Welsh

Four rising Welsh music acts to set your playlist ablaze

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Wales has a rich musical heritage, and the next generation is ready to take centre stage.

By Vivian Lam

Wales has always had more than its fair share of great musicians. From Tom Jones and Shirley Bassey in the 1960s, to Budgie and Badfinger in the 1970s, The Alarm in the 1980s and Super Furry Animals, Catatonia and Manic Street Preachers during 1990s Britpop.

Since then, Marina, Funeral For a Friend and Bullet For My Valentine have been among the more popular recent music acts to emerge from Wales. And today’s Welsh music scene continues to feature a huge variety of artists who create a plethora of styles.

Here are four rising acts who continue the tradition set by their predecessors.

1. Cerys Hafana

Since the release of her first album Cwmwl in 2020, harpist and multi-instrumentalist Cerys Hafana has emerged as one of the most original voices in contemporary Welsh folk music. Mixing folk with more modern styles, Hafana plays the harp, Wales’ national instrument.

By subverting traditional Welsh folk songs and composing her own, sometimes minimalistic influenced music, Hafana simultaneously continues and breaks with tradition.

On her second album Edyf (2022), Havana used the National Library of Wales archive to resurrect old folk manuscripts. Recordings such as Cilgerran and Comed 1858 display a mystical emotion which somehow combines old melodies with more contemporary arrangements.

2. Minas

Fans of James Minas, or just Minas, call him a hip-hop artist. But the Cardiff-based producer and bandleader sees his work as part of a post-punk lineage that celebrates DIY creative independence and diversity. He’s happy with any number of genre labels, as long as they are meant kindly.

Minas’ music certainly uses a punk energy as a way of relating to and understanding the way the world works. For example, the song All My Love Has Failed Me is a prolonged surge of angry adrenaline, layering monotone rhythms that build into short looped riffs. It takes two minutes to change chord, but the music is constantly building and evolving up to that point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbwXKm5wsfs

Minas’ parents were punks so he heard this kind of music as a child. But as is clear on songs like Payday, he is also influenced by grime, and that helped him hone his production skills before taking his band and music to the stage.

Proud of his Welsh-Greek identity and having grown up around the different accents of the capital city and valleys, Minas never thinks about how to speak or sing when performing. In his discernible Cardiff accent, he won’t do more than three takes of a track when recording. He aims for the opposite of “manufactured” by keeping the live feel, even in the studio.

3. VRï

The trio VRï started in Cardiff when classical music students, Jordan Price Williams and Patrick Rimes, discovered a shared interest in their native Welsh folk music, language and traditions. Together with Aneurin Jones, they fuse the classical music approach and instrumentation of two violins and cello with Welsh folk music and energy. All three sing on tracks too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft0MNreiJ_w

Live, the band helps its fans feel a sense of ownership over the music. They’ve released two albums to date, Tŷ Ein Tadau in 2019 and 2022’s Islais A Genir. The song Cainc Sain Tathan is typical of their style, with its clever arrangements and blend of voices and instruments, song and extemporisation.

The music they play has been through the hands of Welsh people for hundreds of years and is the product of those who have cared for, curated and celebrated it for centuries. The energy and precision of their arrangements and performances put it in safe hands and carry it forward for the next generation.

4. Nogood Boyo

The track One Day says a lot about the band Nogood Boyo, named after a character in Dylan Thomas’ play Under Milk Wood. It’s bilingual with alternating lines in Welsh and English, but the lines are not straight translations and bilingual listeners will experience something different from it. The track fuses electronic dance and rock music with folk-style fiddle and accordion playing. It’s also in an oddly lilting 6/4 beat that catches out the incautious or inebriated dancer.

The video tips a Welsh hat to folk-horror and the supposedly strange stuff that rural people get up to – such as speaking a language that has survived almost 750 years of oppression, reputedly by only being spoken when an English person enters the room.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQDMroqAC_U

Live, the band fizzes with energy and galvanises a loyal audience into an energetic dancing mass who hang on, and sing along to, every word of each song. Nogood Boyo has coined itself the label “trash-trad” but this disguises the subtlety of the material. And the band’s commitment to fusing traditional music with contemporary forms neatly sums up the more rap influenced songs such as Not My King. Let’s just say Nogood Boyo is not looking to be on any forthcoming honours lists.

Source: Four rising Welsh music acts to set your playlist ablaze

 Record Review:  “The Gentle Good” by Gareth Bonello

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Gareth Bonello’s latest album sees him excavating his homeland’s folk classics, interpreting each with drowsy, melancholic voice, guitar, cello and piano

The Gentle Good

The Gentle Good is Cardiff-based folk musician Gareth Bonello, whose musical interests often take him far from home. He has explored the bardic connections between Taoist and druidic storytelling (on 2013’s Y Bardd Anfarwol), and the songs of Welsh Christian missionaries with the Indian musicians affected by them. But Galargan (“lament” in Welsh) sees him burrow into his national identity and history to excavate songs full of longing.

