"Much of my creative work and research projects have circled around the premise

of progress and the influence this has on places

more specifically, the city of Cardiff.

Centreplan 70 was a radical development project proposed by the City Council, which was to result in a dramatic overhaul to the landscape of the city centre.

This would involve demolishing a significant proportion of the city’s historic buildings to make way for a futuristic concrete paradise."

– Ani Glass

My collage-like process involves collecting scraps of materials – be it sound, words or images – and bringing them together to create a body of work.

Refining and distilling, removing and rearranging happens continuously, until a clear idea and image emerges.

The lyrics of the song are all inspired by words and phrases used in the development proposal itself and the title – Deffro Mae’n Dydd! [This is Our Time!] – references the only use of the Welsh language in the document.

It could in some way be seen as a call to arms, a call for the people of Cardiff to accept, adopt and celebrate these plans, but the song itself is more of a call to resist imposed industrial-scale changes that do not adequately reflect nor represent people and places.

It was said that the public consultation included only seventy comments from Cardiff residents: a startlingly small number considering the scale of the changes proposed.

Yet, despite this, there is also a euphoric and hopeful sentiment to the song that aims to capture the utopian outlook and ambitions of Centreplan 70. The distinct style and vision of the plan as well as the design and presentation of the promotional material were carefully and masterfully curated – another stylistic element that I was keen to represent.

Sonically,

I wanted to evoke an evolving sense of space.

Almost as if emerging from a tunnel,

to reflect the plan’s focus on creating carriageways.

The intermittent background noise heard throughout, recorded in Cardiff city centre over a year and a half ago, reflects the busy motion of everyday life – noisy when people have the space and spirit to interact but quieter, and often silent when they are separated by the obstacles of poor design.

The song’s driving, locomotive-esque rhythm aims to reflect the continuous nature of progress, something that can be influenced and sometimes directed, but never stopped.

– Ani Glass