Rhys Trimble moves through the world like a voice that cannot be contained. He is a poet, a performer, a musician, but none of those words fully hold him. He bends language the way wind bends grass and carries rhythm in his body like it is blood. To encounter his work is to feel a pulse you did not know you were missing, a vibration that rides across page, stage, and sound.
He grew up straddling borders. Zambia, Wales, small towns, the coast, spaces that are both familiar and strange. That sense of displacement, of being between worlds, is not something he explains. It is something you hear in the way he breaks words apart and stitches them back together in unexpected ways. His poems do not ask to be read quietly. They demand sound. They demand movement. They carry the music of language in them, the kind of music you can almost touch if you close your eyes and listen.
Trimble’s work is not polite. It does not bow. He plays with sound like a child with a drum, like a sculptor with clay, like a poet who knows the difference between a word and the life it contains. His voice shakes, his rhythm slips into your chest without permission. And he does not stop at poetry. With his band Lolfa Binc, he dives into the kind of music that makes you feel you are standing on the edge of something raw and limitless. Noise, punk, experimental, it is music that refuses the usual rules, a soundscape where the voice becomes an instrument, the drums become language, and the boundaries between hearing and feeling dissolve.
Seeing Trimble perform with Lolfa Binc is not a concert. It is a ritual. He stands, he moves, he calls, he shouts, he whispers. He becomes a conduit for energy that is chaotic, fierce, playful, and utterly alive. The songs carry fragments of stories, fragments of poems, fragments of thought, all colliding in ways that are sometimes jarring, sometimes ecstatic, always alive. It is not background music. It is a storm you enter willingly, and by the end, you feel transformed, as if the sound has passed through you and left a trace in your own rhythm.
Even when he is alone on the page, Trimble’s words are alive in this way. His poetry is a landscape that breathes, that twists and turns, that calls attention to the spaces between sounds as much as the sounds themselves. He writes in Welsh and English, but his work is more than translation. Language becomes a material to play with, to push, to fracture, to stitch back together in shapes that feel urgent and human.
Trimble does not perform for applause. He performs to awaken something in the room, something that already exists but waits to be noticed. The same is true for his writing. He does not arrange words neatly to show off cleverness. He arranges them to move the reader, to pull you into the rhythm, to make you hear and feel the world in a way that is strange, electric, and alive. Reading a Trimble poem is like stepping into a room where the air itself is vibrating. You feel it in your chest, in your ears, in your memory. It is playful, it is serious, it is feral, it is tender, it is alive.
There is a generosity to his art. He collaborates, he nurtures other voices, he creates spaces where language and sound can thrive. But he also insists on his own uncompromising vision. Nothing is neat, nothing is safe, nothing is quiet. Everything pulses with energy, with thought, with daring. Lolfa Binc, his poetry, his visual work, his performances, they are different strands of the same impulse. They are all attempts to inhabit language fully, to let it breathe and roar and sing, to remind us that art is not just something we consume. It is something that moves through us.
To follow Trimble’s work is to follow a current. You cannot always predict where it will go, but you can feel the force behind it, the life in it. He reminds us that poetry is not just words, that music is not just sound, that art is not just objects. They are living things, and when we meet them in the way Trimble asks us to, they leave traces we carry with us.
Trimble is not an easy artist. He is not comfortable, he is not neat, he is not conventional. And that is exactly why he matters. He is a poet of pulse, a musician of chaos, a maker of experiences, and a reminder that the world is always bigger, louder, stranger, and more alive than we often allow ourselves to hear. In his words and his music, we are invited to listen differently, to feel differently, to live a little more openly in the noise, the rhythm, and the wonder of what it means to speak and to be heard.
Rhys Trimble: Website / Facebook / Bandcamp
Lolfa Binc: Facebook / Bandcamp
Article by Ade Rowe
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