Reference Points: Gwenifer Raymond

When it comes to the songs of Welsh experimentalist Gwenifer Raymond, there’s a high chance the answer is yes, though don’t expect her to clue you in on their secrets. When Raymond talks about music, it’s more often as a conduit rather than as a creator. The songs have a mind and messages of their own, and she’s just a vessel through which then music makes its intentions known, if it chooses to that is.

With her first two albums – 2018’s You Never Were Much of a Dancer and 2020’s Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain – the Brighton-based artist developed a new expression of fingerstyle guitar she likes to call Welsh primitive, in the same way as John Fahey first described his own music as ‘American primitive’ in the 1960s. Both use the phrasing as a nod to how their music combines their own lived experience with the traditions of long-ago pioneers of the instrument – in Raymond’s case, people like Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Boy Fuller, and spooky Delta blues guitarist Skip James.

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With her most recent album, Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark, those musical influences are now firmly on the undercard, making more room for her own musical eccentricities to shine. Championed by NPR’s Lars Gotrich and BBC Radio 6, the record is steeped in themes of scientific exploration, cosmic wonder, and otherworldly Welsh mythology – a combination of the earthly and unearthly that unlocks a time capsule of labyrinthine melodies, gutsy rhythms, and twisted, folk horror blues.

Tapping into her love of science fiction and astrophysics (a subject she holds a PhD in, no less!), Dog Star feels like the truest expression yet of Raymond’s wonderfully idiosyncratic playing. And while she quickly dismisses the idea that the songs are ‘about’ anything in particular, she has plenty to say about the ideas behind them. “The thing with experimental music is that it’s really hard to talk about,” she tells BEST FIT with a nervous laugh, sitting on the floor of her Brighton flat with instruments and a tapestry of UFOs and “other weird stuff” on the wall behind her. “It's more like a broth you’re stewing in than something you make with a specific purpose.”

Growing up on the outskirts of Cardiff, Raymond describes her childhood as incredibly nerdy, spent mostly with her nose in a book or on family trips to the movies. “We didn't have a car. We didn't go on holidays. We didn't do much. But the one thing we did do was go to the cinema every week,” she says. “My mother was a filmmaker herself, and most of my family are either artists or work in the humanities, so films were the main topic of discussion in the house.”

Then there were the Sunday nights she spent watching Voyager (her favourite of the Star Trek series, though she will admit that Deep Space Nine is probably better on the writing front) and the piles of science fiction books lying around the house. “My love of science fiction is almost certainly my parents’ fault, though maybe not the Star Trek thing,” she says, laughing. “That was all me.”

Around the same time, she discovered she had a knack for understanding maths and science, so it was more or less inevitable that she would go on to study something STEM-related in higher education. Her PhD, she says, was “a weird degree” on two quite different topics, which involved spending years building models of galactic evolution and figuring out exactly what she was looking at through the fancy Japanese telescope the department had at the time. “It wasn’t a super sexy astrophysics degree,” she says dryly. “It was really down in the depths.”

Faced with the reality that continuing in academia was not especially compatible with the life of a musician, Raymond wisely chose music, subsidising her career with a more flexible programming job in the gaming world. But, as these Reference Points show, her fascination with the skies and whatever lies beyond never waned a bit.

GWENIFER RAYMOND: I read a lot, but I tend to oscillate in the kind of books I’m reading, whether it’s a non-fiction phase of reading historical books about the Catholic church or Arctic exploration, or, as I was around the time of making this record, I’ll be deep in a mire of reading vaguely pulpy, science fiction novels. I bought a big stack of them from a bookseller in Brighton market, and, honestly, a lot of the time I was buying them on the strength of the covers alone. Even if a book turns out to be fucking awful, it still looks cool because they have these absolutely beautiful painted covers.

