “folk music from the deep past with modern analogue and digital technology”.

James’ Temple of Peace performances will involve two three-and-a-half-hour sets, each incorporating 20 pieces, and will evolve in different ways over the day. He visited the space for the first time a few weeks ago; he says he felt very moved by it. “The idea of why the temple was built in the first place after the First World War became something I really wanted to tie in to what I’m doing. I love that there’s a slight element of defiance behind what I’m doing – celebrating all the joys of experimental culture against the banality of fascism, and doing so in a space that’s so good acoustically and aesthetically.”

The installation also suits the project’s name. It comes from a book by evolutionary biologist Richard Prum, which attempts to understand or redress the idea of beauty in attracting mates in the bird kingdom, but James hopes people will interpret it in many broad ways. “I’d love it for people to come along and take whatever their idea of beauty is to the idea of music, to enjoy their own special experience.”

Evolution of Beauty will be performed at Cardiff’s Temple of Peace on 5, 6 and 8 October between 1 and 8 pm.

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