Is -y-Coed

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Moving from human utterance to a dystopian wild landscape, natural sounds are interspersed with a range of sorrowful sonorities, eking out and building on the misery of the soundscape. Brief gestural sections punctuate the evolutions, allowing the composition to move into different textural realms. Material was recorded at Lake Vyrnwy (Llyn Efyrnwy in Welsh).

This work can be seen as a sonic protest 'song'. Lake Vyrnwy was created to bring clean water to the English city of Liverpool and was one of many reservoirs built (flooding valleys and drowning villages) in Wales during the 19th and 20th centuries. The locals and Welsh MPs were rarely consulted and the decision was made from on high by the British Government. This reached a pivotal momentum the 1960s with 'Cofiwch Dryweryn', a graffitied stone wall in Llanrhystud, Wales. Meic Stephens originally painted the words onto the wall in the early 1960s following the decision by the Liverpool City Council to flood the Tryweryn Valley to create a reservoir. This was the beginnings of the Welsh Nationalist movement.

PAUL DIBLEY BIOG

Paul Dibley is a Welsh composer and sonic artist, and is also Principal Lecturer in Music and Programme Lead for Media Arts at Oxford Brookes University, UK.

He is Co-Director of the Sonic Art Research Unit and co-founder of the Audiograft festival.

In 2003 Paul completed a PhD in Musical Composition at the University of Birmingham, UK, where he studied with Professor Jonty Harrison. As well as composing electroacoustic compositions (often specializing in using the human voice), he creates compositions for instruments and live electronics. Recent projects include working with Okeanos, Jane Chapman and Jos Zwaanenburg.

paul.dibley@brookes.ac.uk

AUDIO CD