Pretty much by random happenstance I read a bunch in row that had similar themes outlining human interface with the idea of infinity, or very, very near infinity – in particular, White Light by Rudy Rucker, A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck, and The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson. It was completely by accident as I didn’t know what they were about before I picked them up. These books don’t actually try to explain infinity as much as they try to give an experience of it somehow, and there are a bunch of sounds on the new album that feel as if they came from that cosmic sense of something existing at a great, infinite distance. Sounds like the drones at the start and the end of the album, which set a mood that I really like. You might have heard about The Hum, which is this thing that some people hear around the world, which may or may not be related to the Big Bang. I was thinking of that, and also of the static in television signals and a lot of other things around us.

BEST FIT: What is it about infinity that you find so interesting? As a recovering mathematician myself, I’ve spent a lot of time wondering about infinity myself, but I’m interested in your perspective.

I think part of it is the fact that infinity is something that is completely impossible to actually interface with on an intellectual level, as an individual person. You can think ‘oh, it’s really long,’ but it’s not just a really long time, it’s unending. It’s the idea that, based on how we think probability works, infinity contains every single possible occurrence. Anything you can think of will happen over an infinite period of time, and that’s a completely bonkers concept. When you think about infinity you also think about death, because the idea of infinite life is terrifying. Not in an ‘Oh, my family and friends will all die’ way, but conceptually it just doesn’t work. The concept of having an infinite experience of life… our brains can’t handle that.

I read that Stephen L. Peck, when he was writing A Short Stay in Hell, actually freaked himself out.

Yeah, I can imagine. This might not be true, but I have always heard that there’s a high suicide rate among cosmologists. I do think if you get too close to trying to understand the un-understandable, something can break in your brain.

A Short Day in Hell is an interesting example of a very nearly infinite experience. The idea is essentially that people go some kind of purgatory that takes the form of a vast library where each book has exactly 410 pages and exactly 3200 characters on each page. A person is only allowed to return to life if they find a book that perfectly describes their life, which would obviously take a very fucking long time. A near infinity that’s not just long but incomprehensibly long.

The House on the Borderland, meanwhile, is a much older book, and talks about this weird, expanding wormhole kind of thing, like in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, that goes on forever. White Light is also great. Rudy Rucker is a fantastic writer. I think he comes from a mathematics and computer science background, but he’s just really good fun to read. He also wrote Software and Wetware and a bunch of other novels.

When I was looking him up I saw he’s actually written a non-fiction book about infinity as well, called Infinity and the Mind.

Oh, I haven’t read that one, but I do want to read more of Rudy Rucker’s work. He seems like a really interesting guy, and I think quite likely identifies as an anarchist as well. I like his vibe.

So, out of these three authors, he’s the one you’d most like to sit and have a cup of tea with?

Yeah, because I think he'd be a laugh as well. I think he'd be good craic down the pub.

GWENIFER RAYMOND: Reference point one leads more broadly into this point, as it wasn’t just the stories that influenced the album this time around. It was also the minds behind those stories. Maverick speculative fiction writers like Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison, who feel like fictitious characters themselves, to some degree. I even named a song on the album after the occultist rocket scientist Jack Parsons, who I first discovered as a teenager through an article in the Fortean Times about a biography written about his life, called Strange Angel.

It seemed like the most outrageous story I’d ever heard, so of course I immediately went out and got the book and read it. I was really UFOs and esoteric occult stuff at the time, because it’s fun to think about those things. But I was also an aspiring scientist, thinking that when I went to uni I’d like to study astronomy or astrophysics, and he was an inspiring sort of character. That said, he also wasn’t necessarily the greatest of guys. But he did have a kind of irascible enthusiasm for life. I feel like he was never a bummer to be around. He was a man after his own fucking destiny and he was going to make it. That’s kind of what ritual magic is, in a way. It’s this idea of creating your own reality.

