FEATURE: Spotlight: Gwenifer Raymond

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Gwenifer Raymond

___________

AN artist that was recently…

PHOTO CREDIT: Jinwoo

shortlisted for the Welsh music Prize (the award went to Kelly Lee Owens for Inner Song), Gwenifer Raymond is a phenomenal artist who more people should know about. I will come to that shortlisted album, Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain, soon. It is hard to categorise or define Raymond’s sound. There is Bluegrass at its heart, yet there are so many other elements at play. I don’t think I have recommend an artist in this feature who is instrumental. One is so captivated by Raymond’s compositions that you do not need vocals. Before coming to a review of the album and a live review of one of Gwenifer Raymond’s live shows, there are interviews that give us more details about an amazing composer and musical talent. Guitar Player spoke to her n April about her unique acoustic style:

“Raymond found a local guitar and banjo instructor well versed in the traditional genres she was developing, and with his help began developing her clawhammer technique – a right-hand approach that combines a downward thumb movement for the bass note with an upward two-fingered “claw” that sounds the melody notes on the upper strings.

“I’ve turned my right hand into an autonomous engine at this point,” she says. “I used to watch movies and play the same riff for an hour and a half.” Central to Raymond’s practice regimen were the seminal recordings of country-blues legend Mississippi John Hurt.

“You just slowly get the boom-boom of the bass notes going, and then you introduce the melody notes and eventually learn to do it on the beat, and then the offbeat, and then you put a triplet in, and you can speed it up,” she says. “Once you learn a few tricks, you’ve taught your hand to do all those things and it becomes a very offline process.”

Raymond’s clawhammer drives both her 2015 debut, Sometimes There’s Blood, and its follow-up, 2018’s You Never Were Much of a Dancer.

But on her latest release, the expansive Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain (Tompkins Square), the guitarist applies her technique and favored open tunings of G, D, and C minor to songs that embrace nerve-jangling dissonance and often completely eschew standard folk structures in favor of a more through-composed feel.

Raymond attributes this evolution to her having been commissioned to score the 1907 French silent horror short film The Red Spectre.

“I had to write a seven- or eight-minute-long track that followed the emotional arc of the movie, so it wasn’t like a verse-chorus style thing,” she says. “That just immediately sparked me into wanting to write more compositional songs with movements and more complicated musical arcs in them.”

Given that Raymond’s instrument is her primary means of connecting with her audience, her close attention to tone is not surprising. To the guitarist, communicating with sound is often more effective than doing so with words.

“Talking is hard, as I often discover during interviews,” she says. “In conversation, if you’re trying to get something across but you can’t quite find the words for it, you just make a noise and a gesture. In many ways, that’s what instrumental music does. It’s creating the mood of a concept in a non-representative way.

“And it can do that because the words might not even really exist. Or maybe they exist, but not in the language that you speak, because there are plenty of words in different languages that don’t exist in others. So it’s the nonverbal grunting that you do when you can’t quite get an idea across. But prettier”.

Released in November 2020, Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain is a different sound and vibe compared to her debut. As she explained in this interview, she moved away from the Blues and Folk style to writing more composed songs that are more personal too:

“What’s the title of your latest release, and what does it mean to you?

My latest release was my second album, entitled Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain, which came out in November of last year. Like my first album it was a collection of guitar instrumentals in the ‘primitive’ style. I feel as though 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. In many ways I think it’s perhaps a more personal album, more reflective of my own upbringing, rather than of the records on my shelves – turning it into something more like ‘Welsh Primitive’.

What was the hardest part about putting this release together, and why?

I’m quite a slow writer, it takes me a long time to fully compose and realise a piece of music. I think this album is more complex than the first; the song structures are more evolving and less based in a traditional verse-chorus structure. I guess I was more ambitious in what I wanted to create, and harsher with myself about what I was writing as I was writing it. Thus, my song writing process – already pretty slow – has gotten even slower. Of course, I think is was absolutely worth the effort.

