A treat.
Taking the themes of a 1970s Welsh sci-fi novel as a jumping-off point, former Pipette
Gwenno Saunders’ 2015 ‘
Y Dydd Olaf’ was a cosmic marriage of motorik future-pop and the outer limits of Welsh psych. Exploring the unstoppable progress of tech and the desire to keep minority languages and cultures alive, nine tracks were in Welsh, with the final ‘
Amser’ deviating from this, setting one of her father’s Cornish-language poems to music.
Continuing to explore similar territories, ‘
Le Kov’ (‘The Place of Memory’) is sung entirely in Cornish, whose speakers number in the hundreds, a language reclassified from “extinct” as recently as 2010. But rather than being a distancing thing, ‘Le Kov’ invites us in, with a bewitching, otherworldly, sound palette, only enhanced by the unfamiliar tongue. ‘
Hi a Skoellyas Liv a Dhagrow’ (‘She Shed A Flood Of Tears’), opening, immediately warms ‘...Olaf’’s more skeletal electronics with echo-drenched, dreamlike keys and a swirl of soundtrack strings, like being steadily sucked into a velvet whirlpool.
