“If we opened individuals up, we’d discover landscapes,” mentioned the French director Agnes Varda in 2009. Varda is one in every of many artists, musicians and filmmakers from world wide who impressed Tresor, the third album by the Cornish-speaking Welsh psychonaut Gwenno Saunders – and that quote is especially beloved to a musician devoted to mapping out the intersection of land, heritage, identification and potential.
Like Gwenno’s final album, Le Kov, Tresor is written largely in Cornish – a language she realized as an toddler from her father, the Cornish poet Tim Saunders; her socialist-choir-singing mom made positive she was equally fluent in Welsh. Le Kov imagined a cosmopolitan metropolis of modern-day fantasy, raised from beneath the waves just like the revived Cornish tongue itself; Tresor now journeys inward, into an internal life lived by means of Cornish.
To Gwenno, Cornish isn’t some unique linguistic treasure, however the language of her childhood, of household, of creativeness. She’s now instructing it to her son, and the songs on Tresor discover intuition, the unconscious and belonging. It’s a dreamier, gentler album than Le Kov or her Welsh-language debut, Y Dydd Olaf, leaning additional into spectral digital textures on tracks like “Keltek” and “Kan Me”.
The softer sounds are animated by the recent inventive power Gwenno has discovered within the female on the likes of “Anima”, fuzzy psych-rock with medieval leanings and a sinuous melody. Surrealist imagery hangs within the hazy air: a black horse, a shell, a lady’s torso, a ball of fireside. “Duwes po Eva/Ow sevel a’th rag”, Saunders sings: “Is it a Goddess or Eve stood in entrance of you?”
Generally the magical archetypes of womanhood – the mom, the womb, the instinctual, the nurturing – will be limiting, however on this exploratory, visionary document, co-produced by Saunders and her accomplice and collaborator Rhys Edwards, it doesn’t really feel that approach. On the languid title observe – a musical fairy mound piled with layers of vocals, synth, piano and marimba – Gwenno asks (in Cornish): “Would you like a crown upon your head and a lady at your ft?/Do I wish to fill a room with all of my will and really feel ashamed?” She wonders on the energy of ineluctable intuition amid the drifting ghost’s dream that’s “Males An Toll” – named for a set of holed, spherical, Freudian-field-day standing stones close to Penzance – but on opener “An Stevel Nowydh”, with a spine of chiming indie, she’s much less instinctual, extra analytical as she airily interrogates existence: “Is the overall lack of which means an inevitable a part of being?”
If Cornish is the language of inner philosophical enquiry, then the language of politics, for Gwenno, is Welsh; a supporter of independence, she tackles hypocrisy and individualism wearing nationalism’s clothes in “NYCAW” (whose title refers to an previous anti-holiday-home slogan, “Nid Yr Cymru Ar Werth”, or “Wales isn’t on the market”). Sardonic, taunting post-punk with pretty, liquid gothic guitar flourishing underneath the thrum, it bemoans the commercialisation of Welsh identification. In relation to group, she asserts, “the one factor that issues is love”.
Wales, Cornwall and lands past are concretely current within the discovered sounds that add a richness of element all through, from the eldritch creak of a gate resulting in an iron-age settlement on Anglesey to the strings of a hotel-room piano in Vienna. And whereas that is the primary album Gwenno has written whereas really in Cornwall – in St Ives, paid tribute to by the closing observe, “Porth Ia” (its Cornish title) – it maintains a polyglot dialog with world influences from Swedish artist Monica Sjöö to American hippie adventurer Eden Ahbez, by no means giving in to simple authenticity or essentialism. On the driving, sultry “Ardamm”, she addresses critics of her new place as a Welsh-born figurehead of the Cornish language (document numbers signed as much as Cornish programs after the discharge of Le Kov). How lengthy, she asks, will they wait to take the lead themselves? “Ple ‘ma dha vammyeth?” (“The place is your mom tongue?”)
But the medium is now not the message right here; although the which means of Tresor can’t actually be divorced from the language by which it’s written, it isn’t about Cornish, however in it. Tresor’s internal panorama, each native and world, invitations us to think about what vistas and future paths we’d type from our personal jumbled heritages and the place it’s we’d discover ourselves. Among the many final sounds heard on “Porth Ia” are the bells of Santa Maria Della Salute in Venice throughout the 2019 floods. “I need you to know”, Gwenno sings, “that whenever you arrive I might be right here”.
