Wales

Strange Incantations: Gwenifer Raymond Embraces the Wild Side of Fingerstyle Guitar

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A conversation with the Welsh instrumentalist and composer, as well as a transcription from her most recent album

BY ADAM PERLMUTTER July 3, 2024

In the 1950s and ’60s, the guitarist and composer John Fahey spearheaded the development of an idiosyncratic approach to instrumental fingerstyle guitar, drawing equally from folk, blues, and contemporary classical sources, and played in nonstandard and often wild tunings. This niche genre came to be known as American primitive guitar and, for the most part, the musicians and their audiences have been overwhelmingly comprised of white men.

But American primitive guitar—oof, is it time to retire the term?—has become more inclusive in recent years as younger generations of players and fans gravitate towards its mélange of sounds. And one of Fahey’s most prominent acolytes is one of his unlikeliest, at least on paper: Gwenifer Raymond, the 38-year-old tech director of a video game audio company with a PhD in astrophysics, who lives and works in Brighton, U.K.

The specter of Fahey flickers through Raymond’s music, especially in a composition like “Requiem for John Fahey,” which I had the pleasure of transcribing for the January 2019 issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine. But Raymond has put her own stamp on the idiom, with a sense of speed and velocity that comes from her time spent in rock bands, and a penchant for the weird and uncanny.

Having last exchanged emails with Raymond while editing her lesson on John Fahey’s arrangement of “Uncloudy Day” for AG, I recently checked in with the musician via Zoom from her home in Brighton. Among other things, she talked about the unexpected similarities she’s found between punk rock and old country blues, an upcoming sabbatical to work on her third studio album, and a fortunate and surprising gift from guitarist-composer Henry Kaiser. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

You recently completed a North American tour. How has it been to play in the United States, where so many of your musical antecedents originated?

It’s my third official tour of the States. I’ve hit a lot of the same spots, in the Northeast and Midwest, and I do want to try to play farther west. It’s always great play in America, but it’s a strange place to play, because it is both very similar and very different to the U.K.—almost like almost like an uncanny valley situation. American audiences always seem appreciative and particularly enthusiastic, which is nice. Obviously, there’s a special kind of history in some of the places that I’ve been playing—Takoma Park [Maryland], where Fahey’s from, and Chicago or Detroit, where a lot of my other favorite musicians are from.

What was it like for you to discover the blues and John Fahey when you were growing up an ocean away in Wales? Did you have peers who are interested in the same music, or did you follow your own path?

I was a big punk and grunge fan, and a lot of my friends at the same age were into that scene. That’s why we were mates. At the same time, both of my parents listened to a lot of Dylan and Velvet Underground. I came to it through their common influences, which were a lot of early blues musicians. It seemed that anyone whose opinion was worth anything cited the blues as a reference. So I kind of found my own way to enter this sort of strange new land.

What about the blues struck you?

I liked a lot of more angular rock music, slightly weird and left of center, the stranger side of guitar-based rock. The sound that a lot of people think of when they hear the word blues is ’50s and ’60s Chicago blues. That’s not really my scene. I got into blues through guys like Mississippi John Hurt, who was a lovely, warm singer-songwriter and a fucking amazing guitar player, from a technical standpoint, as well as just having a lovely sound.

The first time I heard John Hurt, it didn’t even occur to me that was one guy. So when I discovered that it was, I wanted to pursue playing like that. And hearing musicians like Skip James, who was really strange; he didn’t sound anything like anyone else with his haunting sound… The whole angularity of it didn’t feel that different from some of the stuff I was otherwise listening to. From this kind of blues, I really got interested in hearing solo musicians, with very little between them and you, where you’re hearing the warts and all. There’s nothing to hide the performers, so it’s more of an intimate relationship.

The main accompaniment figure in Hurt’s innuendo-rich “Coffee Blues”

When you discovered that the music was made not on multiple guitars but on one, how did you figure out how to do that yourself?

I just looked up a ton of tabs on the internet, and in guitar books like those by Stefan Grossman. Learning was a mechanical thing for me. It was about sitting there for hours, just playing the same riff over and over again, and trying to get it down. From a technical standpoint, a lot of how you play that music is like learning to play the drums—you have to grow that muscle memory and that independence to be able to play these different things at the same time.

