Brighton-based, Welsh instrumentalist Gwenifer Raymond is set to announce her third studio album to be released September 5th on Canadian label We Are Busy Bodies. 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.”
At times, ladies and gentlemen, she found herself floating in space. The opener ‘Banjo Players of Aleph One’, for instance, is built on a celestial drone – its Gibson Mastertone banjo an off-world presence, purchased second-hand from a widow looking to pay for her husband’s funeral. “I had this image in my head of him somewhere very distant, playing the banjo on the cliffs of Mount On,” Raymond says. Hence the reference to Aleph numbers, a mathematical concept often used to describe the size of infinite sets, and by Rudy Rucker in his novel White Light to outline levels of the afterlife. “I’ve always felt a strong pull to the world of the weird, and I don’t think there’s a lot weirder than infinity, the product of a division by zero,” this atheist astrophysicist muses. “We all get divided by zero eventually.”
‘One Day You’ll Lie Here But Everything Will Have Changed’ has a more serene star-gazing feel, Raymond’s slide guitar tones resembling comets filling the night sky with warping, criss-crossing threads. The title track – a Tom O’Bedlam quote – is a frenetic blues that bends and twists like space-time. And lead single ‘Jack Parsons Blues’ is a passionate fingerpicking dervish full of Arabian flair and flamenco fury, named in honour of a 1940s Californian rocket scientist who helped found NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and was also a friend of L Ron Hubbard and acolyte of Aleister Crowley.
“I’ve long been obsessed with Jack Parsons,” Raymond says, recalling reading Fortean Times articles about him as a teenager. “He lived in this vast old mansion which he shared with a whole cast of oddballs and shysters. He also came to an abrupt end, blowing himself up in his home lab. For all his faults, I find him to be a sort of romantic character – full of boundless zeal and ideas. He was both a scientist and an embracer of the weird and esoteric. He’s oddly inspirational.”
Converts to Raymond’s brand of Welsh Primitive will find plenty to clutch at their ankles here too, with tracks evoking mythical Welsh goddesses (the prairie-wide ‘Dreams of Rhiannon’s Birds’) and Raymond’s childhood woodland discovery of gruesome animal remains (the frantic, exotic ‘Bleak Night in Rabbit’s Wood’), played on a devil-haunted guitar.
A kissing cousin of Lankum’s mutant folk, the furious, gothic and wonderfully wild ‘Champion Ivy’ sounds like Hell’s hoedown, while ‘Bliws Afon Taf’ (Welsh for ‘Taff River Blues’) is more pastoral and tumbling, wrapping the listener in spider threads of gossamer guitar. At Raymond’s blessed fingertips, the earthly meets the stellar on some far-off event horizon, and you can barely see the join.
STAFF COMMENTS
Barry says: Gorgous, dark folk music that's got more than a little hint of Alexander Tucker or John Fahey and moves beautifully between frenetic fingerpicking and slow, bucolic fireside balladry.
TRACK LISTING
Side A
Banjo Players Of Aleph One
Jack Parsons Blues
Bliws Afon Tâf
Bonfire Of The Billionaires
Side B
Dreams Of Rhiannon’s Birds
Last Night I Heard The Dog Star Bark
Cattywomp
Bleak Night In Rabbit’s Wood
One Day You’ll Lie Here But Everything Will Have Changed
