Searching for the young Welsh rebels

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

Twenty years ago, between Love Kraft and Hey Venus!, a Super Furry Animal joined ranks with two friends and released a gorgeous, exploratory album. It had a good name too, Omni, suggesting everything, everywhere, all the things it could be, a sentiment that also suited the Cardiff collective behind it.

This Friday, Acid Casuals return to the capital for one night only, playing the 2006 cult album that’s never been performed live, at the Dora Stoutzker Hall at the Royal Welsh College of Music, to officially launch the Cardiff Music City Festival. Composer Cian Ciaran, fresh from a summer playing his distinctive psychedelic keyboards for the Super Furry Animals, is preparing for the night in his studio with fellow Acid Casual Kev Tame, a former member of Big Leaves and now director of Oleia, who produce the Welsh Music Prize, and CEO of Sain Records.

The “stars were in line” because we were discussing finally putting the album out on vinyl on a label in London, Ciaran explains. “So playing it live makes sense. And the hall itself is lovely, you know – we get access to some of their equipment, so it becomes a unique proposition, a unique performance. The last thing we wanted to do was open up a laptop.”

They’ll have acoustic piano playing alongside synths, a live rhythm section, percussion, and other instruments – “it’s not the type of thing you take on the road”, Ciaran says, smiling. They will also use the college’s Steinway Spirio – a groundbreaking new player piano with advanced sensors and microcontrollers. “You can send the information to it, and treat it like an electronic instrument, so it plays itself effectively. I can send it five hands’ worth of information where we’ve only got two. And it sounds so lovely in the room!”

The opportunity to put together a full gig, with access to such a space and equipment, was hard to resist, Tame agrees. As Ciaran scoured their archives for the source material, digging out old floppy disks and zip disks, he got in touch with old friends to think about how to make Omni work live. “Doing this does feel very much in the spirit of how we were doing things back then in Cardiff, in terms of pulling or working together with the wider creative community,” he says. “We’re not behaving like a traditional touring band or in that kind of sphere, but pulling together with musicians and people on the visual side to put something together specifically for the show.”

Omni came to life in the mid-2000s because Ciaran wanted to marry acoustic instruments with new technology he and his friends were discovering at the time. Acid Casuals was the general tag for a gang of friends who ran club nights and raves in the capital, several of whom, like Ciaran, Tame and their bandmate Llyr Evans, had moved down from North Wales. They even had an art gallery and designed and made jeans; no creative idea was off the agenda.

“It was exciting because you didn’t know what was next, and we weren’t thinking about being commercial or making a living,” Ciaran remembers. “You could just f*** about trying things out, and get by financially, back then.”

“And there was a crew of us who were certainly like-minded,” Tame adds, “pretty open to trying different things out and experimenting with different ways of doing things. Some of us would then go off recording or touring, but there’d be time in between to dip in and out, so it felt like the perfect kind of side hustle, in that sense. Coming back and going, I don’t know anything about this, but I’ll come along and do what I can, and we were obviously younger, with lots of energy and ideas. With all that in the mix, you start feeling as if you can do anything, really.”

Omni emerged from the same optimistic mentality. It roams genres freely, moving between doo-wop and twisted psychedelia, pulsing electro and whirling ambient, often recalling lush library music records, lost cult cinema soundtracks and ghostly echoes of pure pop. Beginning with If I’m A Self You’re A Sunt, a windswept cinematic epic named after a wisecrack from Richard Burton, its many highlights include the dreamy Y Ferch Ar Y Cei Yn Rio [The Girl On The Quay in Rio], the sweet, fidgety electronica of Wa Da Da, and the doomy piano balladry of Long Time No See. It ends with the gorgeous Bowl Me Over, a romantic Beach Boys-grade singalong primed for the end credits of a film, only transported to a more Celtic West Coast.

Contemporary reviews were gushing, even from the new big website at the time, Pitchfork: “[an] enormously satisfying listen for 2006”, wrote Marc Hogan, later its senior editor. Recent reviews of the new vinyl edition make it clear it’s still loved today. “It was one of those rarities where something instantly elbowed its way to the top of my favourites list, loitering around ever since,” writes Spenser Tomson in Electronic Sound. “[It’s] a sonic gift that keeps on giving however and wherever I press play.”

The Omni performance, however, will involve extra elements. “We’re structuring the songs to play live,” Ciaran says, “but leaving them purposely open to interpretation, so there’s a degree of improvisation that isn’t on record, which helps us rediscover the music.” Tame’s 15-year-old daughter will even be joining them as a guest vocalist on Kraken, a track that begins woozily, before bursting free with moments of heightened emotion. “It feels relatively unique combining the older elements with everyone involved,” Tame admits. He turns and looks at his friend. “And it adds a nice bit of jeopardy, doesn’t it?”

You sense that revisiting the past has been unexpectedly nourishing for both Casuals. The new vinyl pressing sounds “fantastic”, Tame agrees, and Cian has enjoyed getting into the nitty-gritty details of the album they made. “When you record and mix an album, you hear it thousands of times, and you don’t want to hear it again! But reinterpreting something, or reinventing it, reminds you of the melodies behind it, where you were when you made it – and it still feels so familiar.”

Acid Casuals play Omni at the Dora Stoutzker Hall at the Royal Welsh College of Music this Friday at 8pm

Find out more about Cardiff Music City Festival

Jude Rogers is a writer, broadcaster, presenter and author of The Sound of Being Human, out now in 2nd edition paperback

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