Amy Grandvoinet reflects on the recent ‘Tranwsnewid: Transform’ event in Aberystwyth Arts Centre and talks to artists, including Cerys Hafana.
Aberystwyth was a cloud, but within that cloud was a buzz: ‘Trawsnewid : Transform’, a two-day event of audio and visual art at the Arts Centre on Penglais Hill. For ages, you could see this small flyer outside the dance-gear shop advertising what was ephemerally rumoured to be a big happening. On Friday 2nd and Saturday 3rd February, whisperings became reality. Humans gathered inside Aberystwyth Arts Centre’s concrete cave, sheltering from gruelling precipitation; a friend wore ash-blue acrylic cumulous earrings with rain-drops hanging off them, glinting and sparkling in the grizzle.
Word in the cave was: more like this should go on at Aberystwyth Arts Centre. Perhaps it once did? A sense of nostalgia and new-ness filled the highly-peopled space. Facebook and Instagram pages had announced ‘Trawsnewid : Transform 2024 🔮 …a unique festival of audio visual exploration …gŵyl unigryw o archwilio clyweledol #Aberystwyth 🌊’, successfully charming and summoning a sell-out. The USP was that performers would produce song-sets but also videos for their respective shows. £35 for a weekend-pass seemed an absolute bargain for a line-up presenting not only feasts of sound but also of sight from Parisa Fouladi, Cosmic Dog Fog, EADYTH, The Family Battenberg, Cerys Hafana, Gruff Rhys, Mr Phormula, Worldcub, Skunkadelic, Gallops, Tynys, Adwaith, HMS Morris, Gwenno, Sage Todz, DJ Dilys, and more.
Aberystwyth Arts Centre, it turns out, is the perfect location for a modest and civilised festival. Acts were split manageably between three stages: ‘Neuadd Fawr : Great Hall’, ‘Theatr : Theatre’, and ‘Cyntedd : Foyer’. Still, there was hot chatter about occasional overlap tragedies ~ the kind of mild peril without which anything calling itself a festival would lack.
The clocks of the Arts Centre helped attendees, for example this one in the upstairs Bar.
The disco-ball, too, in the upstairs Bar also, basked in broad appreciation.
‘Trawsnewid : Transform’ was put on by Aberystywth Arts Centre in collaboration with FOCUS Wales, which ‘places the music industry spotlight firmly on the emerging talent that Wales has to offer the world, alongside a selection of the best new acts from across the globe’, and usually operates as an esteemed multi-venue festival in Wrexham, North Wales. Gaggles of rain-duckers could not stop celebrating the gathering’s location in Aberystwyth this time, not Wrexham and Cardiff neither.
Many sounds and many sights emanated from the two-day ‘Trawsnewid : Transform’. Visual and audio pairings were unwaveringly excellent: local shots of Aberystwyth promenade and its Irish Sea amid twangy pop-beats, brave footage of war-torn Palestine next to smooth honeyed vocals, synthy vistas and tutus and planets, dream-rhymes over wooden floors plus WordArt, pixelated tambourines beside string-strokes, glittery forest in poetry utterance, tassel-hats and funky bass, &c!
And also harp, clarinet, and red electric-guitar with invisible humans and smoking moss and slate.
Cerys Hafana and I happen to be friends, and Cerys kindly agreed to Answer a few Questions about playing at ‘Trawsnewid: Transform’ in the ‘Theatr : Theatre’. So did Iolo Walker and Jenő Davies, makers of the visual to go with Cerys’s audio, whose Questions and Answers follow afterwards.
Amy: Cerys, what on this present Earth-planet does the word ‘trawsnewid’ mean to you, and your music?
Cerys: My first association is with The Transformers, but I’ve been trying to get that out of my head. I don’t think I’ve ever seen The Transformers, but when I moved to Machynlleth age 5 I was almost immediately befriended by another 5-year-old who insisted we play Transformers every lunch-time. I think transformation is at the heart of making folk music. Rather than making something out of ‘nothing’, you are taking something old and turning it into something new. I made lots of the songs that I performed on Friday for a podcast called ‘Old Tunes Fresh Takes’ during the lockdowns. It was amazing seeing how one song could change in so many different ways, and to feel that yours was just one small part of that tapestry.
Amy: Rumour has it you sometimes sketch cats, and you design a mean t-shirt. How do you understand relationships between ‘visual’ and ‘audio’ in what you do?
Cerys: I perform a lot of instrumental music, and most of the songs I sing are in old Welsh, and if they’re not in old Welsh they’re in old English and are usually about horrible / baffling things. I enjoy using visuals to try and make the songs less opaque, or to maybe present a different interpretation of the song that is more palatable to us in 2024, or to try and bring an element of comedy to a song that is otherwise about the end of the world. In a slightly different vein, I like sketching wobbly cats and designing t-shirts because I’m not very good at those things so it feels like low-stakes creativity. Usually, I spend a lot of my time sitting at the harp feeling stressed.
Amy: How did you respond to the visual requirement demanded by ‘Trawsnewid : Transform’ specifically?
Cerys: I’m usually very bad at asking other people to do things for or with me because I tend to assume they don’t want to, so I had planned to do something myself for Trawsnewid then at the last minute realised I don’t have the skills / time / equipment for such an undertaking and asked Jenő and Iolo. In hindsight this would have been a much better plan from the beginning and I feel horror at the thought it almost didn’t happen. I am such a lone wolf in most aspects of my work and bringing people in feels very lovely. I still haven’t seen the video in its entirety but I feel like there was a stronger emotional reaction than normal from the audience (I have never been hugged by so many people after a gig), and can only assume that that has something to do with the video.
