Llais brings huge international names to perform on a Welsh stage

Jude Rogers

A chorus of voices can rally the American civil rights movement, and another can skyrocket South African music into the mainstream. A single voice can repeat a static note – “ha, ha, ha, ha” – and burst open the potential of pop music. Women’s voices that are new to each other on the night can fuse on stage to radically reimagine old songs, while young poets’ voices can supercharge rhythm and flow to tell brand-new stories.

Llais, the Wales Millennium Centre’s celebration of the human voice, is bringing all this range and diversity to Cardiff in its eighth year. It’s also bringing huge international names, like American avant-garde pioneer and composer Laurie Anderson, who is bringing a one-off performance, Friends and Teachers, for her first ever visit to Wales.

In demand worldwide for her imaginative shows that blend songs, improvisation, politics and philosophy, she’s as compelling a stage presence as she was when her voice provided percussion and vocoder-led singing on her unexpected no. 2 UK hit, O! Superman. “The voice is never neutral,” she told Athens Voice in 2009. “It carries body, gender, age, power, memory — and ultimately, responsibility. When I began using technology to alter my voice, it was never about hiding. It was to reveal something. To show how easily a voice can become authority. How quickly we believe what sounds “right.”

Voices from two of the biggest global music albums of all time also resound through the Donald Gordon Theatre. Under the direction of original members Demetrio Muñiz and Barbarito Torres, The Buena Vista All Stars will expand the legacy of the Afro-Cuban Buena Vista Social Club, whose debut album, released 30 years ago next year, sold 8 million copies worldwide. The London African Gospel Choir will superpower the South African styles of isicathamiya and mbaqanga in their celebration of forty years of Paul Simon’s Graceland, alongside a performance by one of the world’s greatest gospel groups, the Blind Boys of Alabama.

Composer and sitarist Jasdeep Singh Degun will so showcase Indian classical singers and Western classical sounds in his live collaboration with the BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales, while folk, jazz and alternative voices will also resonate over the four days. These include rising traditional singing stars Shovel Dance Collective, Welsh-language gothic noise merchants Tristwch y Fenywod, and Mercury Prize nominee Lisa Hannigan, bringing her ambitions vocal project, Sirens, to the Millennium Centre.

A show that offers a different live collaboration every night, SIRENS incorporates original compositions and reimagined works by female songwriters, arranged by music director Theodora Byrne. Each night’s group singers interpret them, engaging in deep listening with one another, and layering harmonies. “What feels particularly powerful about Sirens, especially in this moment, is that it’s built around human connection and response,” Hannigan explains from her tour bus. “Each artist brings her own songs and voice into the room, but she isn’t performing in isolation – the other women listen, respond and support her, both vocally and, I think, emotionally. ”

She’s noticed a “generosity and vulnerability” in that exchange, she adds, “which has been incredibly moving to witness.” The Cardiff performance will showcase Hannigan alongside the extraordinary Irish female vocal group Landless and English indie-folk singer Bess Atwell, two acts playing individual gigs at Llais. Charlotte Church and This Is The Kit’s Kate Stables are also coming along to bolster this impressive one-off collective.

The collaborative spirit they will be sharing is especially powerful in our age of AI, Hannigan says. “AI can generate and imitate more and more of what we make, [so] there is something very powerful about gathering people together whose response to one another can’t be predicted. These are individual voices, breaths, instincts and emotions meeting in real time… creating something collectively that belongs to that particular group of people, in that particular room, on that particular night.”

Llais’ director and Wales Millennium Centre’s Chief Creative and Content Officer Graeme Farrow believes that a festival of the voice is a rebellious response to our homogenised age. He started the festival in 2016, to celebrate the “human voice in other genres alongside other brilliant events like Cardiff Singer of the World.”

When he considers why the festival matters, he recalls a world-renowned experimental artist from last year’s programme, Meredith Monk, talking about the “voice being the original instrument”, and how human beings “sang together before we could talk with each other” in language. “There’s something deeply primal about singing and coming together to sing – I think it’s one of the most deeply human things that we have. I think we’re going to have to really try hard to fight to reconnect with the things that make us human in this world where algorithms are driving towards an ultra-processed diet of culture and music – and the voice is a place we should turn to.”

At the heart of the Llais festival is Gwyneth Lewis’ quotation on the front of the Wales Millennium Centre, he adds: ’In these stones, horizons sing.’ These voices don’t have to be singing loudly either, he says. “Think of Laurie Anderson, and she’s often speaking in a warm, welcoming whisper. And some of the greatest voices of our times, like Björk or Joni Mitchell or Kate Bush are so individual. They couldn’t be invented artificially.”

Llais drills down into the emotional reality of how voices “really move us,” he concludes. “I want this festival to be the musical equivalent to reading to your children at bedtime, feeling like an act of resistance. It’s about taking Gwyneth Lewis’ quotation and thinking about what it really means, and how singers can create their own musical universes – both for themselves, and for everyone who allows themselves to get lost in them.”

Llais runs from 7-11 October at the Wales Millennium Centre. Sirens: Hosted by Lisa Hannigan, will play at the Donald Gordon Theatre on Saturday 10 October at 7.30pm. Find out more HERE

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