Gwenifer Raymond

Brighton-based Welsh instrumentalist Gwenifer Raymond is reaching for the cosmos on her third studio album, Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark, released on September 5th release on We Are Busy Bodies. This is paired with the release of the lead single, “Jack Parsons Blues”, delivered with impressive unrestrained passion.

Following her acclaimed 2020 LP, Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain—a record that repurposed American Primitive traditions to map the folk-horror landscape of her Welsh roots—Raymond is now aiming her intricate fingerpicking towards the heavens. Where her previous work charted knotted woodlands, this new album looks to the stars, fusing arcane occultism with cosmic science.

The lead single, “Jack Parsons Blues,” serves as a blistering introduction to this new frontier. A whirlwind of fleet-fingered guitar, the track channels both Arabian flair and flamenco fury. Its namesake is the infamous 1940s Californian rocket scientist, a founder of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who was also an acolyte of Aleister Crowley. “He was both a scientist and an embracer of the weird and esoteric,” Raymond says of Parsons, whom she finds an “oddly inspirational” and “romantic.

A former astrophysicist herself, Raymond’s deep-seated fascination with science fiction and cosmic concepts permeates the new record. She cites influences from Philip K. Dick to the mathematical nature of infinity as shaping the album’s soundscapes, which were recorded in her home studio. On Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark, Raymond moves beyond the “Welsh Primitive” style she pioneered, venturing from the earthly to the stellar. The album promises a journey from the cosmic void to the galactic plane, where Raymond’s blessed fingertips connect a tangible, earthly grit with the mystique of the great beyond.