Ar hyn of bryd mae'r cynnwys hwn ar gael yn Saesneg yn unig.
Ar hyn of bryd mae'r cynnwys hwn ar gael yn Saesneg yn unig.
Ar hyn of bryd mae'r cynnwys hwn ar gael yn Saesneg yn unig.
hyrwyddo a dathlu cerddoriaeth Cymru
promoting and celebrating the music of Wales
+44 (0)29 2063 5640
Gwen Siôn recording in the field for Llwch a Llechi
Gwen Siôn
Composer of the Month
Described by the Arts Foundation Futures Awards as “a truly natural talent…as if nature is singing to you through her”, Gwen Siôn is a creative force whose diverse portfolio as a composer, music producer and multidisciplinary artist has been recognised with commissions, public installations, exhibitions and residencies in the UK and beyond.
Currently in great demand for projects and performances throughout the country, her upcoming dates include an immersive sound walk with Bradford City of Culture and Opera North, an audiovisual project on coastal erosion and rising sea levels performed live at CULTVR and festival dates at Machina Bristonica and Other Voices.
Gwen grew up in Bethesda whose distinctive landscape exerted a huge influence on her music: “It has a real mix of the industrial and natural about it,” she remarks. “Placed in the shadow of the quarry which is quite literally carved out of the mountain, you can feel the weight of it and everything it represents. I think growing up here has definitely shaped the way I think about sound.”
Although she was raised in a musical household, Gwen received no formal music education beyond school. Instead, she learnt about music production through a process of collaboration and experimentation. “As a teenager I used to go to a lot of outdoor free parties and raves and began producing electronic music with friends in my early twenties off the back of that,” she remembers. “We formed a music production collective and just taught ourselves through messing around with hardware and found sound. We’d go out walking and record things on our phones, build sample libraries and mess around with them in our bedroom studio set ups. Through this kind of experimentation and play we learnt a lot of technical skills.”
Community and exchange were important factors in Gwen’s creative development. “For me, collaborative thinking and working, skill sharing and developing a support network to share creative ideas with was vital. That’s how I learnt how to get my musical ideas out of my head and into something tangible in Ableton.”
FIVE KEY WORKS
Dyfroedd Pell
This piece was composed specifically for underwater sound installation and musical hydrotherapy sessions. It was commissioned by charity Liquid Listening as part of their Arts Council England funded project supporting children with special educational needs and disabilities through musical hydrotherapy sessions touring SEND schools across the UK.
Copper Coast
Created as part of 'Hearing Landscape', a site-specific project translating 12 Irish landscapes into experimental sound works, produced whilst on residency at Greywood Arts in East Cork, Ireland.
Songbird
This composition combines electronics, strings, piano, voice and field recordings of birdsong.
Llwch a Llechi
An audio-visual performance project supported by Sound UK, Arts Council Wales, Wales Millennium Centre and Llais Festival 2024 (premiered in October 2024 by 11 BBC National Orchestra of Wales players, Côr y Penrhyn choir, and Gwen using live electronics, including hand-built electronic instruments made from site-specific slate, oak and yew).
HS2 Ghostlands
A multi-disciplinary project created in response to the climate emergency and HS2, highlighting issues of deforestation, habitat destruction and biodiversity loss. This project was the result of working on location at 18 specific sites over a 5-month period in 2020/2021 collecting field recordings and conducting research into HS2 and its environmental impact (the permanent destruction of 108 ancient woodlands and wildlife habitats). The final outcome of the project includes a digital archive of environmental recordings in the form of an interactive sound map, a set of musical instruments hand-built by recycling natural materials found at the locations and an experimental musical composition titled 'Ghostlands'.
During this time, Gwen was working in palliative care and often played the piano with some of the dementia patients. “There was also a stroke patient who had lost most of her speech but was still able to get words out if she was singing, so this got me really interested in art and music therapy. From that I then went on to work as a project coordinator for an environmental charity where we did a lot of art and music-based community projects focused on well-being for different ages and abilities.”
After a while Gwen began to realise that, rather than solely work in a kind of facilitator role, she also wanted to develop an artistic practice of her own. This prompted her to study Fine Art at Central Saint Martins where became involved in sound art, socially engaged and interdisciplinary practices and really began to discover her creative voice. “There was a real ‘lightbulb moment’ when I realised I didn’t have to separate the different aspects of my work,” Gwen remembers. “I could draw on my interests in environmental science, record sound, make music, make sculpture, work with communities - it didn’t have to be compartmentalised or separated.”
When Covid hit, Gwen no longer had access to the University’s studios and materials so as a result began making instruments out of whatever she could find. “Towards the end of my degree I was making a lot of sound installation work, handmade instruments and weird sound design stuff. Off the back of this I started getting commissions and began working professionally as a composer and multidisciplinary artist.” Gwen realised she wanted to keep working like this so registered as self-employed as soon as she graduated in 2021 and hasn’t stopped since.
Gwen Siôn performs with her handmade electronic instruments (photo: Beverley Craddock, Unit Pictures)
Over the past four years Gwen has worked across a fascinating range of projects, receiving support from a long and impressive roster of organisations including Arts Council Wales, Sound and Music, PRS Foundation, Atelier11 Paris, GreywoodArts Ireland, StokkoyArt Norway, Netflix and the BBC.
Notable amongst these is her audio-visual performance project for Wales Millennium Centre Llwch a Llechi (‘Dust and Slate’) with BBC National Orchestra of Wales and Côr y Penrhyn, catHead - a multi-genre electronic music project using Gwen’s handmade instruments, which toured across the UK, and her multi-disciplinary arts and environmental research project HS2 Ghostlands which won LMVH’s Maison/0 This Earth Award. Gwen has also been nominated or shortlisted for the 2021 MullenLowe NOVA Awards, 2021 Sustainability First Art Prize and the 2023 Electronic Music Award (Arts Foundation Futures Awards).
