Wales born, Brighton-based instrumentalist Gwenifer Raymond is a celebrated champion of the finger-picked guitar. She has drawn international acclaim for her repurposing of Mississippi blues and John Fahey’s intricate Americana to embody her roots in rural South Wales and her interests in folk horror and the avant garde, inventing a new form dubbed Welsh Primitive. The Guardian has described her as a “profound talent” whilst The Observer has praised her “awe-inspiring technique and intense musicality”, and Uncut Magazine has championed her “fast-developing talents as a composer of eerie menace.”

She released her third studio album, “Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark,” in 2025 on We Are Busy Bodies, a follow up to “Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain” (2020, Tompkins Square), a Welsh Music Prize Nominee, and You Were Never Much of a Dancer (2018, Tompkins Square).

Gwenifer was born in Cardiff, Wales in 1985. At the age of eight her love of Nirvana’s “Nevermind” prompted her to ask her parents for a guitar, and later the cover of Lead Belly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” from their MTV Unplugged in New York show sent her scurrying in search of whatever recordings she could find from the roots blues gods of fingerstyle: Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Boy Fuller, and the more “eerie, threatening, almost not from this world” sounds of Skip James.

“The first time I heard Mississippi John Hurt, I just assumed there were a couple of guys playing on that recording,” she says. “When I discovered that it was just one guy playing guitar I immediately wanted to figure out how to play like that myself. It’s just such a full sound, so fully realized and covering this wide sonic range. It seemed to offer so many possibilities.”

While playing around South Wales in punk bands as a drummer and guitarist - in thrall to Pixies, Butthole Surfers, The Fall, and The Velvet Underground as well as Dylan and Neil Young - she taught herself blues guitar and Appalachian folk from the books of Stefan Grossman and practiced the clawhammer banjo style until it became second nature. Then, at 16, she found a tutor in Cardiff who taught her the famous alternative thumb technique and also introduced her to the American Primitive work of Fahey. Raymond set about merging these Americana learnings with the pent-up energy of her teenage punk years and her fascination with folk horror classics such as The Wicker Man and The Blood on Satan’s Claw to create a sinuous, primeval and cascading British blues all her own.

Once she’d completed an MA and PhD in Astrophysics at Cardiff University and moved to Brighton to become an AI and video game programmer, Raymond was discovered by instrumental guitarist Doctor Turtle playing open-mic nights and - via the circuitous trans-Atlantic journey of her demo - signed to San Francisco’s Tompkins Square Records in 2017. Her first proper gig was at the Thousand Incarnations of the Rose Festival in Maryland, where she hung with heroes such as Glenn Jones, Marisa Anderson, Daniel Bachman and Peter Walker and was presented by Henry Kaiser with a 1880s Joseph Bohmann guitar which she feels may be possessed by some fingerpicking demon.

“I’m not saying I’ve seen it toss chairs across the room but there’s definitely some presence to that guitar,” she says of an instrument used sparingly across her albums, alongside her Waterloo WL-14L, a Tricone National Resonator and other guest guitars. “You can feel it when you pick it up. It always seems to bestow such huge performances.”

Her 2018 debut album You Never Were Much of a Dancer - with its references to hangmen and sackcloth, ashes and blood – was steeped in noir Americana, but being asked to score the 1907 silent French horror film about a Satanic magician The Red Spectre shifted her folk-structured perspective towards classical movements and the European avant garde.

Recorded in her Brighton flat during lockdown in 2020 to the sounds of Moondog, Erik Satie and her neighbor’s washing machine, her second album, Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain – a reference to the UFOs spotted over a mountain near her childhood home - lost itself in the misty Welsh landscapes of her youth, and entranced the world beyond. It garnered huge acclaim as pioneering a Welsh Primitive style and set Raymond apart as a unique fingerstyle talent. “It felt like I was emulating the specific guitarists I looked up to less, and had started to incorporate my own specific musical eccentricities,” she says.

Having toured Europe, the US and Canada with the likes of Michael Chapman, Michael Hurley, The Handsome Family, Lankum, Charlie Parr, Richard Dawson, Ryley Walker and Squid, and played major festivals including WOMAD, Green Man, End of the Road and Transmusicales in France, Raymond recorded her latest album “Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark” in similar fashion; 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. The album is a hybrid of the ancient and the futuristic where, in Raymond’s multi-dimensional finger-work, the arcane etchings of occult folk horror fuse with the unfathomable equations of the cosmos, the earthly meeting the stellar on some far-off event horizon.

Listen: Lars Gotrich talks up Gwenifer Raymond on his final 2025 edition of All Things Considered

Read: Beats Per Minute reviews “Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark”

Watch: Vintage Guitar Magazine showcases Gwenifer Raymond’s fingerstyle guitar work

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