{"title":"Gwenifer Raymond","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"gwenifer-raymond-last-night-i-heard-the-dog-star-bark","title":"Gwenifer Raymond - Last Night I Heard The Dog Star Bark","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"tralbumData tralbum-about\"\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"tralbumData tralbum-about\"\u003eLast Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark is a hybrid of the ancient and the futuristic, where the arcane etchings of occult folk horror fuse with the unfathomable equations of the cosmos. A big bang, yes, but also an atom cleaved. On her latest album, this celebrated new champion of the finger-picked guitar looks upwards, outwards. somewhere beyond. Now the landscape is mapped – its knotted woodlands, its aurora-crowned mountains, its tangled undergrowth – Gwenifer Raymond hears the stars call.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLast Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark is a natural evolution for such an intensely questing, personally excavating artist. The album is Raymond’s first since 2020’s Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain, which drew widespread acclaim for its repurposing of Mississippi blues and John Fahey’s intricate Americana to embody Raymond’s roots in rural South Wales and her interests in folk horror and the avant garde, a new form dubbed Welsh Primitive. Now, on her forthcoming album, Raymond finds herself conjuring the work of pioneering rocket scientists, the words of fictional hobo prophets and the concepts of mathematical infinity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHaving toured Europe, the US and Canada with the likes of Michael Chapman, Michael Hurley, The Handsome Family, Lankum\u003cspan class=\"bcTruncateMore\"\u003e, Charlie Parr, Richard Dawson, Ryley Walker and Squid, and played festivals including WOMAD, Green Man, End of the Road and Transmusicales in France, Raymond began recording Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark; exploring textures and following threads alone in her flat’s home studio, trying to get a sonic grip on a world spinning out of control.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSci-fi and scientific readings provided a strange, objective clarity. One key reference was Tom O’Bedlam, an insane homeless mystic from Grant Morrison’s comic book series The Invisibles who sees holy words in street signs reflected from the city’s wet concrete, hidden meanings within the modern chaos. “The world seems to have been taking on an increasingly surrealistic tilt,” Raymond says, “and ol’ Tom makes more and more sense.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I’ve always been a big sci-fi reader,” she says, listing Phillip K Dick, Kurt Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury amongst the authors she read avidly as a child from her parents’ extensive sci-fi collection. Raymond would go on to complete a PhD in Astrophysics at Cardiff University, before moving to Brighton to become an AI and video game programmer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMidway through writing her third album, then, she was drawn to the pulp sci-fi corners of Brighton market, picking up and devouring second hand tomes of strange science and the mystique of eternities. “A bunch of the stuff I was reading had these themes about the nature of infinity, and tying this into concepts about the afterlife,” she says. “Those thoughts were running in my mind a lot, especially when I was creating some of the droney sounds that book-end the album. The album enters from the cosmic void and exits through the galactic plane. Maybe you’re exiting out of hyperdrive into some strange planet where the album lives, then you zip out to find whatever is next.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003ca\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"We Are Busy Bodies","offers":[{"title":"Black Vinyl","offer_id":41978498023509,"sku":"WABB-210B-1","price":25.0,"currency_code":"CAD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Green Vinyl","offer_id":41978498056277,"sku":"WABB-210B-2","price":27.0,"currency_code":"CAD","in_stock":false},{"title":"CD","offer_id":41978498089045,"sku":"WABB-210B-3","price":15.0,"currency_code":"CAD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0650\/3063\/files\/WABB-210-1400px.jpg?v=1751379091"},{"product_id":"gwenifer-raymond-you-were-never-much-of-a-dancer-pre-order","title":"Gwenifer Raymond - You Were Never Much Of A Dancer (Pre-Order)","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThis is a pre-order and will ship by September 4, 2026. \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRemastered reissue of You Were Never Much Of A Dancer. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn her own words ....\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen I was about eight years old a pretty formative thing happened to me ... my mum bought me a cassette tape of Nirvana’s Nevermind. Being so young I'd had no real interest in music prior to that, but I did have a ‘My First Sony’ cassette player that I used to listen to audiobooks. Anyway, I put the tape in, pressed play, and what I heard blew my little 8 year old mind. I don't know what it was about that wall of sound that so captured me, but I spent many hours hyperactively running around the house with headphones on, volume at full blast, and Nevermind on repeat. It was either for Christmas or my birthday that year, that I asked for a guitar.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI spent all my teenage years playing either guitar or drums in various punk and rock outfits around the Welsh valleys, but around that time I was also getting seriously into older stuff\u003cspan class=\"bcTruncateMore\"\u003e, Dylan, The Velvet Underground and the like. Through those cheap compilation CDs you could get then, I found that a common influence amongst these guys was pre-war delta and country blues, as well as Appalachian music. Eventually I stumbled upon Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James and Roscoe Holcomb, and they became the holy trinity of musicians I so wanted to able to play like. Eventually, I tracked down a blues man in Cardiff who could teach me and it was in studying these guys that I was introduced to John Fahey and the whole American Primitive thing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI’ve always loved being in bands and the sonic chemistry it produces, but at the same time it’s always a bit of a compromise that those sounds in my head have to pass through and be translated by someone else’s. Sometimes it can be for the better, but sometimes not so much. American Primitive was the first time it had occurred to me that you didn’t really need anything more than one solo instrument to fully express yourself, especially when those feelings and moods refuse to be articulated in words, sometimes it's a mystery to yourself what it is you’re expressing. I still play in hard rock and punk bands and love to wail and hit my guitar with a complete lack of any subtlety or nuance, but in the end I think that all these things are really part of a circle, feeding back into itself. It’s all just a lineup of strange mutations.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"bcTruncateMore\"\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan class=\"bcTruncateMore\"\u003e“You Never Were Much of a Dancer”:\u003cbr\u003eOriginally released as TSQ 5531; © and (p) 2018 Tompkins Square.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"We Are Busy Bodies","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42409150021717,"sku":null,"price":28.0,"currency_code":"CAD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0650\/3063\/files\/WABB-236-cover-1400px.jpg?v=1776364117"},{"product_id":"gwenifer-raymond-strange-light-over-garth-mountain","title":"Gwenifer Raymond - Strange Light Over Garth Mountain (Pre-Order)","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThis is a pre-order and will ship by September 4, 2026.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRemastered reissue of Strange Light Over Garth Mountain. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWelsh musician Gwenifer Raymond's 2018 debut album, You Never Were Much of a Dancer , introduced a new voice on acoustic guitar, receiving 5 stars in The Guardian, big spreads in MOJO and UNCUT, and airplay on multiple BBC programmes. This led to months of touring on the European festival circuit. Her second album, Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain, finds Raymond ranging into unexplored experimental territory, drawing from her Welsh roots.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain”:\u003cbr\u003eOriginally released as TSQ 5777; © and (p) 2020 Tompkins Square.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"We Are Busy Bodies","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42409151332437,"sku":null,"price":28.0,"currency_code":"CAD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0650\/3063\/files\/WABB-237-cover-1400px.jpg?v=1776364293"}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0650\/3063\/collections\/WABB-210-1400px.jpg?v=1776367602","url":"https:\/\/store.wearebusybodies.com\/collections\/gwenifer-raymond.oembed","provider":"We Are Busy Bodies","version":"1.0","type":"link"}