This article was taken from the June 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online
Gruff Rhys hails from a rich tradition of Welsh musician-adventurers -- and he is on a quest to resurrect them.
When he was young, the Super Furry Animals member's grandmother would tell him stories about his ancestor John Evans, a whistle-playing farmhand from Snowdonia who travelled to the American midwest at 22 in 1792 in search of a mythical tribe of Welsh-speaking Native Americans called the Madogwys. "Some of the stories seemed quite fantastical: John Evans annexed North Dakota from the British; he discovered volcanoes and walked through rivers of alligators; he was jailed for being a spy; he lived with a series of river tribes along the Missouri," says Rhys. There were also mysteries -- no one knew what he looked like, whom he met on his one-man walking expedition, or where he died. "He was the first to map the Missouri Basin and the Yellowstone River -- those maps were used by the Lewis and Clark Expedition across to the Pacific," says Rhys. "Most of his work has been destroyed; he is like a ghost in history."
Rhys decided to retrace Evans's life with a string of concerts along his historic route, investigating Evans along the way. The result is American Interior, a sprawling, bilingual multimedia project that is part road movie, part historical biography and ultimately a personal quest. It includes a new solo album, a film following Rhys on tour, a Penguin book and an app with mini-bites of video and audio filmed en route, all in English and Welsh.
The project, released this month, is tied together by music. "When there's a bigger story to tell, I'm happy to break a song into a thousand pieces and expand it into something new," says the 43-year-old musician. The central motif is one of the songs from the album, "100 Unread Messages (But not a Single Note From You)". The app is structured as 100 audiovisual stories laid out geographically along an interactive map, so you can take the journey with Rhys by clicking on each message. The film is essentially a feature-length music video of the trip, in which the making of "100 Unread Messages" is documented from start to finish, and performed at the end. "You get the sense the whole project is just an extension of my songwriting," says Rhys.
In August 2012, Rhys kicked off his three-week investigative concert tour at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library at Yale University, where copies of John Evans's maps are archived.
Rhys brought along a 90-centimetre fabric avatar of Evans, created by artist and longtime collaborator Pete Fowler, for the trip. The concert route took in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, the Ohio River Valley and the Mississippi, with pit stops at towns such as New Madrid and Kaskaskia then on to St Louis, where he picked up his friend, Flaming Lips drummer Kliph Scurlock. He then travelled to Omaha, Columbia, down to Memphis and, finally, to New Orleans.
Along the way, Rhys interviewed academics such as Raymond Wood, professor emeritus at the University of Missouri and the maps curator at Yale University. He also spoke to tribespeople including Edwin Benson, an 82-year-old Native American on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota, who is the last speaker of the Mandan language. "He sang us some songs and told us stories of his tribe's history and language, which was the single most moving experience for me," Rhys says. "We had so much material like this that it seemed the perfect opportunity to experiment in a digital medium where we could combine the music, text and film and tell the story in a new way. That's why we worked with Storythings to come up with the app." For the app, produced by Penguin, content away from the main narrative becomes part of the larger story. "There's a mini-documentary with a storyteller and musician called Keith Bear, where he talks about the political implications of the building of Lake Sakakawea in North Dakota in the 50s. It split the Mandan-speaking communities geographically and led to the killing off of Mandan," says Rhys. Another interview with Dennis Hastings,director of the Omaha Tribal Historical Research Project, is filmed on the site of John Evans's old fort. "He talks about how Evans would've experienced the Omaha culture at its height and how their civilisation has been almost completely destroyed." Other app "stories" include original music from Rhys and other collaborating musicians, original illustrations, fonts and cartoons by Pete Fowler, and Rhys reading excerpts from the book.
American Interior is the second in a trilogy of musical investigations about Rhys's family. The first, Separado!, was a film project following Rhys around villages in Patagonia, searching for a Welsh-speaking South American relative, the gaucho musician René Griffiths. The third will be based in Zimbabwe -- but not before Rhys has digested and reflected on all that he's learnt about Evans's seven-year journey. "At the end of the concert tour, we found he had probably died in New Orleans but never had an actual tomb," says Rhys. "So we took the incarnation of Evans back to the mountain where he grew up in north Wales, dug a shrine, and I wrote a New Orleans-style song for the occasion. We invited the local villagers to sing along, and that was the end of the journey." American Interior is released on May 5;
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
