Watch guitarist Gwenifer Raymond play a Tiny Desk Concert and more!

Watch Welsh guitarist Gwenifer Raymond's Tiny Desk Concert and more following her recent Guitar Moves interview.

One For The Weekend: Gwenifer Raymond

Check out "Jack Parsons Blues" off guitarist Gwenifer Raymond's forthcoming album "Last Night I Heard The Dog Star Bark"

Here's the scoop...

Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark is a hybrid of the ancient and the futuristic, where the arcane etchings of occult folk horror fuse with the unfathomable equations of the cosmos. A big bang, yes, but also an atom cleaved. On her latest album, this celebrated new champion of the finger-picked guitar looks upwards, outwards. somewhere beyond. Now the landscape is mapped – its knotted woodlands, its aurora-crowned mountains, its tangled undergrowth – Gwenifer Raymond hears the stars call.

Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark is a natural evolution for such an intensely questing, personally excavating artist. The album is Raymond’s first since 2020’s Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain, which drew widespread acclaim for its repurposing of Mississippi blues and John Fahey’s intricate Americana to embody Raymond’s roots in rural South Wales and her interests in folk horror and the avant garde, a new form dubbed Welsh Primitive. Now, on her forthcoming album, Raymond finds herself conjuring the work of pioneering rocket scientists, the words of fictional hobo prophets and the concepts of mathematical infinity.

Having toured Europe, the US and Canada with the likes of Michael Chapman, Michael Hurley, The Handsome Family, Lankum, Charlie Parr, Richard Dawson, Ryley Walker and Squid, and played festivals including WOMAD, Green Man, End of the Road and Transmusicales in France, Raymond began recording Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark; exploring textures and following threads alone in her flat’s home studio, trying to get a sonic grip on a world spinning out of control.

Sci-fi and scientific readings provided a strange, objective clarity. One key reference was Tom O’Bedlam, an insane homeless mystic from Grant Morrison’s comic book series The Invisibles who sees holy words in street signs reflected from the city’s wet concrete, hidden meanings within the modern chaos. “The world seems to have been taking on an increasingly surrealistic tilt,” Raymond says, “and ol’ Tom makes more and more sense.”

“I’ve always been a big sci-fi reader,” she says, listing Phillip K Dick, Kurt Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury amongst the authors she read avidly as a child from her parents’ extensive sci-fi collection. Raymond would go on to complete a PhD in Astrophysics at Cardiff University, before moving to Brighton to become an AI and video game programmer.

Midway through writing her third album, then, she was drawn to the pulp sci-fi corners of Brighton market, picking up and devouring second hand tomes of strange science and the mystique of eternities. “A bunch of the stuff I was reading had these themes about the nature of infinity, and tying this into concepts about the afterlife,” she says. “Those thoughts were running in my mind a lot, especially when I was creating some of the droney sounds that book-end the album. The album enters from the cosmic void and exits through the galactic plane. Maybe you’re exiting out of hyperdrive into some strange planet where the album lives, then you zip out to find whatever is next.” 

Gwenifer Raymond's "Last Night I Heard The Dog Star Bark" is out September 1. You can pre-order a copy via Bandcamp right here. Listen to "Jack Parsons Blues" below followed by a couple of recent performances. 

 

Gwenifer Raymond lights up Sellers & Newel, Saturday & Sunday

Welsh fingerstyle guitar marvel Gwenifer Raymond plays two nights (Saturday is sold out) at a Toronto bookshop. Check the clips.

Handsome Family with Gwenifer Raymond @ The Horseshoe, Tuesday

The Horseshoe double bill of The Handsome Family with guitar slinger Gwenifer Raymond will make for a magical event.  

Gwenifer Raymond opens for Handsome Family @ The Horseshoe, October 10

If you're going to see the Handsome Family at the 'Shoe, get there early for guitar dazzler Gwenifer Raymond's opening set. 

Get tickets for the Handsome Famiy's upcoming Horseshoe gig with Gwenifer Raymond right here.  

Gwenifer Raymond returns with Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain

Guitarist Gwenifer Raymond's fierce finger-picking style is well showcased on her latest exploration of her Welsh roots. 

Here's the scoop from Gwenifer...

"My new album, Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain (available from Tompkins Square Records right here), has eight songs in it. All were recorded in a basement flat in central Brighton, locked-down amidst a global pandemic. I recorded them myself and neither I, nor any of the songs saw said outbreak coming. Coronavirus may have dictated the circumstance under which the album was recorded but it did not otherwise inform any of the compositions that run through it; like I said, we didn't see it coming.

"Growing up in Wales was not a theme strongly present in my first record (perhaps not too surprising in an album of 'American Primitive'), but I feel as though my memories of that time have started to insinuate themselves in the tunes here. In my opinion, landscape does a lot to shape a community's folk music; from my childhood I recall tall, spooky trees, black against the grey sky, breath misting in cold air, and I have tried to take something of Welsh folk horror to make my own 'Welsh Primitive'. 

"Whilst this isn't the only theme present in the album, childhood memories do form the background for a couple of tracks: coal trains steaming along the foot of our garden, rattling the glasses on the kitchen table; and the titular 'Strange Lights...' dancing above the peak of the mountain which loomed over the house where I grew up. Dead men also feature prominently, as well as personal tragedies and the madness of touring. 

"It's possible this album is leaning more into the left-field than the first - the songs are longer and more 'compositional' for lack of a better word, rather than deriving so heavily from the folk and blues traditions, though, they're still there - all of those dead men are hard to shake. Some parts go fast and others go slow. Sometimes I play more aggressively than I intend to and other times I play exactly as aggressively as I intend to. I still say it's punk music and I have no idea what key the last tune is in." – Gwenifer Raymond

Listen to “Gwaed Am Gwaed,” “Eulogy for Dead French Composers” and “Hell For Certain” below.

Quarantunes: Gwenifer Raymond

Welsh guitarist Gwenifer Raymond knocked out a sweet version of John Fahey's arrangement of the gospel hymn "Uncloudy Day" 

Gwenifer Raymond scores with The Three Deaths Of Red Spectre

"This song was originally born of this live scoring piece I did for a early 20th century silent film called ‘Red Spectre’, so it wasn’t from the outset designed as a Christmas song, but it does feel like a winter song to me. The opening is cold and spiky; it puts me in mind of dark nights and city light reflections on wet tarmac. Then it has these sort of changing seasons in the song, like windy rain and calm sweeping over in sequence. Then back to the start; with the lights all over again.

This time of year is my favourite, when it gets dark early and bitter cold outside; you need to have a hostile environment in the first place to have something to wrap up snug and cosy against. That’s kind of the whole point of a winter festival right? It’s essence is in the contrast." -- Gwenifer Raymond

Watch Gwenifer Raymond's video for "Sometimes There's Blood"

Impressive guitar picker Gwenifer Raymond's new album You Were Never Much Of A Dancer is out now.