FEATURE:
Revisiting…
Gwenno - Le Kov
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BECAUSE the forthcoming…
PHOTO CREDIT: David Levene/The Guardian
Tressor is released in July, I wanted to use this opportunity in Revisiting… to look back at Gwenno’s current studio album, Le Kov. Released in 2018, it is a stunning album from the Cardiff-born artist. Her second studio album (following from 2015’s Y Dydd Olaf), I heard a few of the songs from Le Kov played on the radio when it was released a few years back. Now, whilst you might catch the odd track here and there, it does not get the airplay and examination it deserves. It is an album where its deep cuts are so interesting and original. Recorded all in Cornish (Gwenno Saunders grew up in a Cornish-speaking family, with her father Tim Saunders writing Cornish poetry), maybe the dialect means that some people find Le Kov less accessible than other albums. I feel the greatest strength of Le Kov is that it celebrates Cornwall and we get to hear the accent and dialect. With compositions that go between dreamy and trippy, and stunning vocals from Gwenno throughout, Le Kov is an intoxicating experience! A tribute and representation of a displaced people whose language has been marginalised. Gwenno was also inspired by the Government’s decision to cut funding towards the Cornish language in 2016. Seemingly seeing it as a dead language, it means Le Kov is a very valuable, educational and important album. The melodies and hooks are there to keep you coming back, whilst the heart of the album is this beautiful and heartfelt representation of the Cornish dialect (or language).
Before getting to a couple of positive reviews for the exceptional Le Kov, I have found a couple of interviews where Gwenno talked about the inspiration behind the album and her relationship with the Cornish. The Guardian chatted with her in 2018 and, quite rightly, noted the fact Le Kov is probably the first Psych-Rock/Pop album in Cornish:
“To that end, Saunders has just recorded her second solo album entirely in Cornish, the language she learned as a child. The follow-up to Welsh-language Y Dydd Olaf (2014), which won the Welsh Music prize, Le Kov would be a fantastic album whatever it was sung in – spacey, strange and richly melodic – but there’s no doubt that the language gives it an added sense of purpose. Without wishing to make any rash claims, it seems likely that it’s the first ever Cornish electronic psych-pop concept album.
Indeed, it seems likely it’s the first ever Cornish rock album full stop. There has been a vibrant Cornish-language folk scene for decades. The late singer and poet Brenda Wootton was its best-known exemplar, while Saunders has a soft spot for a band called Bucca, who released a solitary album, An Tol Yn Pen An Telynyor, in 1980. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, given how few native speakers there are, it never crossed over into pop.
The website Kernow Beat has assembled an exhaustive database of wildly obscure bands from Cornwall, pulling back the curtain on a vibrant regional music scene: who knew punk took such a grip on Penzance in the late 1970s? But, alas, not one of the frequently mind-boggling names it lists (Constable Zippo’s Electric Commode Band, Furry Vermin, Big Dick and the Deviants) seems to have used Cornish. Its solitary appearance in something approaching pop was on Aphex Twin’s 2001 album Drukqs, the track listing of which contains a few Cornish titles, albeit frequently misspelt and easy to miss among the titles comprising entirely made-up words.
Aphex Twin actually turns up on Le Kov, one of an array of real-life figures who haunt the album’s songs. They are the inhabitants of the titular imaginary city “where Cornish is spoken by everybody”: Peter Lanyon, a painter of abstract landscapes from St Ives who died after crashing the glider that he flew to “get a more complete knowledge of the landscape”; Michael An Gof, commander of the doomed Cornish rebellion of 1497; and Georg Sauerwein, a 19th-century German linguist who was the first person to write a letter in Cornish for a century, the words of which inspired the song Koweth Ker.
As the cast list suggests, Le Kov is an album teeming with ideas. As she discusses it, Saunders flits from Brexit to JG Ballard, from Constant Nieuwenhuys, a Dutch artist who imagined an anti-capitalist utopia where no one had to work, to cheese. (One of the few surviving traditional sayings in the Cornish language is “Eus keus?” or “Is there cheese?”)
There is also a preponderance of the lost, sunken cities that pepper Cornish mythology: Lyonesse, reputed to be the home of King Arthur, and Langarrow, “which I thought was more interesting, because the people there really went for it and had a good time. It was built by convicted criminals, who then mixed with the natives and it all went wrong. It became like the Cornish Sodom and Gomorrah.”