After I’d been doing that on my own for a while, I found a really good fingerstyle teacher in Cardiff, not far from where I lived. I started going to him for a while, even though I’d been playing the guitar for ten years at that point. He was really great, and he played me my first Fahey record.

In a New York Times feature, you described John Fahey as “almost your mean uncle figure.” Can you expand on that?

Me quipping? Never [laughs]. Fahey is my favorite musician in the American primitive genre. You can sense his personality in his guitar playing. Even if he’s trying to hide something about himself, he can’t. He’s playing these lovely tunes, in major keys, but somehow it sounds kind of  menacing. Having heard a lot of about him, he strikes me as an interesting character. If I had met him—he was an asshole, but I probably would have liked him and seen him less as a father figure than a strange uncle. Unfortunately, he was gone before I discovered him.

The odd, militaristic intro to John Fahey’s interpretation of the gospel standard “Uncloudy Day.” Note that Fahey quickly tuned the first string up a whole step, to D, for the main body of the tune.

You played in grunge and punk bands as a kid, and occasionally as an adult. What did you take away from that music in how you approach the acoustic guitar today?

To a certain extent, I still like a good, solid riff—even if there are 25 of them in a song. I like the idea of formulating a song with strong riffs. It’s probably because of my background that I play pretty hard and quite fast. I’m not a fan of pretty, pastoral sounds or meditation music. I like the gothic and the the dramatic stuff, and I think that’s from coming up steeped in punk and grunge and hard rock and metal.

What is it about the dramatic and heavy sounds that speaks to you?

It’s the first music I liked—I had zero interest in music until I first heard Nirvana, when I was eight. It grabbed me and always has. It’s hard to explain; it’s just a natural gravitation I feel—not just in music but all media, especially horror movies.

Photo by Leny Munier

It’s interesting that you have an astrophysics background and a professional life as a video game coder, but in your musical life, you work in a decidedly low-tech medium. How do these different areas interact with other?

They have certainly identified a certain attention deficit that I have, which might be present in my music. I got into science because I love the grand scale of the universe and all of those things. And the top two reasons I left science were that in order to pursue a career in science, you have to be beyond dedicated, and that I was playing too much guitar. Also, I have a horrible appreciation for printing the myth, which is not very good, as it doesn’t get you accepted into scientific journals. As for games, it was just that I’m good at maths—and I like video games. In a way, they inform each other by being almost polar opposites, which means that they don’t interfere. There’s a nice separation of the things, so you can approach each with an independence of thought.

What kind of video games does your work involve?

I’m currently the tech director of a game audio co-development studio, so I’m not personally working on anything right now. We do audio for lots of games, like Diablo and stuff like that. I’m actually about to go on sabbatical for two months to write a new album. I’ve never had that much time off work to pursue something, so that’s going to be a really interesting two months.

Do you have ideas percolating—or will you enter the sabbatical without any preconceived notions for your album?

I’ve already written half of it, and I’m approaching it the same as I ever have, which is just to play guitar and wait for the songs to slowly come out. I’m going to approach it like a job with regular hours and a routine, and I’m hoping I just might unlock something that’s hard to achieve when you’re tired after work, and you’ve only got a couple of hours to spare. I usually write just enough tunes to fill an album, but I’m hoping to overrun it and have a lot of materials to combine and edit for more of a cohesive album—or maybe not [laughs]. I don’t know yet, but I’m going to find out.

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A Paen to the Nation: An Interview with Tomos Williams

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Tomos Williams tells Gail Tasker about the connections between Paul Robeson and the Welsh labour movement, reclaiming Wales’ traditional music after centuries of oppression, and confronting the ugly sides of his nation’s past

