#drone folk

Penelope Trappes - Home ( Æternum).

P E I R I A N T - New 'Dychwelyd' Album via NAWR

Welsh-Born Experiemental Drone-Folk Duo 'Peiriant' have released their sublime new album 'Dychwelyd' meaning to 'return' on the 5th of July via the Welsh experimental moniker 'NAWR Music'.

Dychwelyd explores the act of returning to source. It is born from the experience of homecoming and returning to a landscape and culture. Returning to strengthen roots and bring up a young family, albeit a move inland from where we grew up to a place dominated by hills and woven through with rivers. Y Mynyddoedd Ddu/ Black mountains of Bannau Brycheiniog frame our landscape - ancient hills with a rawness and freedom, which connect us through the ages to a sense of place.

'DYCHWELYD' TRACKLISTING

Taflu Dŵr

Y Gors

Carreg

Llethr

Cân Idris

Pits

Toriad / Agoriad

Spoons

RELEASE DATES

Friday 7th June - Single #1 - Taflu Dŵr

Friday 5th July - Album - Dychwelyd

Friday 2nd August - Single #2 - Cân Idris

BIOGRAPHY

Peiriant are a duo of violin and electric guitar, who play with melody and tonality to create atmosphere and soundscape. Electronic equipment, samples and found objects also add to their semi-improvised pieces, which are spun from grounded ideas.

Rose and Dan Linn-Pearl draw from their foundation in folk and classical in addition to post-rock, minimalism and sound art to weave experimental music that is anchored in the Welsh landscape. They play with layers of drone and dissonance, contrasting with songs and pure tones to give a rich and sonorous auditory experience.

‘Welsh-born duo Peiriant’s self-titled LP sculpts startling instrumentals from the bones of folk music, guitar delays and deep drones.’

- Jude Rogers (The Guardian)

Live performances have included BBC Radio 3: Late Junction at Chapter arts centre, Cardiff 2017, NAWR concert series (Swansea & Hay on Wye 2018 to present). They are regular performers at Nozstock festival & How The Light Gets In. In 2021 they released River Songs E.P : A collection of four pieces inspired by the River Wye.

ABOUT

Rose Linn-Pearl balances playing the violin with work as a veterinary ophthalmologist.

Early classical training and folk complemented a lifelong interest in improvisation and experimental music. Her interest now lies predominantly in tonal shifts and playing with discord and pattern.

Dan Linn-Pearl is a composer, songwriter and sound artist. His work includes alternative rock and electronic music, sound installation, experimental film and moving image under Deaf Pictures. He is a founding member of sound art collective Gwaith Sŵn who produce a monthly thematic show for award-winning arts station Resonance 104.4FM.

Both Rose and Dan are members of experimental concert series NAWR whow curate shows featuring established and up-and-coming artists. These take place in Swansea, Aberystwyth and Hay on Wye.

'Peiriant' Online

https://peiriant.bandcamp.com/https://www.instagram.com/peiriantband/

Half-Eaten Guitar Wyrd Visions 2006, Blue Fog

The usual fear with learning biographical details about your favourite occult-coded neo-folk musician is discovering that they’re actually a Nazi. (Or possibly worse still, if prizing authenticity: finding out they aren’t.) If said musician is from Toronto though, the real dread is finding out that they have a LinkedIn.

Self-released in 2006 and reissued in 2014 by Phil Elverum in a seemingly plain cardboard sleeve that bears text impressions more easily deciphered with the fingertips than the eye, Wyrd Visions’ Half-Eaten Guitar has an intentional air of mystery. The sounds within (extremely slow, extremely minimal mostly-acoustic Nordic folk informed by the aesthetics of first-wave black metal) also point towards the work of a quasi-outsider artist, the sort of recording a label press release can claim to have “discovered” through some unlikely series of events. Still, notice how the inside of the sleeve is a striking, bold Undertaker-purple? That’s a clue.

As a matter of fact, Colin Bergh, the artist behind Wyrd Visions, was much better known in Toronto as part of the trio who founded Bad Day, a fashion and culture zine whose splashy gallery launch parties were attended by the fab international and hosted by people like James Franco and Gus Van Sant. (This sort of thing was an especially big deal in credibility-thirsty Toronto, a legitimate world city gnawed by the inner fear that it is secretly Columbus, Ohio with more colourful money.) The knowledge of Bergh’s identity as an haute couture guy whose previous band was called Awesome is inevitably going to impact how you hear Wyrd Visions. Any perception of irony is poison to monkish music like this, because it introduces the possibility that what you are hearing is actually a very slow, (almost literally) one-note joke. And if it is intended as a joke, are you a fool for following your instinct to engage with it on its own droning terms, for sinking into the somnambulant world it seems to evoke?

To Bergh’s credit, I think Wyrd Visions ultimately comes across as a sincere venture and that, given time, Half-Eaten Guitar’s stillness and austerity have the power to draw in even highly skeptical listeners. Wyrd Visions borrows black metal’s somber chord progressions and wintry vibes while jettisoning its machismo, particularly in Bergh’s youthful, Grizzly Bear-esque vocals. At times Half-Eaten Guitar is reminiscent of Agalloch’s more ambient work, such as the mournful electric guitar that enters on bonus track “Air Conditioning.” There is probably a think-piece (or a think-sentence) someone might feel like writing about someone from the fashion world covering Mayhem’s “Freezing Moon,” a band with a few guys in it who’d’ve at least thought about murdering Bergh for daring to play their music had he tried it in 1993. But, ach, is that sort of thing interesting anymore? Better to say that Bergh and guest singer Jennifer Castle find a nice midway point between campfire and bonfire light for the tune, a cold thrill in the old command to “follow the freezing moon.”