Lily Green
Name: The Great Divide
Artist: Lily Green
Length: 3:46
Preview:
» Download the full track [9mb, MP3]
Biography
Lily Green is a solo artist based in Cardiff. In a music world dominated by guitar-based bands and songwriters, Lily has a refreshingly original sound.
Her songs are a distinctive balance and blend of listenability, virtuosity, raw emotion, and modern experimentation.
Classically trained as a pianist, vocalist and flautist, Lily felt her artistic expression was stifled by the rigidity of the classical music world. After some time off from this environment, Lily began writing original music in a more contemporary style, combining talented musicianship and composition in a progressive, yet listenable context.
Drawing on her musical training, Lily portrays classical keyboard instruments in a synthesis with the technological. Piano and harpsichord are sometimes familiar, while at other times they are processed and altered, and surrounded by her creative style of electronic programming. Lily’s unusual mix of instrumentation and bold experimental approach sees her unable to be easily placed into existing musical genres. Instead, her sound is her own, truly unique from all others.
Lily self-released her debut EP late 2006, and is currently working on her first studio album. She has received airplay from BBC6 on Stuart Maconie’s Freakzone, BBC Radio Wales’ Bethan Elfyn and Adam Walton, and ORGAN’s Resonance FM.
Lily performs regularly in Cardiff and has played for promoters Peppermint Patti, Loose, Meltdown, Freakshow and Twisted by Design, The Family, and Pedigree Falcon. In addition to performing her own songs, Lily plays in more avant-garde styles. She has performed for Cardiff’s improvised and experimental music forum Rove, the Cardiff Jazz Festival in Ashley John Long’s free-improv Big Band, and she recently collaborated with Cardiff-based electronic musicians ORCOP and Valley Lines for Chapter’s Experimentica.
Inspiration
In her own words:
I was shown around the Origins gallery in National Museum Cardiff and was particularly taken by the circumstances in which many of the artefacts are discovered – found in lakes, swamps, rivers, and bogs.
There is a history not only in Wales, but also across Europe, of Bronze and Iron Age peoples depositing objects of value into watery places.
The objects given to the water would have had monetary value. In many of the examples in the Origins gallery the objects had real significance to the livelihood and survival of the users – big cauldrons used to cook food for a large group, and the Capel Garmon Firedog, in itself is a really beautiful piece, which would have been the main focus in the hearth of its house and used for cooking and heating.
I was inspired by two aspects of these sorts of objects. The first related to where the objects are found; that is the idea that watery places have been seen as magical places or gateways to the other side, and the objects being placed in the water as offerings to the gods.
What is also really interesting is that many of the objects in the gallery found deposited in watery places have been purposely damaged so that they can no longer be used by people in the living world, and so are offered completely to the spirit world.
The second aspect related to the motivation behind the act of offering such valuable objects to the gods. What were those people asking for in return for their offerings? What were they searching for?
So, in my song, The Great Divide, I wanted to convey a sense of magic and other-worldliness, and address the question of motivation: what drove those people to give up objects of great value?
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