Looking Back On A.i.R With Superhand
Mid-Wales-based electronic duo Superhand look back at their residency here at Wales Arts Review. Superhand is a freak-blues music group based in Cardiff, South Wales, and one of the chosen artists to take part in Wales Arts Review’s most recent series, Artists in Residence. Throughout 2017 these artists will take a leading creative role in what Wales Arts Review publishes, centring their skills on a challenging project over the course of a month. We were inundated with applications, receiving hundreds of emails about the positions, and it was no easy task whittling down all that talent to this final eleven. Our team of six editors debated long into the night, and in the end, we decided on a collection of people who we most want to work with, and whose work excites us. We think you will be excited by them too.
Recording for our AiR project with Wales Arts Review was a very productive and insightful experience. It was a different process for us; we had never set up, improvised and recorded that particular way. It was quite liberating and we were very pleased some great new ideas came out of it.
The material was recorded at a time when politically many things were happening, and this greatly influenced our improvised lyrics. Musically we just let things happen. This process has shown us a new way forward in our music-making, and we have now become more experimental as a creative unit. We are now performing in a similar way to how we set up for the AiR session and we have kept some of the ideas we came up with, which keep evolving. They have become some of our new working pieces that we include when performing.
The experience has put us in touch with a different, more experimental music scene that we feel at home in, and has shown us a new way forward for 2018. It would be great to find some other artists to collaborate with or perform with. We would be happy for anyone to contact us with any ideas for future projects. A big thank you to Wales Arts Review, for this opportunity.
To check out all of Superhand‘s project and listen to the music created for it, click here and explore the work from the other chosen artists residencies here.