Recording in his kitchen and a cottage in the wild expanses of Mid Wales’s Elan Valley, Bonello has ploughed through the rich song collections of the late Meredydd Evans and Phyllis Kinney at the National Library of Wales, among others, then arranged the chosen tunes for voice, guitar, cello and piano, all played by him. Galargan begins with the softly yielding beauty of Pan Own I Ar Foreddydd (As I Was One Morning), where a blackbird “tuning on the branch” fascinates the protagonist, providing hope in dim light. Nid Wyf Yn Llon (I Am Not Happy) follows, which, with its Morrisseyesque title feels fittingly bleak. A song collected from a drunk prisoner by a jail warden in Dolgellau, its rhythms and melodies drip and pool like a particularly mournful example of Portuguese fado.

Bonello’s voice is as comforting as warm water and honey throughout, wrapping around lilting syllables and so many mesmerising, slow-moving moments. Great, too, is his intricate, woozy guitar playing, descending in golden thickets on Y Bachgen Main (The Slender Lad). Phosphorescent piano lines decorate Beth Yw’r Haf I Mi? (What Is Summer to Me?) as a boy mourns the loss of his love in the blazing sun. This drowsy, melancholic album is perfect for late summer, full of that specific kind of sadness some of us sense as the seasons pass by.

Source: The Gentle Good: Galargan review | Jude Rogers’ folk album of the month

Cerys Hafana à l’Opéra de Rennes

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This fall, let yourself be enchanted by the vibrations of Welshwoman Cerys Hafana. For three evenings and opening for the Spanish artist and producer Raül Refree, this magician of the triple harp takes over the Rennes Opera during the Trans Musicales,

The triple harp is like the end-of-the-world landscapes of Wales of which it is the national instrument: majestic and intimidating. The musician and composer Cerys Hafana, originally from the small town of Machynlleth, revisits the traditional repertoire by making the three rows of strings of the venerable instrument (which has 92 of them!) sparkle. 

The artist also uses his impressive companion as a percussion tool to create a buzzing pulse. Crystal lace or tumultuous waterfalls, Cerys Hafana’s tunes are enhanced by an airy soprano singing in Welsh which evokes a magical and marvelous incantation.

Source: #Trans2023 : Cerys Hafana à l’Opéra de Rennes – Les Trans

Cerys Hafana: “The sea is going up in flames, the angels are raining down from the heavens”

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Cerys Hafana talks to Russ Slater about the uniqueness of her triple harp and its bridging of the historical, the profound and the personal

By  Russ Slater

Cerys Hafana remembers her mum asking her if she’d like harp lessons. “I said ‘more than anything in the world!’ I don’t know why I said that,” she laughs. She started on a lever harp but upgraded to triple harp a few years later, learning from “one of the only people in Wales who still teaches it.” 

The triple harp dates back to 16th-century Italy, but became hugely popular in the baroque period, when it first appeared in Britain. “For some reason,” says Hafana, “the people who really took to it in London were the Welsh, who played it in courts for posh Londoners and then took it back to Wales. It then died out everywhere, apart from in Wales.” It gets its name from having three rows of parallel strings instead of one. “The triple harp has the two outside rows, which are the white [natural] notes, and you have two of every note, and then the middle row is the black [flat and sharp] notes,” she tells me. The black notes mark it out from other harps, which use pedals and levers to achieve flats and sharps. But it’s the two outside sets of strings that allow for the triple harp’s unique effect of doubling that Hafana loves. “It creates a whole world of effects that you can’t get on any other type of harp or many other instruments.”

Hafana, who also sings, uses this technique to full effect on her recently released second album, Edyf. This record marks a staggering evolution from her 2020 debut, which was made up of what she says are “fairly well-known Welsh folk tunes.” She wanted to give the new album her own identity, deviating from the typical triple harp repertoire, while also finding something personal. “I started looking in the National Library of Wales’ archives for tunes and words that no one has sung for 200 years. I was looking for things that were a bit weird, and I wanted to see if there were some themes that were still relevant.” She found a catalogue called The Ballads Database and a collection of songs from “some guy who went around Wales writing songs down, but didn’t really know how to write down music.” This research led her to finds such as ‘Comed 1858’ (“about a guy going up a hill to watch a comet go past in 1858”), ‘Tragwyddoldeb’ (“a hymn about eternity” that reminded her of discovering that “the universe is infinite”) and ‘Y Môr O Wydr’ (“a hymn about doomsday… the sea is going up in flames, the angels are raining down from the heavens. It’s bonkers, so intense”). It was the last of these that drew me into the album. The chief instrument on the track is bowed double bass, with Hafana playing a treated harp. “I’ve got paper weaved around the strings so it sounds distorted. It completely deadens the sound; it’s not obviously a harp.” The technique was learned from Nansi Richards, Wales’ own ‘Queen of the Harp.’ 

It’s this need to experiment, to “kill all of the prettiness of the sound,” and her choice of material – the album also includes three original tracks – that mark Hafana out. She may be playing a baroque choral instrument and singing words from 18th-century hymns, but her music is not an artefact; it’s full of emotion and purpose and, when it hits you right, a raw power, which is quite an achievement from a harp

Source: Cerys Hafana: “The sea is going up in flames, the angels are raining down from the heavens” | Songlines