Amy: To what extent was the Arts Centre itself transformed, in your opinion, at this unique two-day festival?
Cerys: The Arts Centre can feel like quite a big place, on the top of quite a big hill, and it was lovely to be sharing that space with 800 other people who were all there for the same reason. It tied a lot of the different rooms together, making the space feel more cohesive, if that makes sense. It was also nice to see other Welsh language acts, who I seem to spend most of my life following around at various gigs and festivals in other parts of Wales, being enjoyed and appreciated by the demographics mid-West Wales has to offer. I think it can be valuable for non-Welsh-speakers to occasionally find themselves in situations where they don’t understand everything going on, but still enjoy themselves. Those opportunities can be hard to make happen but I felt Trawsnewid did an excellent job.
Amy: Can you share any thoughts or feelings about jackfruit?
Cerys: What a strange edible object. So many textures in one place. What does a jackfruit look like when it’s at home? I have had some very nice jackfruit and some very bad jackfruit in my time and I’m pleased to report that I enjoyed the Art Centre’s Trawsnewid jackfruit curry before my concert very much, although I was reliably informed that it is not usually served in such large pieces.
Cerys was wearing a shacket, which she warns is a horrid word in English and even more horrid if you speak Welsh, cosmically patterned, dark trousers, un-matching socks, and large shoes.
Iolo and Jenő tell us more about their role in the co-production.
Amy: Hi Iolo, hi Jenő! Thanks so much for answering some questions about the ‘Trawsnewid : Transform’ happenings this February at the Arts Centre Aberystwyth! Can you tell us what the word ‘trawsnewid’ means to you?
Jenő: It’s great to have so many bilingual acts play in Aberystwyth under one roof, many I’m familiar with but have actually never seen live before. I was very happy to be part of it working with Cerys.
Iolo: Celebrating is important. The festival gave space to celebrate so thank you for that. I guess this is what transformation is about, moving forwards and celebrating.
Amy: Can you tell us about your process in making your visuals that duet with Cerys’s audio?
Iolo; The video was a continuation of a project recontextualising ‘The Tale of Blodeuwedd’ from the fourth branch of Y Mabinogi in the contemporary Dyfi Valley. Blodeuwedd is turned into an Owl by Gwydion the Sorcerer; in the video, the transformation takes the form of a low-flying fighter jet as an effigy, which plague the slumbersome town of Machynlleth near Aberystwyth. Cerys’s music (rewriting archived music, creating new folk songs) is relevant to this recontextualisation of myth in the valley. We’re grateful we got to propose our project alongside Cerys’s bewitching music.
Jenő: We knew what we wanted to do straight away. Finding a secluded location and foraging for materials to create an effigy is something we’ve done in a workshop context, but never recorded in a more choreographed way so it took a test-run to iron out some logistical challenges.
Amy: I understand your video is one single 50-minute shot; wow. Was there anything you were worried might happen during rolling? Was there any fauna – other than yourselves – hopping about in the vicinity? And is it possible to reveal the location?
Jenő: The camera was mounted on a Bronze-Age-style improvised tripod made of long sticks. This gave us the height needed for the shot but it was difficult to monitor and frame, as we couldn’t really see the screen. It was difficult to see out of the green morph suits we wore, later keyed out, to create the illusion of invisibility… we were lucky but there is a point where I slip and nearly fall.
Iolo: We didn’t catch it on camera, but as we were throwing the flowers on the plane at the end of the film, three fighter jets flew past the outcrop we were shooting on in unison. Planes = owls = fauna, not that we differentiate between metal or non-metal birds.
Amy: Sensorial affects come through so much with your film; digitality gives richness. What was it that was burning amid the slate and moss? And other materials strewn about the scene?
Jenő: Paraffin-soaked coconut coir rope formed the flaming outline of the jet effigy.
Iolo: Gorse flowers, broom bush, hazel catkins, rhododendrons, a discarded Christmas tree, ferns. These available materials reference Blodeuwedd’s creation although she was made from primrose, bean, broom, meadowsweet, burdock, nettle, oak, hawthorn, and chestnut.
Iolo was wearing an oil-spill hydrocarbon-polyester Goth coat that had been on television previously that day, Shein trousers, and Vivo barefoots. Jenő was wearing a shabby / chic / cheugy mosaic tweed snowboarding jacket with fake lapels, a tasteful collarless linen shirt, best pinstripe trousers from British Heart Foundation, and also Vivo barefoots.
It’s great that the Arts Centre in Aberystwyth, prime cultural Real Estate, can house events like these. Work-realm trawsnewid-ed into play-realm ~ ‘Neuadd Fawr : Great Hall’ became not an exam hall or graduation ceremony, but a reverberant dance mat ~ and everyone was having a wonderful time.
Everybody left through the ‘Cyntedd : Foyer’ after snacking on special jackfruit and sipping Juicy Pale Ale temporarily on-tap. Thank you Aberystwyth Arts Centre and FOCUS Wales, surely more is wanted, with eyes peeled and ears open.
Find Cerys’s work at @ceryshafana on Instagram and via website at ceryshafana.com, Iolo’s work at @ouroborosgummy5 on Instagram and via website at iolo.uk, and Jeno’s work at @jeno.davies on Instagram and via website at jenodavies.cargo.site.
