Anyone who follows my weekly album picks knows I have a thing for guitar and its players in all manner of styles from Jeff Parker to Mary Halvorson to Jimi Hendrix, Joe Pass, John Fahey, James Blackshaw, Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, Marc Ribot, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Bill Orcutt, Django Reinhardt, and the Reverend Gary Davis to name but a few.
I was introduced to Gwenifer Raymond thanks to a review The Quietus, one of my favorite sources for music discovery. Listen to just a few bars from any track from Last Night I Heard The Dog Star Bark, even the droney ones on either end, and you’ll hear echoes of some of the players mentioned above with a heavy tilt towards roots music in all its forms.
From the liner notes:
“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.
I once worked with a guy who had a PhD in Astrophysics and he was scary smart. I also kinda love that Gwenifer Raymond shreds on finger picked and slide guitar while working in AI. Boo!
“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.”
Maybe “exiting out of hyperdrive into some strange planet” is all that needs to be said since listening is just a click away. Last Night I Heard The Dog Star Bark was recently released on We Are Busy Bodies on September 5.