In 1952 the chemist and rocket engineer Jack Parsons died from wounds that he sustained during an accidental explosion whilst working in his home laboratory on explosives for a film set. Upon hearing the news of her son’s death, Ruth Parsons promptly took a fatal overdose of barbiturates.
An occultist and associate of both Aleister Crowley and L. Ron Hubbard, Parsons’ story has been memorialised in song by the likes of Six Organs of Admittance, Jóhann Jóhannsson, The Claypool Lennon Delirium, and Luke Haines with Peter Buck. Now the pantheon expands with Gwenifer Raymond’s urgently strummed flurries continuing the tradition. That her ode is instrumental does little to deviate from the Parsons legend. Her rapid playing on Last Night I Heard The Dog Star Bark’s second track elicits a sense of desperation and an implication of time running out.
Raymond’s mastery of her instruments is unmatched. She can conjure detailed imagery with little more than carefully plucked strings and dexterous fretboard scurries. The title track, for example, starts with a rocking cadence – rocking as in your gran’s chair, not the riffs of AC/DC – that slowly develops into a pitching tumble of notes, relocating her Welsh Primitive to the Great Plains and evoking a stroll taken across the dusty landscape lit by the failing light of an aging sun. As if a twirling column of smoke has become visible, a shift occurs, and you’re hightailing it back to the ranch on your quickest steed. A middle section of melancholy and reflection follows before drifting back into that rocking cadence and then, once more, bolting for the door. It’s cinematic in both its structure and depiction of Western vistas.
The track dedicated to the Taff River meanders along more softly. It’s borne of intricate, internal rhythms suggestive of little, white, cresting waves emerging for a brief moment as the river courses around muddy banks. She entwines licks of steel amongst roiling fingerpicking that roams and barrels on incessantly. The mantle that once belonged to John Fahey belongs squarely to Raymond.
The pensive opening notes of ‘Bleak Night In Rabbit’s Wood’ tread forward like an uncertain mammal with its paw raised, carefully leading us up to an acoustically delivered chunky doom metal breakdown that mirrors a gruesome discovery she made as a child. She is a master storyteller using nothing but her fingers. A sonic marionettist.
Raymond tells timeless tales through her free-spirited performances. If, sometimes, it feels as if seventeen separate melodies are somehow being flung from six strings and two sets of five fingers at once, then know that all of nature, its blooming flowers, its swooping birds, appear in our ears because of her innate command of an explosive musical articulation. There are no accidents here.