Saunders says the album was partly inspired by the government’s decision to cut its meagre funding for the Cornish language in 2016. “There’s that argument that I think is really stupid: why do you have to learn Cornish or Welsh, why don’t you learn Mandarin? It’s like everything you do has to have monetary value. I think you have to find the non-monetary value in things.” But mostly it’s rooted in something more personal: her desire to “accept what I actually am – and my upbringing, which always felt slightly at odds with other people’s”.
It certainly sounds unconventional. Saunders is the child of a Cornish poet and a Welsh language activist who was imprisoned “a couple of times for vandalising the Welsh Office”. She elaborates: “My mum was always complaining about being in the house and having to look after the kids, so I think she really quite looked forward to going to prison, just to get a break.” In her house, Anglo-American culture and the English language were forbidden, the TV was turned down if S4C wasn’t broadcasting, and everyone spoke Cornish, a language that virtually died out in 1770, before undergoing a minor – but ongoing – revival 150 years later.
“It was like living in a sort of cult of four people, in Riverside in Cardiff,” she says. “I had no idea about popular culture. Years later, I said to my mum, ‘Why didn’t you tell me about David Bowie or people like that?’ And she said that it was all just around, that I was always going to find out about that stuff myself. But it was really annoying for a while, because I’d meet people and have no idea what they were talking about – you know, ‘Who are Pavement?’.
I am looking forward to seeing what her new album, Tresor, offers. Although it was recorded in Cornwall, it is about her experiences of motherhood and how this has affected and changed her. Even so, the album is almost entirely recorded in Cornish. As preparation for Tresor (the Cornish for ‘treasure’), have a listen to the gorgeous Le Kov (Cornish for ‘a place of memory’). The Quietus sat down with Gwenno and, as I suggested earlier, asked about that ill-advised 2016 Government decision:
“Did the decision coincide with the government withdrawing Cornish language funding in 2016?
G: I think that a lot of things contributed to it. I found a lot of Cornish speakers on social media, which sounds like a really uneventful thing, but it was eventful for me having not known a huge amount of Cornish speakers growing up. I met people in Cardiff who spoke Cornish. And yeah, it was related to the funding thing. But also the last song on my last album was in Cornish [‘Amser’] and it was really amazing every time I played that song live. People would really listen when I’d announce it, so that excited me because it was suggesting a conversation. I think you learn quite a lot when you play live.
To me it’s astonishing that you grew up speaking Cornish, because I assumed it was ancient history growing up. I certainly didn’t know anybody who spoke it.
G: Not as a first language among native speakers where you use it with parents or whatever and you're using it every day. Now I have a son and I speak Cornish with him. So I thought a lot about that; about what you're given. When you have children you think a lot about your own childhood. So that fed into it because Cornish to me is a family thing. I instinctively think of the home because I didn't use it in school. It's a very homely thing.
I don’t speak Welsh or Cornish, but I know the salutary “Iechyd da!” and “yeghis da!” mean the same thing (Good health). I suspect they’re quite similar so do you mix them up ever?
G: I don't think you do. Someone asked me that the other day. I don't think you do mix your languages up if you speak more than one do you? They're both Brittonic languages so Welsh is related to Cornish.
It’s a part of my heritage so I should probably learn it really.
G: It's a tool isn't it? And if you've got a couple of tools you may as well use them all. I overthink things a lot and so I found that singing Welsh initially helped me feel freer in the creative process, and I became less conscious of what I was doing. And I felt that with Cornish too, because it was such uncharted territory for me. There's not a lot of Cornish language music, so as a creative process I became a lot less conscious of what I was doing.
One of the biggest disappointments of the Brexit vote for me was that Wales and particularly Cornwall voted out.
G: But you know what, Richard Wyn Jones - who's the head of politics at Cardiff University - did a study of who voted for what, and you can't forget there are quite a lot of people who are retired who have moved to rural areas. The joke is they'll move to somewhere like north west Wales - "I just want to go somewhere away from the foreigners" - and they'll end up in a predominantly Welsh speaking area. I think the percentage of people who weren't born in the area was quite high and I just wonder if that would apply to Cornwall as well. I think there are two things going on: that and the fact there wasn't much in it. For me more than anything else, people were manipulated by state media.
