That’s right, it’s coming up to the end of July and this is the new Welsh music Noel Gardner has found and/or been directed towards in recent weeks, including Callainn/Callan, Ynys, Mines and more. You can listen to it all, if you want to, and we want you to!
CALLAINN/CALLAN prove there’s gold in the RWCMD
By its raison d’etre, plenty of music – new, Welsh or otherwise – is composed at the Royal Welsh College Of Music & Drama in Cardiff, but only some really makes its way into the wider world. Callan Teare, a Devonian musician studying composition at the RWCMD, has however released Small Items on Bandcamp and I for one am glad about that. Though previous music released as Callainn/Callan seems to have been solo recordings, these five untitled pieces feature saxophonist Em Craig, also a RWCMD alum, alongside Teare on electronics. The results are spartan, shivery experiments with tonality and processing, perhaps in the lineage of British free improvisation and peaking with the last, longest and most melodic piece.
A dark dungeon… in a wide open Welsh field? Here be CARNYX
The musician behind Carnyx, from somewhere undisclosed in Wales, has named the project after an ancient Celtic horn associated with warfare, notorious for its intimidating sound. If you’ve guessed that Carnyx is this month’s entry into the Welsh dungeon synth canon you’ve guessed right! However, new four-song EP Alban Hefin comes at the genre from a different angle to most, with a psychedelic folk influence amidst the foreboding keyboard instrumentals. Lyrics are provided on the Bandcamp page, but with no vocals on the actual recordings turn out to be short stories or, in the case of Amongst Fair Meadowsweet & Yarrow, a recipe for mead. Pick of the quartet for me is Aneirin’s Lament For The Fallen in its hazy, droning finery.
Jazz, psych and Indian drone out Aberystwyth way from GARETH M. EDWARDS
This month’s stumbled-upon Bandcamp discovery of new Welsh music is a real swish one for fans of cosmic psychedelic lounge jazz exotica. Even better, make that Aberystwyth-based cosmic psychedelic lounge jazz exotica – that’s got you interested I’ll bet! Gareth M. Edwards has a nice line in paisley shirts and mod haircuts, and also has a ‘solo project that sometimes becomes a band’, Light Vessel Automatic, who do an organ-ic garage rock thing. The Lost Emissary, which I think is Edwards’ debut release under his own name, is four improvised pieces in around half an hour, with a differently tuned drone the foundation of each. Sax and flute dapple the snakey pathway, tanpura and mandolin meander in and out. Its combination of apparent influences reminds me a little of Cymro-Indian jazz hookup Khamira, which I certainly mean as a compliment, though Edwards is more on an avant-psych tip than a trained jazzer one, I think.
Swansea sludge metallers MINES pivot to electronica
Mines, from Swansea, have been around for the best part of a decade and uphold the city’s tendency towards slow, distorted heavy rock. It seems, though, that they’re eager to expand their remit, trying out some synth-forward prog/post-rock moves on new four-part CD EP Warm & Safe (Lavender Sweep). Its first song, My Body Is Ready, segues into the second, My Heart Is Willing, running to some 18 minutes between them and ultimately coming on like a dub techno version of big room electronica. Fox Teeth & Crooked Feathers – the last track, another 16 minutes by itself – finds Mines revisiting the agonised sludge metal sound of their previous release, Your Ever Failing Happiness, indeed dragging matters out to a still more intense degree.
Soulful indie-folk from OLIVE GRINTER on her debut
Cardiff solo acoustician Olive Grinter has titled her debut album Hugs, and while I don’t wish to look as if I’m opposed to hugs in a conceptual sense, it perhaps implies a suite of twee indie-folk when that is not really Grinter’s bag. Folk-anchored, sure, but from the off there’s jazz and soul influences that hint at Nick Drake or even Terry Callier. At Hugs’ least distinguished (Murmurations), it sounds like music you’d hear on a mobile network advert which advised you to call your nan more often, but it only takes a fairly minor stylistic adjustment (My Seeds, say) for us to be back in sophistifolk torchsong territory.
As PEIRIANT, the Linn-Pearls give us a lil’ pearler
Dychwelyd is the second album (and first to get a physical pressing) by Peiriant, a married couple located somewhere around the Wales-England border and proclaiming the influence of Brycheiniog’s mountainous landscape. Power of suggestion and so forth, but listening to these eight instrumental pieces I feel like that region’s verdancy and naturalism is ably represented by Rose Linn-Pearl’s violin, gliding and swooping with avian elegance, and the FX-bedecked guitar bed supplied by Dan Linn-Pearl (who also maintains a more pop-centric solo project, Gated Estates). Individually, neither Peiriant member is necessarily locating uncharted territory for their instrument, but when combined, the results feel decidedly original – or, at least, I can’t think of any given band or album which sounds like Dychwelyd.
Enter into the synthesized fantasy world of UNHOLY GRAIL
July’s example of this new Welsh music column’s now-becoming-traditional dungeon synth entry is by Unholy Grail, who is from south Wales and – like many people making this strange type of music – also plays in a black metal band, Verletzen. The Wayfaring Knight comprises seven tracks in 19 minutes and has been available to stream on YouTube for a few months, but now has a cassette release on the Nocturnal Curse label, also from Wales. As the project name and EP title hints at, there’s an RPG/fantasy novel aesthetic at play, with Unholy Grail’s music alternating between pomp-and-circumstance digital orchestration and subtler, spacier passages of cloudily droning keyboard. Very taken with it!
Clandestine black metal from… Llandaff? It’s WRACH
Releasing this black metal project’s debut LP Quae Infra Volo Videre, English label Apocalyptic Witchcraft bills Wrach as hailing from, merely, Wales. A couple of one-off releases last year tied Wrach to something called the Llandaff Black Covenant, though as with its westerly counterpart the Pembrokeshire Black Circle I’m conscious of the possibility the whole ‘movement’ is actually just one person. Wrach isn’t quite as sonically deranged as the PBC-related stuff I’ve heard, but it’s not far off: seven buzzy, tremelo-heavy offerings which sometimes achieve a soupy psychedelic quality but are arguably at their finest when getting right into the weeds of bestial punk grot, as on Ignis N.O.X. Delirium. I suppose a live performance’s out of the question?
Scary monsters and scarier AI shenanigans with ¥ETI
¥eti is an alias of Adam Martin, who lives in Cardiff and makes his own experimental electronic music as well as pressing up other people’s records as part of the commendable DIY operation Lathe To The Grave. Accordingly, this two-track release comes on turquoise 7” vinyl and has sleeve artwork created using AI, though knowingly acknowledges this via its track titles, which are the sort of gibberish AI comes up with when attempting typography. That end may not justify the means for you, but the music is pretty cool if you like wistful melodic IDM a la Boards Of Canada or ambient-mode Aphex Twin, as I do.
Dylan Hughes’ YNYS refine their classic pop approach on album two
Aberystwyth’s Ynys release their second album, Dosbarth Nos (Libertino), just over 18 months after a self-titled debut. Certain elements remain in place on these 10 new songs, others have changed: notably, where Ynys was pitched as the solo project of Dylan Hughes, now he’s the leader of a five-piece band, although most of the musicians who play on this new album were also on the last one. Stylistically, I considered Ynys to be tilting towards that Flaming Lips type of bells’n’whistles AOR psychedelia, and while that still rears its head now and then (Dim Ond Ni for example), Dosbarth Nos is more in the lineage of various 1970s auteurs who took a prog-rock approach to powerpop, and thus I prefer it.
words NOEL GARDNER