By Gail Tasker

In 1928, the African-American singer, actor and civil rights activist Paul Robeson was returning from a West End show when he came across a chorus of unemployed Welsh miners. They had walked all of the 140-plus miles from their homes in Rhondda to London, waving banners and singing in protest against the mass unemployment and hardship they were enduring. It would be the beginning of Robeson’s rich and reciprocal relationship with the Welsh labour movement, which would go on to span performances, activism, and even a role as coal miner in the 1940 Welsh film Proud Valley. In 1950, amidst Cold War tensions, Robeson’s passport was revoked by the US State Department due to his left-leaning politics, so it was whilst stranded in the US, in October 1957, that he gave a recital through a telephone line to a packed audience in Porthcawl Pavilion as part of the Miners’ Eisteddfod. An eisteddfod is a celebration of Welsh music and poetry, and in this instance, Robeson performed a selection of songs, including the spiritual ‘Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel?’ and ‘Schubert’s Lullaby’, while the Treorchy Male Voice Choir sang ‘Y Delyn Aur’ and ‘We’ll Keep a Welcome’ in response. This moment, dubbed the ‘Transatlantic Exchange’, comes up time and again in Welsh modern history, and most recently in the composition ‘Paul Robeson Ac Eisteddfod Y Glowyr 1957’ by Welsh trumpeter Tomos Williams. Angular yet meditative, a repeating motif hints at Coltrane’s A Love Supreme as it surges through a backdrop of spiritual harp cadenzas and off-kilter piano.

The tune appears on Williams’ 2021 album Cwmwl Tystion / Witness, the first instalment of the Cwmwl Tystion trilogy. Comprising a series of performances and resulting albums, Cwmwl Tystion explores aspects of Welsh identity, history, and culture through the mouldable folds of the jazz idiom, into which Williams introduces repertoire from the Welsh folk tradition. This fusion, in a nod towards Robeson’s activism, embodies the core themes of Cwmwl Tystion: internationalism, openness, and the idea of shared humanity.

Over a Zoom call, Williams recounts the beginnings of Cwmwl Tystion in a self-deprecating manner. “I was starting to think, ‘Well hang on, I’m getting older. I can’t just wait for other people to do stuff. Maybe I should do something.’”Williams, originally from Aberystwyth, was already involved in the Welsh music scene as a member of folk group Fernhill and the folk jazz fusion group Burum, as well as various side projects, but these thoughts, which occurred around 2017 during the fall-out of the Brexit vote, where an ideologically-charged referendum proved divisive for Wales, were particularly catalysing. He’d also come across Wadada Leo Smith‘s momentous 4-disc box set Ten Freedom Summers a few years prior to that, in which the musician had navigated the tumultuous events of the Civil Rights Movement across 19 tracks, part composed and part improvised over 34 years of intermittent creation. Williams describes the discovery as like a switch turning on.

“It’s all about the African-American experience throughout the 20th century and before that,” Williams says of Smith’s work. “The titles are very specific, but the music is just massive. It has gravitas, it has depth, it has everything. I thought, ‘Wales needs something like this.’”

Matana Roberts‘ Coin Coin albums, which Williams also cites as a clear influence, inhabit a similar paradigm. In them, Roberts combines her lived experience with that of her ancestors to explore overarching themes of racism, oppression, and liberation, a series that now spans five albums. Cwmwl Tystion is a clear reference to these two projects in its abstraction of political events through the kind of musical framework employed by Smith and Roberts, but as Williams explains, the point of departure is its questioning of what it means to be Welsh.

“With the whole Brexit thing, there was just a constant bombardment of one kind of identity. There was no allowance for being anything different from this sort of south east of England attitude, if you like, [the idea that] that’s how everybody sees the world, and that’s what Britain is. I’ve got a big problem with Britain to start off with, but equally as a Welsh person within Britain, you’re completely different, and equally within Wales, there’s multiple different perceptions of Welsh identity. I’m Welsh, whatever that means. And so then this is the experience that I have. Let’s put it out there.”

With funding from Welsh music charity Tŷ Cerdd and Arts Council Wales, Williams toured Cwmwl Tystion’s first instalment Witness in 2019 with an all-Welsh band, featuring Francesca Simmons on violin and saw, Rhodri Davies on harp and electronics, Huw Warren on piano, Huw V Williams on bass, and Mark O’Connor on drums. Cwmwl Tystion II / Riot, which toured in 2021, consisted of a slightly different line-up, including Soweto Kinch on saxophones and spoken word and Orphy Robinson on vibraphone. The music then was raw, fiery, and more dissonant than Witness. Tracks like ‘Cardiff Race Riots 1919’ and ‘Mahmood Mattan’ – concerning the wrongful conviction and execution of a Somali seaman of the same name, who was falsely accused of murdering a woman in Cardiff in 1952 – reference the more uncomfortable side of Wales’ past. Williams explains how he wanted to deal with racist attitudes that are still present today, but often overlooked due to Wales’ status as “the perennial underdog.”

