GWENIFER RAYMOND - Last Night I Heard The Dog Star Bark

There are many reasons to praise Gwenifer Raymond's talent. The first lies in the Welsh musician's courage and stubbornness in wanting to keep alive the tradition of purely instrumental albums, a task made even harder when the instrument is acoustic guitar and the raw material is folk — or rather, the primitive folk tradition. And yet, there's nothing conventional about her new project.

“Last Night I Heard The Dogstar Bark” is the Welsh guitarist's third album, her first for We Are Busy Bodies, and a fascinating follow-up to two albums released on Tompkins Square: a collection of ten folk pieces in which technique and compositional craft move in perfect sync, with surprising and original results.

Talent and good taste are evident right from the opening track, “Banjo Players Of Aleph One”: a drone opens hostilities, with acoustic guitar and banjo settling into a delicate melody with solemn, almost cosmic tones, revealing the Welsh artist's passion for science fiction and the occult. It's no surprise, then, that restless fingerpicking chords alter and amplify the harmonic and rhythmic framework of the tracks that follow, “Jack Parsons Blues” and “Champion Ivy”.

Within this energetic flow of acoustic guitar chords, Raymond finds room to voice her admiration for visionary scientists and occultists, blending her own background in astrophysics with a passion for Philip K. Dick and Ray Bradbury. The dark, heavy tone that animates pieces like “Bliws Afon Tâf” and the even bleaker “Bonfire Of The Billionaires” further shifts the stylistic direction of an album that rewrites the canons of tradition with bold, frenetic strokes.

The definitive metamorphosis occurs in the long title track, slow and solemn in its cosmic-blues gait, flourishing in its essential harmonic approach that gradually grows and flares up until it draws in the sound of electric guitar, remaining suspended between reality and imagination, between reverb and silence that alternate with knowing nods to virtual landscapes.

The rest of the album stays true to the aesthetic and ethic of Gwenifer Raymond's guitar style, moving between placid country–western excursions that remain trapped in the mud and darkness of night (“One Day You'll Lie Here But Everything Will Have Changed”), tracks paying tribute to Welsh culture with an evocative dedication to the Goddess (“Dreams Of Rhiannon's Birds”), and a pure exercise in technique and style that invites dancing (“Cattywomp”).

It's impossible not to appreciate the less descriptive, more limpid tone that subverts the technical approach of John Fahey and Robbie Basho, in favour of a more meticulous and complex structure with swirling, unpredictable tones (“Bleak Night In Rabbit's Wood”).

The sometimes almost hostile yet musically intoxicating atmospheres of “Last Night I Heard The Dogstar Bark” drift between excitement and unease, giving us one of the most intense folk records of the year.

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15/09/2025