I was also influenced by the golden age of magazines like Amazing Stories, which is how Jack Parsons got into rocket science in the first place. He was in science fiction clubs when he was young. In fact, I think he was in the same club in California as the writer Ray Bradbury at one point. It’s always interesting to me how science fiction informs the real world. I recently learned a new word I’d never heard of before, ‘hyperstition’, which is essentially the idea of something from the world of fiction informing and then creating something in reality. If you think about the flip communicators in Star Trek, for example. They directly inspired the design of actual flip phones, because the people just wanted to make these cool things they’d seen on Star Trek. That’s a form of hyperstition, you know?

BEST FIT: That reminds me of a great sci-fi short story by E.M. Forster, called The Machine Stops. It was written in 1909 but already describes a world where humanity is forced underground due to climate change and have their lives controlled by a giant, internet-like machine. It could be an example of hyperstition, too.

Oh, I haven’t read that one. I’ve got my notepaper here, I’ll write it down and look it up.

Jack Parsons met quite an unfortunate fate and blew himself up. What exactly was he trying to do?

Well, he had a home lab and I suspect he wasn’t great on health and safety. If I remember rightly, he was doing some kind of experiment using a very unstable compound and he dropped something that caused an explosion.

I mean, there are conspiracy theories around that he was murdered, as he was at one point involved in a criminal case as a special expert in explosives. I think it was a mob thing, a car bomb or something. So there are some people who think the mob paid him back by killing him, and I think part of that is because he was supposedly this expert in explosives and would never have been so silly as to blow himself up like that. But I don’t know. I feel like Jack Parsons had the energy of a man who would in fact do something quite silly like that and not properly protect himself. You know, that cocky kind of ‘I’ll be fine’ energy – he was exactly that guy.

I’m drawn to anyone who is their own person and doesn't let themselves be defined by what is expected of them. Something that annoys me a bit is that, historically, have not been as free to be as irresponsible as the men. And some of these guys, like Jack Parsons, were often completely fucking irresponsible. They weren’t reliable human beings, but it’s that same unreliability that allowed them to be these sort of wonderful, sort of problematic geniuses. It pisses me off, you know? I want to have the freedom to be an irresponsible prick like Harlan Ellison, who was also a genius and incredibly charismatic. A lot of these guys were very likeable characters, but you wouldn’t want to lend them money, you know?

I read that Amazing Stories turns 100 years old in 2026, which is pretty incredible. I mean, it’s been in and out of publication but people are still really hungry for these kinds of stories. What do you think it is about magazines like that that keep them in circulation?

I think people just love great, speculative fiction that uses the mechanics of individual stories to tell a greater truth about how we experience the world. Metaphors are great. I know, that’s a shockingly obvious statement, but they are really quite useful!

GWENIFER RAYMOND: I'm fundamentally a pretty rational person, wholly at heart an atheist and a believer in science. But at the same time, my bookshelf is loaded with books about UFOs and the occult and ghosts and goblins. It used to be easier to hold these sorts of post-modern contradictory philosophies in your head simultaneously, but the era of actually dangerous conspiratorial thinking pushing its way into mainstream politics is kind of sucking the fun out of it. But how do we avoid that? And why is it so fun to believe things you don't really believe?

I do get asked about these things, and sometimes the questions will come from people who are really earnestly into these kinds of ideas, but I don’t really believe in any of it. I mean, I believe in it in the sense that I believe that reality feels inherently malleable and that human experience in the universe is some tiny, fractional thing. We are made up, essentially. We’re just dressed up monkeys, making a mess of things for a short amount of time before we inevitably disappear.

That said, I do think that thinking about the occult and other strange things probably does tell us some inherently interesting things about the nature of what it is to be a dolled-up ape existing in a brief spark of civilisation. Talking about playing with and creating your own reality, I mean, if you are in your own solipsistic universe and you truly, truly believe that you are Napoleon Bonaparte come back to life, and if it’s not hurting anyone and you’re having a great fucking time being that person, then okay! How is that less real than the so-called real world?

