Siapiau – Pi (Discus, 2023)
British improvised experimental music ensemble Siapiau has released a new album inspired by Pi. Multi-instrumentalist Phil Hargreaves describes the Pi project: “The geometry of human architecture tends to be based around the quadrilateral, or at least angles of one sort or another. The natural world, though, tends towards the circle. Your red blood corpuscles, the iris of your eye, capillaries in cross-section, and so on through the plant and animal kingdoms.
“For centuries mathematicians puzzled over circles, especially the conundrum of the area covered by a circle; the origin of the phrase ‘squaring the circle’. The area of a square, or a rectangle, was a known quantity; simply multiply the lengths of two opposite sides. But the circle remained obstinately enigmatic.
“Eventually an iterative process of deduction led us to a value for the number that would unlock the circle. The number that would give us this insight is called pi, and it is an irrational number with an infinite number of decimal places, which is so strange that it’s almost like a clue that God left to her existence, a watermark in the fabric of the universe.
‘Siapiau’ is the Welsh for shapes, as Maggie felt that that is what we do – create shapes out of nothing. And Pi is the essence of Nature’s Favourite Shape, the circle.
“All the music on this album was created out of nothing by us one weekend in Carmarthenshire, sometimes within parameters. ‘October Butterflies’ and ‘Music for Hands’ are my compositions, and the poetry is mine, apart from ‘I Favour Nonsense’ by Kurt Schwitters. And, of course, the poetry of pi itself.”
Musicians: Fran Bass – electric bass, voice, little instruments; Phil Hargreaves – tenor and soprano saxophone, flute, voice, little instruments; Richard Harrison – drums/percussion, voice, little instruments; and Maggie Nicols – voice, keyboard, little instruments.
Buy Pi.