Score of Gwen Siôn's Atlantis 2050
which she will perform at
CULTVR, Cardiff on Friday 29 August 2025
Gwen has a deep interest in the relationships between sound and environment, nature and technology, as well as synaesthetic crossover — in particular the dynamic between colours and musical notation.
Her creative process usually begins outside and, although her work is primarily electronic, her intention is to communicate something that feels intimately connected to the natural world. “I like to spend a lot of time working on location,” (gathering environmental sounds through field recording and hydro-recording is a large part of her practice) “and am often trying to convey a sense of place in my work. When I’m composing something about a particular location I try to find ways of reading the shapes, textures, colours and structures within that landscape as a musical score. It’s a really playful approach and experimenting like this is integral to my process.”
Gwen often uses non-traditional composition methods inspired by reading landscapes as scores, alongside extended techniques, sound design, sampling, electronic manipulation, environmental recordings, and collects physical fragments of the landscape to create her instruments.
As the creator of multi-instrumental, vocal and electronic compositions, she designs and builds her own handmade electronic instruments and experimental sound devices by recycling found objects and natural materials. “I’ve got a really hands-on approach to music making, building instruments by experimenting with recycled objects and natural materials is a really important part of my composition practice and I love using the instrument building as another layer of incorporating a specific place or landscape into the sound.”
Engaging in acts of translation and transformation, she interprets landscape in musical terms, exploring how composition can be used as a means of mapping space and the cultural, ecological and socio-political significance of space.
Experience Gwen Siôn’s work first-hand at Earth & Sky, her soundwalk in Haworth (Opera North X Bradford City of Culture 2025) which runs until 12 October.
Gwen has other upcoming performances including at CULTVR, Cardiff on 29 August; at Machina Bristonica Festival on 28 September; at Other Voices Festival in Cardigan 31 October and 1 November.
CURRENT & UPCOMING SHOWS
Earth & Sky immersive soundwalk (Opera North X Bradford City of Culture 2025)
24 May 24 - 12 October 12 2025, Haworth
Recently Gwen composed new music for ‘Earth & Sky’, an immersive soundwalk across the Brontë Moors above Haworth, West Yorkshire. ‘Earth & Sky’ (commissioned by Opera North and Bradford City of Culture 2025) uses geolocation technology meaning that the featured compositions evolve with different sonic elements triggered in real time as the audience physically move through the landscape. Alongside Gwen, Opera North also invited contemporary electronic composer and Venice Biennale’s artistic director of music Caterina Barbieri and Kenyan experimental composer Nyokabi Kariũki to create new pieces. The new works by the three composers are woven together with on-site field recordings and sound design by Sarah Keirle-Dos Santos and new poetry written especially for the walk by Bradford-born poet Nabeelah Hafeez.
Gwen’s piece Quiet Earth takes inspiration from the coexisting natural and industrial elements found within this landscape, rock strata and quarrying processes. Her composition combines electronics (using a mix of hardware, modular synthesis and experimental hand-built instruments made from recycled natural materials), acoustic instrumentation including piano, strings, clarinet and cymbal, a mix of both unaltered and heavily distorted environmental recordings, percussive recordings of local stone and vocal recordings including fragments lifted from literary texts about the moorlands.
Atlantis 2050
Friday 29 August 2025, CULTVR, Cardiff
(doors open 7pm, performance starts 8pm, c. 1 hour duration)
Atlantis 2050 is a new audiovisual project transforming environmental sound and data into music performed alongside immersive visuals. The project highlights the impact of rising sea levels and coastal erosion through site-specific fieldwork, electronic music composition, data sonification, moving image, handmade instruments, installation and live performance.
Following a period of research, gathering data from local and national environmental organisations, Gwen explored 9 coastal areas projected to be amongst the most affected locations in England and Wales by 2050. Working on location at 4 sites in Wales and 5 in England, Gwen has gathered environmental data and sounds including field recordings, hydro recordings and recordings of electrical signals produced by seaweed and coastal plant-life. She has also filmed video footage at each location, and collected site specific natural materials and found objects along the coasts (e.g. shells, driftwood, stones) to create a new series of sea-inspired electronic instruments and sound devices.
The collected data, recordings and footage have been used to create a new music composition,
accompanying visuals and an immersive live performance using surround sound and stereoscopic-dome projections. The music combines environmental audio recordings and original vocal, electronic and multi-instrumental compositions with compositions created using patterns in data on rising sea levels and coastal erosion (translated into MIDI to determine elements of melodic phrasing and notation) as well as the sonification of electrical signals produced by seaweed and coastal plant-life.
The music will be performed by Gwen using a combination of fixed media, live electronics, vocals and experimental handmade instruments, alongside violinist and improvisor Angharad Davies responding to a series of Gwenn’s graphic scores inspired by the coastlines.
R&D supported by Ty Cerdd, Oxford Contemporary Music and Articulture (as part of artist development programme CoDi BŴM! supporting outdoor music and sound exploring the climate crisis). Premiere supported by CULTVR and Arts Council of Wales (as part of Catalyst 360º Residencies and Live XR Showcases)
Fieldwork locations: Happisburgh, Withernsea, Morecambe, Marazion, Dungeness, Pensarn, Fairbourne, Tenby, Cardiff
Machina Bristonica Festival 2025
Sunday 28 September, DOCUMENT Bristol
Gwen performs a live set with electronics, vocals and her handmade instruments.