On the other hand, we have an issue with fascists sort of co-opting these things. It’s not a new thing, either, because fascists have always had this association with vaguely cultish symbols. There’s a reason why ritual magic often gets mixed up with fascism, and it’s a problem. It used to be fun to be able to laugh at conspiracy theories, but now we have people who don’t believe in vaccines. We have people having their rights being taken away. We have people who are dying. As I said, it sucks the fun out of it. Man, they ruined my enjoyment. I can’t even laugh at Alex Jones anymore because he’s an important right-wing figure and not just some weirdo who shouts on the internet.

I’m rambling now, but yeah, I do find it more difficult these days to hold these contradictory philosophies, even if it is much more fun to believe in UFOs that it is to not believe in them. And, you know, the world is a weird place, and the universe is inherently stranger than the stories we tell ourselves to make it make sense. I mean, look at quantum mechanics and the idea that the universe cracks open and implodes into new forms of reality every fucking nanosecond. That’s way stranger than thinking there’s a fucking goblin living in my garden.

BEST FIT: Do you think these interests of yours do feed into your day job working in gaming?

Well, I’m a programmer rather than a game designer, so no, it doesn’t really figure in my work. To be honest, I like to keep my day job very separate from my artistic stuff, and that’s mostly because I’m an absolute nightmare. As soon as I have to collaborate, I get into fights with people. But as a solo musician, yeah, absolutely, all those interests feed into what I’m doing. For me, that’s what art is all about. It’s kind of about play. I take it very seriously, but at the same time it’s not very serious, if that makes any sense.

Tell me about your haunted guitar. Is it in the room with you now?

Oh yeah! [Gets up and grabs it]

This guy was built in the 1880s and was a gift from Henry Kaiser, the guitar player. It’s the sibling of another guitar that he has, which is the one that you hear in the movie Grizzly Man. When I say it’s haunted, I mean it has that sort of vibe. It feels like it has a presence when I play it. It actually feels like the guitar is playing me rather than being played.

So it’s not whispering across the room at you while you’re sleeping?

I don’t know, maybe. I just love the story of it. It’s this ancient old guitar that sounds fucking great and you don’t know what kind of shit it’s seen. Two World Wars and a bunch of other things besides. I love the idea that the things this guitar has seen informs the sounds that it’s making. It’s hyperstition again, man!

Let’s talk a bit about “Dreams of Rhiannon’s Birds” from the album, and how that ties in with some homegrown Welsh mythology.

The myth of Rhiannon comes from the Mabinogion, which is a medieval collection of stories from Wales. I really liked the stories that talk about her three birds that can lull whoever listens to their song into an Otherworld. As an instrumental musician, if you think about it in a highfalutin kind of way, that’s kind of what I’m trying to achieve yourself. I intentionally titled the song in a sort of ambiguous way, because I liked the idea of posing the question of whether it was dreams that the birds were creating or dreams the birds themselves were having. It’s alluding to the cycle of reality again. Like, which part is the dream?

There’s a similar ambiguity about the title “Bleak Night in Rabbit’s Wood” too, I think.

The story behind that song comes from when I went to primary school in Gwaelod-y-Garth, which, in Welsh, means the foot of the Garth, which is the mountain that the village sits next to. I can’t remember exactly why, but one day at school we all got sent out with notepads into the woods – which is a pretty irresponsible thing if you think about it these days, sending a bunch of eight-year-olds out into the woods to explore on their own.

Anyway, while we were out there, we came across this rabbit that had been pulled inside out by something, and its guts were hanging out. I don’t remember everything that happened, but when I was playing this riff that memory, for some reason, came back to me. It was like it decided that this song was the one to tell the story of the final, bleak night of the rabbit’s existence.

GWENIFER RAYMOND: I knew it was kind of a dick move to choose this as a reference point, but I do think there’s an inherent difficulty in talking about abstract art. Often a piece of work is not so much the product of a well-understood and definable meaning or purpose, but more like a primal scream that comes out of you and you’re not really sure where it came from. A composition can take a narrative turn because it wants to, not necessarily because you want it to. So the question becomes, how do you engage with talking about art without ruining the whole thing. David Lynch was maybe the master of this.