There certainly was a lot of sneering at the Cornish after the referendum.
G: A friend was going door-to-door in Holyhead trying to convince people to vote remain. And when asked why they were voting Brexit people would answer "because of the muslims". And that epitomises people in disenfranchised areas where they can't really work out what's wrong. They're believing what they're reading. It's very complicated so you can’t just to say people were cutting their noses off to spite their face”.
I shall move on to a couple of reviews. Voted one of the best albums of 2018 by several publications, there was a lot of praise for Le Kov. This is what Loud and Quiet had to say in their review:
“Those who’ve been to Cornwall will know its beauty is subtle and serene, and those who haven’t will get a pretty good idea if they let ‘Le Kov’ – the second album from former Pippettes member Gwenno Saunders – immerse them in all the hidden charm the southern coastal county has to offer.
The first thing you fall in love with about Cornwall is the sea, so it’s no surprise that the album’s opener ‘Hy a Skoellyas Lyf a Dhagrow’ perfectly captures its tranquility with sun-tinged psychedelia. From there, ‘Le Kov’, an album sung entirely in Cornish, becomes a record of two halves. There’s the pop-infused, groove-laden soundtrack to a quintessentially British day out by the sea on one side – captured in glistening lye in the infectious art-pop of ‘Tir Ha Mor’ or the fairground nostalgia of ‘Daromres y’n Howl’. Then there’s the hypnotic lure of Cornish mythology on the other (the Brythonic city legends are a great place to start digging deeper). Of course, no Cornish experience would be complete without cheese, and “Eus Keus? (Is There Cheese?)” provides one of the record’s most unabashedly fun tracks in its dedication to fromage.
Gwenno effortlessly glides between styles on ‘Le Kov’ – the seamless transitions between forlorn piano and frosted beats (Aphex Twin was an inspiration) to pristine drums and discordant brass evoke a Cornwall that’s as easily accessible as it is steeped in tradition and folklore.
Like her debut, ‘Y Dydd Olaf’, delivered in her native welsh (the Cornish comes from her parents, it was spoken around the house, and her father is a Cornish poet), the fact that the majority of people won’t understand the lyrics matters not. ‘Le Kov’ would be a wonderful album even if it were sung in Gallifreyan”.
The Skinny with impressed with the beguiling Le Kov. An album that turned four earlier this month, go and listen to it in full if you have not done so already. You will definitely find yourself coming back for further spins:
“On her solo debut Y Dydd Olaf, Gwenno Saunders explored the importance of preserving a sense of cultural identity almost entirely in Welsh. Closing track Amser, though, was sung in Cornish. It’s this thread that Gwenno picks up again on her new album Le Kov, journeying through both the individual and collective subconscious entirely in the Cornish language.
Much like Y Dydd Olaf, Gwenno’s often languid vocal style ensures the language is delivered beautifully, both tuneful and entrancing, continuing to ensure that her music is accessible to the non-Cornish speaker. On the sparkling pop of Tir Ha Mor, her voice and the seemingly intuitively musical nature of the words give the album one of its strongest hooks. She draws inspiration from Aphex Twin’s Drukqs on Hy a Skoellyas Lyf a Dhagrow, delivering a dream-like landscape alongside her hushed vocals. Eus Keus? (or “is there cheese?”) is more playful, building on propulsive melodies and continually reintroducing warped guitar around Gwenno’s own more exuberant voice.
Le Kov is a cinematic and atmospheric collection, crisply produced while also maintaining a sense of mystery. Its cosmic blend of psychedelia and strong synth-pop sensibilities once again bring the listener firmly into Gwenno’s psychological territory. She places another Brythonic tongue firmly in the spotlight, continuing to break through language barriers with sparkling psych-pop”.
Undoubtedly one of the best L.P.s of 2018, Le Kov is an album we all need to hear. Ahead of the release of her third studio album in July, go and listen to the moving and wonderful Le Kov. Not too many of its tracks make its way onto radio now. It is a shame, as every track on the album is engrossing (and something that people need in their lives). Le Kov is a remarkable album from…
THE brilliant Gwenno.