Gwenifer Raymond (Interview)

Today we’re listening to Gwenifer Raymond, a Welsh guitarist based in Brighton. Growing up in south Wales, she was inspired to pick up guitar after listening to an album gifted by her mother: Nirvana’s Nevermind. Later she found the music of artists like Mississippi John Hurt and John Fahey, which pointed her in the direction of her original “Welsh Primitive” style. Her new album, Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark, just came out last Friday. It’s mostly solo acoustic guitar, on which she shreds, and incorporates themes from science fiction and occult folk horror. We’re also playing her 2020 LP, Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain, which features similar playing, with percussion on the opening track, “Incantation.” A conversation with Gwenifer follows the streaming links.

Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark - Gwenifer Raymond (42m, no vocals)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Bandcamp / Tidal

Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain - Gwenifer Raymond (45m, no vocals)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Bandcamp / Tidal

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What’s your earliest memory of music?

When I was a little kid – like 8 or 9 – I was completely disinterested in music, but I had this Sony walkman I’d wander around the house listening to books on tape on. My mother took it upon herself to buy me a copy of Nirvana’s Nevermind. Whatever motivated it, she guessed right on that one, because that’s the first music I remember really liking. I mean really liking – I asked for a guitar either for my birthday or for Christmas that year, and that’s how the whole dirty affair got started.

Tell us more about your journey with the guitar.

I was in primary school, and luckily for me there was this initiative where you could get a short set of discounted lessons if you got yourself a guitar. I remember all the other kids had your standard sort of learner acoustics, but I had insisted on a cherry red Squire Stratocaster. A short while later I played my first concert: Jingle Bells in the morning assembly.

A long long while later, when I first heard the alternating thumb country blues picking style from guys like Mississippi John Hurt, I tracked down this great local picker in that mode, who also happened to give lessons. He was the person who introduced me to John Fahey’s stuff.

Who were the early artists / albums that influenced your sound the most?

Obviously as mentioned earlier, Nirvana was my first love – but through my teenage years I fell under the spell of a whole host of noisy guitar bands: Pixies, Butthole Surfers, Melt Banana; as well as 70s British punk: The Fall, X-Ray Spex. I was also pretty influenced by my parents’ records: Bob Dylan, The Velvet Underground, and the like.

From that stuff and researching common influences, I discovered pre-war blues and Appalachian folk: Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, Blind Boy Fuller, Dog Boggs, Roscoe Holcomb – and eventually following that evolutionary chain, John Fahey. Then I watched the Jim White sort-of-documentary Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus which kind of wrapped up everything back to to where I started, roots influenced but with more left-field, lo-fi, avant-garde, and noisy or discordant sounds: 16 Horsepower, The Handsome Family and Johnny Down, to name a few.

It’s a long list, but that’s a pretty honest run-down of where I was coming from when I first started seriously writing solo-guitar music.

Your Strange Lights record repurposed blues styles from the American south. What connection did you feel between that music and your upbringing in south Wales?

I suppose there is sometimes that sense of being somewhat dislocated from what popular media would have you think about as “proper” civilisation. I grew up on the borderland of the valleys, and though it’s really not that far outside of Cardiff, we didn’t have a car – so there was this feeling that home and the immediate surroundings made up basically the whole world. Luckily for me, my immediate surroundings were rivers and hills and woodland: overgrown and wild spaces to get lost in. The American south – and bear in mind that my entire experience of the American south is formed from movies, books and music – just felt like a version of that blown up to histrionic proportions.

It’s also worth considering that a lot of American folk music is deeply founded in British and Irish folk music, and spiced with other influences from other lands. So it’s familiar and alien at the same time.

You cite a range of sci-fi influences. Tell us about how those authors and their works affect your creative process and manifest in your music.

I’ve always been drawn to big ideas and the strange outsiders that often lie behind them. Ideas so big that the people who came up with them were so overcome that they never had a chance of fitting into society in a regular way.

Great sci-fi just underlines the weird that’s already with us, in everyday life. It’s “science” fiction right? The cosmos is the weirdest shit anyone ever came up with, and we’re just sitting in it every day watching Frasier reruns while quarks spin and reality continuously shatters and reforms around us. Once that idea gets stuck in your brain, it’s hard to get out. If you have that compulsion to create in you, I feel like as time goes on the ambient weird just creeps in more and more.

How do you discover music these days? Any notable recent finds?

Mostly it’s just digital-crate-digging these days, through Bandcamp and the devil Spotify. I read a lot of articles (I really like Bandcamp’s features), especially for broad outlines on sub-genres I’m less familiar with, and I just tend to fall down rabbit-holes from there: “Related Artists” etc. Another avenue of discovery is that when you happen on a new record label on the smaller side, it’s often really fun to spend time checking out their whole back catalogue, because that's a pre-made, well-curated collection of new music, just waiting for entry into your ear holes.

I also recently started a monthly radio show (on Slack City and Totally Radio) with my buddy Simon Ounsworth (aka Doctor Turtle), called “Now That’s What I Call Content!” Intentionally I skew my selections a little more to the fringe and outsider (though not exclusively), so a decent fraction of my music-discovery time gets expended on that. For example, last month's theme was song-poems, and right now I’m trying to decide on the top four or five absolutely must-hear Tiny Tim recordings. Researching for that is another great way to happen on super niche labels; I've stumbled into some really wild stuff working on this show.

Name an underrated artist from the past 50 years.

I kind of hate questions like this, so I’m just going to name the first artist that comes to mind (probably because I’m listening to her right now) who meets that criteria, and who always brings me joy: The Space Lady.

Absolutely unmissable live.