Pretty much as soon I started to write my own music and not just learning other people’s songs, I knew that I was never going to sit down and purposefully write a song about a topic that interests me. And, honestly, that has never happened. It has always just been about sounds. Even when I was playing in punk bands, where the notes had to be in the right places, it was often more about how you can attack each note or use feedback to create different sounds.

This probably sounds really, really stupid, but I had no idea why I wanted to play in that way. For example, you know, if I wanted to play a certain note twice, I might use a hammer-on rather than picking that note again, which makes that second note softer. Simple things like that. It's just something I inherently feel. It’s all subconscious, the difference between a not feeling right or not right, or feeling uncomfortable versus familiar.

To me, that’s the strength of experimental music. It’s not about a thing. The songs write themselves. The songs were already in existence, and you are just there as a medium to channel that music from wherever it exists. For me, the songs are their own fucking characters. They have their own personality quirks, and those quirks may or may not have anything to do with what I am doing as a musician.

Whenever I write a piece of music, I’m always just playing and playing until I finally go, ‘Oh, that sounds cool.’ Often it feels like some kind of puzzle, trying to figure out what the hell the song wants to be and do. That’s often what takes the longest time.

BEST FIT: You’ve said that you tend to write pretty slowly. How long were you working on the songs for Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark?

I spent about five years working on this record, though more like three years, on and off, in terms of actively working on it. I mean, I have to be honest, a lot of what made this album finally happen is that I took a two-month sabbatical from work, which meant that I was able to sit down every day and just play for hours. That sped up the writing process quite significantly. So, yeah, the real reason my writing is a bit slow is because I’ve got a day job, and when I get home I’m tired and there are other things I need to do. It’s hard to solve a complicated problem like a weird piece of instrumental music when, you know, you’ve got to cook your tea and do the fucking laundry.

I can totally relate to that as someone who works in medical science by day and journalist by night. It can be exhausting. Before we move on to point five, I want to go back to David Lynch, because I know he has been a big influence on you in many ways.

Yeah, oh my god. Huge, huge, huge David Lynch fan. I grew up in a very film-focused family, so films in general were a big influence on me, especially maverick filmmakers like David Lynch and Werner Hertzog, who had these very strong visions of what they were doing. They weren’t trying to make films like anyone else. They were making films that were unmistakably unique to them.

In a way, that goes back to what I was saying earlier about the songs writing themselves. I never got the impression that David Lynch was just going to sit down and write a movie about a certain topic that he found interesting. The films just happened. They formed around him. His head was the black hole around which the accretion disc of the film would heat up, you know?

As a big film person, I do find myself thinking about soundtracks a lot when I’m writing my own music. Soundtracks are inherently interesting to me, because those are pieces of music that aren’t about anything. They’re enhancements for a thing about something.

I remember you saying that the first time you played a live score, it actually altered your songwriting in a way that has been quite transformative for your own music.

Yeah, that was a piece I wrote called “The Three Deaths of Red Spectre” as a live score for a silent film from 1907 calledThe Red Spectre, by the French director Segundo de Chomón. That was a big thing for me, as it really helped me to get out of the ABAB, verse-chorus-verse style of songwriting that I think is more present on my first album, which has a sort of funky, bluesy feel that came out of playing in rock bands and punk bands. Having broken out of that has really helped me realise that, for me, it’s much more pleasurable to write music that has its own momentum and its own narrative to pursue.

Before we move on, I want to touch on what you said about ruining things by explaining them. Has there ever been a piece of art that you really loved that was ruined in such a way?

No, not really. Because part of the point of the art I love is that I don’t really care what the intention of it is. My enjoyment is entirely in the experience of the art. I mean, no one was happy when Morrissey turned out to be who he is, but does it ruin The Smiths for me? No.

