Bio:
9Bach was formed by Lisa Jen and Martin Hoyland in 2005. The name is a play on numbers and words. Lisa: "9 is as in Nain, (pronounced nine), which means grandmother in the North of Wales; Bach means little and is also a term of endearment in Welsh. In one language 9 is something so mundane as a number, but in Welsh Nain is a cozy, family-orientated, lovely thing. Your grandmother is a person we can relate to and visualise."
Lisa on vocals, harmonium, and piano and Martin on guitars and percussion are joined by Ali Byworth (drums and percussion), Dan Swain (bass guitar), Esyllt Glyn Jones (harp, vocals), and Mirain Roberts (vocals).
9Bach’s music is an atmospheric, evocative, and emotional hybrid of the Welsh folk tradition, and of contemporary influences and working practices. Building on a deepened, almost ambient sound picture, the songs take you into the landscape and the emotions that it evokes. Music is a living thing, not a museum piece, and the way that 9Bach compose and perform reflect this.
“The only folk technique we use is in the song. Lisa tells a story in the folk tradition, either in the first person, or in the third person. We also generally arrange our songs in the folk tradition; we don’t really adhere to the verse, bridge, chorus structure of standard pop or rock music. This in turn demands something different from the drums, bass, and guitar, than your standard approach. The drum and bass will set a strong groove to sway to, and the guitars will weave in and out, creating atmospherics, as the harp does too.”
“Then we take a modern dance approach to the instrumentation, grooves and loops, parts coming in and out, but done with real instruments, and sometimes putting interesting effects on them to create the ambience.”
9Bach’s songs reflect their strong roots in home and their frequent international travels. They have played live in Spain, Holland, and Canada and travelled to Australia to collaborate with the Black Arm Band Company —a groundbreaking music and theatre company focusing on Australian Aboriginal experience and identity. Lisa is also a long-term vocal collaborator with Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals: she featured on the Candylion album, and sang live on the Candylion/ Hotel Shampoo tour dates.
The tension and interaction between local and international informs the group’s songwriting. As Lisa says: “I don’t do heartbreak and ballads. I have nothing to report on those kinds of themes. I’m a very emotional person; I get moved very easily, but by nature, the ghosts of our ancestors, the mountains, the history of the quarry, and the men that slaved there. My imagination is very vivid and I often make stories up and convince myself they are true.”
During the last two decades, there has been an upsurge in international awareness of Welsh language music. As Lisa says, “for us, writing and singing in Welsh is the most normal thing to do; it’s instinctive. We’ve had a few queries and comments asking why do we sing in Welsh when we could make more money singing in English? The answer is Welsh is my first language… my creative brain and ideas swim in the small streams that run into the crystal clear lakes— LLyn Idwal, Llyn Ogwen, the Ogwen Valley. I can’t escape that, it’s in you if you’ve been breathing this air since forever.”
“The language comes hand-in-hand with the landscape, your culture, and the stories you tell. It comes out in the music, which will inevitably make it different to English music. I don’t feel our music ‘sounds’ particularly Welsh on this album, but it is specific to here because that’s where it’s from. For our music to be heard outside of Wales it has to sound different and unique to the Anglo —American music that dominates the world’s mainstream music. Non-Welsh speakers can pick up on the mood and understand it through the music and vibe. There are so many languages worldwide in the same situation as Welsh; people do get it.”
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).