PHOTO CREDIT: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

What do enjoy most about producing your own material?

I produced it myself, although there’s obviously not too much production that goes into a raw album of solo instrumental guitar. I had intended to go into the studio to record it but the pandemic hit and my plans had to change, so I ended up recording it myself in my basement flat where I live in Brighton. I’m not sure if I’d call this an effect of ‘production’ exactly, but I do think these circumstances in recording influenced the mood of the album. In my opinion solo instrumental music is innately very intimate, and so I think the effect of recording in isolation – with no other person present at that moment to listen in – has done something to intensify that sense of intimacy between recording and listener.

What do you want the listener to take away from listening to your music?

As I just mentioned, I think that listening to solo instrumental music is often innately quite an intense and intimate experience. I think the strength of this style music is also in its ability get across quite verbally inarticulable expressions of something… I personally wouldn’t want to dictate, or even suggest what a listener should take away from my music. Rather I just want them to find something – anything – in it that reflects or resonates within themselves.

How does a track normally come together? Can you tell us something about the process?

My tracks come together slowly over time. Typically, I happen across a hook upon which I think a song could hang, and then rest of it is more a matter of discovery. It’s kind of an evolutionary process, hence why it can take so long. I wouldn’t say I write the song as opposed to figure out what it’s meant to be. The process is no more sophisticated really than playing an awful lot of guitar whilst sitting and staring out of the window.

What band/artists have influenced you the most since you started this project, and why?

I take a lot of influence from all over the shop to be honest. The most obvious sources would be your key acoustic fingerstyle guitar players: John Fahey, Blind Boy Fuller, Skip James and the like. However, there’s direct references (whether or not they’re obvious to anyone but me) on the latest album to Erik Satie and Master Wilburn Burchette. I don’t really like listing strict influences though, as I tend to be a bit of a digital crate digger and draw my influences a bit more piecemeal from various folk, avant-garde, doom metal, outsider, blues trash and garage rock sources that I stumble upon in internet excavations. That and basically anything put out by Numero Group”.

Aquarium Drunkard asked Raymond how she managed to hone and perfect her guitar style. They also wanted to know whether she hails from a musical family:

“AD: It’s a real practice playing the kind of music you play. How long did it take you to get up to speed?

Gwenifer Raymond: Oh, I don’t know. I’ve been playing guitar since I was a wee one. I’ve been playing guitar for maybe 25 years. It’s practice. You pick up different techniques. At one point I made a concerted effort so that I had a bunch of those Stefan Grossman classic blues tab books, with John Hurt thumb techniques, which I’d seen my teacher doing. So, I started trying to do that on my own, in my own style of playing.

AD: Did you come from a musical family?

Gwenifer Raymond: No. Well, sort of. Neither of my parents are musicians, but they’re both big music fans. We had lots of music around the house. On my mother’s side of the family, some of them were quite musical. Most of them I never met. But my uncles were all adept players. And certainly, my brothers are both musicians.

AD: What can you tell me about Welsh music and how it plays into your work? I don’t know much about it or how it’s distinct from Irish or Scottish or English folk music. What can you tell me about it?

Gwenifer Raymond: Yeah, I don’t listen to too much Welsh folk, beyond, obviously hymns and stuff when I was at school. I have listened to some, though, and it’s almost like a cross between Scottish and Irish. It’s kind of in that category. I think it was more the landscape of Wales with lots of open space and big dark mountains. It was that kind of imagery that plays in my head to the music, rather than folk music”.

I am going to bring in a review for the extraordinary Strange Light Over Garth Mountain. The Guardian were suitably impressed with the Welsh-born, Brighton-based artist’s second album:

“The Garth Mountain marks the south-east of the Welsh mining valleys and the north-west of Cardiff, bronze age burial mounds pocking its peak in strange, crumpled formations. It loomed behind Gwenifer Raymond’s house when she grew up, as the guitarist moved from explorations of punk towards folk, traditional music, the blues and beyond.