GWENIFER RAYMOND: It's such a complicated relationship that we have with nostalgia. It’s so comfortable, but the pursuit of nostalgia, for me, is kind of leading to the death of a lot of things. So many of the films that get made these days are part of a franchise, or are a remake or a pastiche of something we’ve seen before. I feel like art should always be exploring what’s next. Something new. Of course there’s the whole thing about having to learn the rules before you can break them, which is the idea that form exists only as a structure to put things on. And that’s useful, in a way. Things can become interesting when they diverge from expectations. I mean, look at the impact of Psycho when Hitchcock killed off the character played by Janet Leigh. It was something people hadn’t seen before. It was defying expectations.

I guess what I’m saying is that nostalgia is a useful thing to lean on, but too often people are not just leaning on it they are fully relying on in it. There’s less interest in defying expectations and more in just making people feel comfortable. I think that’s why I used the word ‘deification’, because nostalgia is basically god these days. And maybe that’s alright, given the fact that the planet’s on fire and everyone’s a fucking Nazi. The world sucks, so maybe it’s, you know, fine to go and build yourself a fake cathode ray tube TV and watch old cartoons from the ‘90s. That’s a lovely experience. Very cosy. But I do miss the people who are really pushing a radical new concept of art.

We already talked about David Lynch, but I think he really exemplifies the complicated relationship with nostalgia. His films often felt nostalgic, but they weren’t at all. They were the complete opposite, exposing the dark underbelly of the American dream. I mean, Blue Velvet is exactly that. In the opening sequence he gives us these beautiful panning shots of lovely small-town America, and then all of a sudden there’s a load of bugs.

I can’t deny that the technical and aesthetic underpinnings of my music lie in the hands and heads of a bunch of long-dead musicians, but what’s interesting to me in centuries-old music is not the manifestation of a time since passed but what still resonates today. Of the parts that have become nostalgia, what can be corrupted into new and interesting forms? I think that’s why I like the idea of putting a bunch of experimental noise next to lovely, sweet guitar playing. I mean, it can be twattish as well, but if done well I think it tells the story of the world, in a way. In a sense of going from nostalgia to the new.

If you’re writing a piece of music that has a narrative, it kind of makes sense to do that. It’s a natural thing, and maybe even how you create momentum in music. You start out with something familiar, go into something new, and often look back to the familiar. That’s kind of a song structure in itself.

BEST FIT: I like that. It’s been wonderful to watch your own progression across your three albums, going from the American primitive-style playing of your first album to creating your own, distinctly Gwenifer Raymond sound on Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark.

Thanks. I think I'm just bad at doing things on purpose. It’s a problem for me, but it does allow for other, possibly more interesting things to happen.

It’s working for you. It’s perfect. Last question, because I know you work a little with AI in your day job, I’m just wondering how you feel about AI in relation to nostalgia?

I have to underline here that I work with AI in the traditional game AI sense, not in the LLM sense. That shit will be the fucking death of us all. Fucking hell.

People using these LLMs to create ‘art’ are not creating art at all. They’re making content, and it’s not remotely the same thing. It’s incredible to me that people can think that way.I also find it fascinating that AI is so popular amongst the far right. Is it because the kind of people who have far right ideas are the kind of people who can’t actually create art themselves and they’re just jealous of those who can? Art is like the one distinctive power that sensitive, lefty people have, and they are trying to strip us of that power.

I’m generalising here, but people who are introspective have the ability to create beautiful art that engages with the idea of caring about other people beyond themselves. If you look at the history of right-wing politics and art, they fucking hate anything kind of art that’s not representative. Conceptual, post-modern art is not a popular thing among the right. There’s nothing introspective or artful about your fucking ChatGPT prompt, and you’re basically destroying the planet to make your fucking fake poster. I fucking hate it.

So we're not going to see Gwenifer Raymond in Studio Ghibli style?

[laughs] I would burn the world to the ground before I do that!