
Rhodri Davies is a harpist, improviser, composer and multidisciplinary artist. He plays harp, bray harp, horsehair harp, electric harp and builds wind, water, ice, dry ice and fire harp installations and has released eight solo albums. His regular groups include: HEN OGLEDD, IST (with Mark Wastell and Caius Williams), Common Objects and duos with Mark Sanders and John Butcher. He has worked with the following artists: Derek Bailey, Hamid Drake, Simon H Fell, Will Gaines, Jenny Hval, Sofia Jernberg, Theodora Laird, Lina Lapelyte, Nicole Mitchell, Butch Morris, David Sylvian, Pat Thomas and Otomo Yoshihide.
Davies has been closely associated with the pioneering composer Éliane Radigue performing eighteen of her pieces. She composed OCCAM I for Davies in 2011, the first in an ongoing series of solo and ensemble pieces for individual instrumentalists in which a performer’s personal performance technique and particular relationship to their instrument function as the compositional material of the piece. New pieces for solo harp have also been composed for him by Christian Wolff, Carole Finer, Philip Corner, Mariam Rezaei, Phill Niblock, Ben Patterson, Alison Knowles, Mieko Shiomi and Yasunao Tone.
In 2008 he collaborated with the visual artist Gustav Metzger on ‘Self-cancellation’, a large-scale audio-visual collaboration in London and Glasgow. In 2012 he was the recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grants to Artists Award, he was a Chapter Associate Artist (2016-19) and in 2017 he received a Creative Wales Award. He is a co-organiser of the NAWR concert series in Abertawe.