“Every riot that we talk about in Welsh history is generally against the English. You’re giving it to the man and the man is generally, in this context, the majority culture, which is English. Whereas in reality, in the global sense, Wales is a part of that dominating British Empire. We are part of colonial history, and if we want to be realistic, we’ve got to deal with our role in the big picture. We can’t continually play the underdog card”.

In the liner notes to Witness, Williams describes it as “a paean to the nation and its people… by some of the finest musicians in Wales.” The music is a freeing journey of open-ended improvisation, dissonant and angular, yet there’s also a hint of the dirge-like and anthemic. This is owing to the presence of traditional Welsh tunes embedded within the material. ‘Pa Beth yw Cenedl?’ for example contains the folk melodies ‘Castell Rhos Y Llan’, ‘Lloer Dirion’, and ‘Marwnad Yr Ehedydd’.

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Five Best Trails in Britain for Bird Watching

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Britain is a bird watcher’s paradise. We may get complacent at times, but Britain boasts diverse habitats and a rich avian population. From the cliffs of Wales to the marshes of England, there’s a trail for every bird enthusiast – here are our top five.

By Rhys Gregory

1. Gower Peninsula, Wales  

The Gower Peninsula offers some spectacular scenery with its cliffs, salt marshes and sand dunes. This Welsh trail offers a lot of variety which creates a haven for birds. The coastal views are stunning, making your bird-watching experience even more memorable.

Birds to Watch: Here, you can spot the charismatic chough with its red bill and legs. The powerful peregrine falcon and various wading birds along the shoreline can be seen. Each season brings different species to observe, and many people travel from afar to see puffins.

Best Time to Visit: Visit in spring and autumn to catch migrating birds. Summer is ideal for watching seabirds during their breeding season.

2. West Highland Way, Scotland  

The West Highland Way is a legendary trail, starting in Glasgow and winding through the dramatic landscapes of the Scottish Highlands. It’s Britain’s most famous trail for a reason. The rolling hills can feel like stepping into a different universe at times.

Birds to Watch: Look out for majestic golden eagles soaring above, ospreys fishing in lochs, and ptarmigans blending into the rocks.

Best Time to Visit: Late spring and early summer are prime times for spotting breeding birds in the wild setting.

3. Norfolk Coast Path, England  

The Norfolk Coast Path takes you through a mix of marshes and sand dunes, making it quite a British affair. The coastal lagoons and its flat, accessible trail make it ideal for bird watching.

Birds to Watch: This area is famous for avocets, striking marsh harriers and elusive bitterns.

Best Time to Visit: Winter is great for migratory waterfowl, while spring brings breeding waders.

4. Rutland Water, England  

Rutland Water is a renowned bird-watching site with its extensive wetlands and lagoons. The well-maintained trails and hides make it easy to spot a variety of birds.

Birds to Watch: Ospreys are a highlight here, along with the elegant great crested grebe and numerous duck species.

Best Time to Visit: Spring and autumn are peak times for migrating birds, while summer is perfect for watching ospreys.

5. Coast to Coast Walk, England  

The lengthy Coast to Coast Walk stretches from St Bees to Robin Hood’s Bay, offering quite diverse landscapes from the Lake District to the North York Moors.

Birds to Watch: On this trail, keep an eye out for the curlew with its distinctive call, the lapwing and the hardy red grouse in upland areas.

Best Time to Visit: Spring and summer are the best times to see breeding waders and upland birds along the route.

Conclusion  

Britain’s bird-watching trails are somewhat underrated, with many species being more easily spotted in Wales than elsewhere. From eagles and puffins to guaranteed Osprey sightings, there’s a wealth of diversity and stunning landscapes to immerse yourself when walking Britain. By visiting these trails at the right times, you can experience the best of what British bird watching has to offer.

Source: Five Best Trails in Britain for Bird Watching