Raymond’s 2018 debut, You Never Were Much of a Dancer, set alight the ghost of American primitive pioneer John Fahey (one track was a requiem for him, echoing his own for Mississippi John Hurt). Her fingers tangled around her guitar strings in thrilling, intricate patterns. This time, on an album richly influenced by her birth country, she tries to invent a new style: Welsh primitive, she calls it, infused with folk horror, conjuring up coal trains steaming along the foot of her garden and tall, eerie trees, black against the grey sky.

Those expecting Welsh folk styles will be disappointed. Strange Lights’ closest cousin from Cymru is probably Rhodri Davies’ Telyn Rawn album from earlier this year, where his medieval harp’s horsehair strings seemed to seethe and bleed. Raymond’s references are more about mood, beginning with Incantation’s slow, single drum and shaken bells, then a simple, stark guitar line that weaves a menacing spell. Hell for Certain ups the pace, becoming thick, dense and tangled like a Davy Graham raga. Worn Out Blues bends out its sad melody with sighs of both melancholia and terror.

Gwaed am Gwaed (Blood for Blood) most effectively conjures up an ominous landscape, however, driven by a minor-key folk ballad figure that writhes around and over itself, like a mythical creature slithering out of the shadows. Raymond’s similarly fearsome precision often feels both portentous and perfect”.

To finish off, it is worth quoting from a live review. Raymond is an artist who, on record is fabulous, yet you get something altogether different with her stage performance. The Guardian reviewed a gig of hers in Islington earlier in the year:

“This Welsh musician plays really loud and really fast too, like a vengeful bluegrass musician conjuring up roiling fury, then dropping into languorous eddies, switching between paces with pin-sharp precision. Guitar playing should never be mere gymnastics – “shredding” for shredding’s sake – but Raymond combines awe-inducing technique with grace, depth and emotion.

Hell for Certain, a track from her 2020 album Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain – played in its entirety tonight – sounds even faster and more muscular than its recorded version. (In the video, shot by her mother, Raymond looks wryly uncomfortable in a lace dress, creepy Victoriana and taxidermy arrayed around her.) If anyone made bloody, dramatic Welsh westerns, her instrumentals would be the natural soundtrack. Another 2020 track, Gwaed am Gwaed, translates as “blood for blood”.

The venue’s usual capacity is nearly 900; social distancing has reduced it to 150 tonight. Those of us in the stalls are siloed into pods of two seats with a little table for drinks. But even with smaller numbers, the combination of space and enthusiastic warm bodies means that Raymond’s playing echoes around the space like a living thing, more three-dimensional and organic than its recorded version. Ah, gigs: this is my first one since March 2020.

The folk roots of Raymond’s music lie in faraway Appalachia; the acoustic blues of the American south are well represented too. Her specific field of solo guitar is known as “American primitive” – almost everyone involved now agrees that is a highly problematic name, because it both appropriates and patronises the work of its black inspirations, but a new one hasn’t been minted yet. John Fahey (1939–2001), the father of the genre, coined it, and a steady trickle of acolytes have since taken up this mesmeric, meditative form that, with its open tunings and air of mystery, has as much in common with Indian ragas and drone-based music as it does Anglo-US fingerpicking.

American primitive long remained the preserve of white guys. Great as many of them have been (the late Jack Rose in particular), that is now changing. A recent New York Times article profiled a series of non-white, non-male and non-binary solo guitar players breaking the mould; Raymond is one of the rising talents quoted. “The music can only get more interesting,” she says”.

Go and check out and follow Gwenifer Raymond. She is an award-nominated, hugely acclaimed young artist whose music is so vivid and stunning. Even if you are not a fan of Folk or Bluegrass, that will not be a problem. There is something deeper and different when it comes to an album like Strange Light Over Garth Mountain. If you have not listened to that album, you will definitely want to…