“Any references to old Druidic practices or characters from the chwedlau [folk tales] like Ceridwen are invoked in an imaginal and/or metaphoric sense, done through a queer, anti-fascist, decolonial, surrealist lens where we are trying to explore an emotional relation to these concepts that haunt the culture and landscape,” says Tristwch y Fenywod’s lead vocalist and zither player, Gwretsien Ferch Lisbeth.
Welsh culture has a deep and rich history of folklore on which the band—rounded out by Sidni Sarffwraig on bass guitar and Leila Lygad on the electronic drum kit—leans for inspiration. In medieval tales, Ceridwen was a legendary enchantress who had a cauldron that held all poetic inspiration, which was called the Awen. The word “awen” is commonly used in Welsh when referring to artistic inspiration. What motivated musicians based in Leeds, with roots in the city’s underground and experimental scenes, to seek their own “awen” from across the border?
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“We like the idea that ‘Re-enchantment is Resistance,’” says Ferch Lisbeth, “that by reclaiming, re-interpreting, and re-imagining these stories and concepts from history that we are creating something new from them which dismantles their power as narratives to be put forward by racists who see the ancient Britons as an example of a ‘purer/more authentic white culture.’ We actively seek to destroy these ideas—with a special fuck you to neofolk nazi scum!”
Contemporary Welsh-language music, spanning all genres, partially traces its lineage back to the 1960s, when folk artists like Dafydd Iwan saw parallels between their own political battles to secure rights for the Welsh language with Anglo-American protest music of the time. It sparked a chain reaction of artists inspired by those who came before them, adding their own external influences, which continues to this day.
Already making music as outsiders through projects as diverse as Guttersnipe, The Ephemeron Loop, Hawthonn, Slaylor Moon, and The Courtneys, TyF’s trio of women are a step removed from the Welsh language scene which inspires them.
Below, Ferch Lisbeth discusses how she ended up making music with Leila Lygad and Sidni Sarffwraig.
It’s the most obvious question that music journalists are told not to ask on their very first day, but I think an exception should definitely be made for you: Can you explain your name?
Gwretsien Ferch Lisbeth: ‘Tristwch Y Fenywod’ means The Sadness of Women, which actually originated as an affectionate nickname that Sidni used to call me at the beginning of our relationship (we are a couple). For me, there has always been a type of sadness and melancholy which is very much woven into my experience of femininity—a cosmic woe that I find really inspires me to make music and to write.
It’s hard to say whether this feeling is truly distinct from genuinely holding empathy and directly experiencing the difficult realities of being feminine in a world that is so structured on the oppression of women and feminine creatures. But there has always been something of a divine, almost visionary quality to me about bearing witness to suffering, allowing one’s self to actually feel the dark emotions that we are often socially encouraged to mask or turn away from. It feels like it comes from a place of love, but which opens you up to fragility, alienation and despair, particularly in this human social world which forces estrangement from spirit and imagination.
Leila and I bonded over this shared experience when we first met—we are both goth to the core! But the name seemed especially appropriate when the band formed, as we were all grieving very real and unpoetic life occurrences; Leila and I both lost close friends suddenly to cancer and Sidni’s bandmate from her former group, The Courtneys, became permanently disabled from Long COVID which led the band to go on indefinite hiatus.
This was the impetus for spending more time together and making music as a form of therapy. Plus, I was trying to pick a Welsh name for the band that sounded good and felt very personal. It just so happened that the name translated really well and as soon as I wrote it down it just felt right and special somehow.
And how did you three find each other and end up making moody, Welsh-language goth music?
Me and Leila met in 2014 at a Deep Listening workshop at Leeds Beckett University, which was led by her partner, Phil Legard—who is a lecturer in the music department—and composer and all-round excellent human being Kim Cascone. I thought Leila and Phil were the coolest people I’d ever met. It was so exciting to meet weirdos who were into alternative music and culture who were both actually serious about it.
They have a huge library of very cool books and music. They have this amazing “21st century moon musick” duo called Hawthonn, who I feel are one of the great contemporary goth bands. We had talked about doing some sort of collaboration for years during our hangouts, when we would get stoned, listen to prog, and play games based on sigils or amusing apocrypha from various esoteric texts.
Then I met Sidni at Kraak Festival in Belgium in 2018, where we had both gone to see our favorite Canadian experimental musician Alex Moskos, who introduced us. We started dating later that year, and were drawn to making music together. I was a fan of her project Slaylor Moon, and we had a shared passion for no wave and the idea of making queer-femme experimental music.
When me and Sidni started spending lots of time together here in the UK, Leila and Phil were at the top of the list of people I wanted to introduce her to. We all got along very well—Sidni was also an academic who loves the outdoors. Leila and Phil have an extensive knowledge of places to hike in around the area of Northern England we live in, and they often feature things like Neolithic tombs, Bronze Age rock art, standing stones, derelict follies, and other features of psychogeographical and archaeological interest. I was re-learning Welsh, and Leila was learning it for the first time after Hawthonn supported Gwenno. So there was a lot conceptually floating around to inform the notion of playing music together. We were all in agreement about how much we loved Dead Can Dance so we figured we could model our sound somewhat on the first DCD record.
All these disparate pieces came together when me and Leila were on a walk in the woods and thought, ‘What if we did some kind of goth band where I play my mutant electrified harp and sing yn y Gymraeg [in the Welsh language], Sidni plays bass with heavy chorus pedal usage, and Leila plays the electronic drum kit, but with ‘ancient’ drum sounds loaded onto it?’
Leila had been making field recordings and using a bat detector, so she offered a more unique dimension to the idea of drumming with samples. When we finally got together and tried jamming with all these elements in place, we instantly thought it worked really well.
There’s a really strong sense of what the album is in terms of its themes and sonic landscape. Was it easy to create such a coherent work?
There was a lot of laying conceptual groundwork into this kind of syncretic notion of what the three of us wanted to express before we even played a note—so by the time we did, it already felt quite well-realized, even though we are excited to develop the sound further. The constraints of the instrumental palette are definitely important, but I also think it’s the fact that we do all have quite a clear idea of what we are trying to put across. We’re also very close.
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You each have rich and varied pasts in the experimental scene, both in Leeds and beyond. Have these different projects allowed you to do things with your music that you couldn’t do without them? And how does singing in a different language play into the project?
I can’t speak for the other two, but for me, a special name which is used to perform music is essential if it’s going to be a band with a specific mood. The way I make music, it’s communicating this whole philosophy and politics which I am generally insisting on quite aggressively! I don’t know music theory so well, so for me music and the identity and concepts attached to it arrive fully formed in my mind. I just hear the music and see the images in a kind of vision or dream sequence, then I have to decode it and give it life.
In terms of singing in a different language, it inaugurates a different way of being. But speaking a language—really being ‘fluent,’ as in being able to think things privately in that language as well as communicating with others and sharing meaning and ideas—it has to be connected to your personal relationship with the concepts and histories and sensory memory of what that language is. Otherwise, I don’t think it amounts to much. That’s why even though I grew up in an area with majority Welsh first-language speakers all around me and learned the pronunciation and grammar from even the earliest school days, I didn’t really “speak Welsh” with other people because my family don’t speak it, and the few friends I had were alternative—speaking Welsh was not ‘cool’ if you were a young person in the ‘90s/early ‘00s who listened to Marilyn Manson and Cannibal Corpse. Of course, I still had my private, interior, spiritual relationship to North Wales, which was incredibly profound and deep, but I wasn’t really able to translate and communicate all those feelings using the Welsh language until I re-learned as an adult.
Using the language in Tristwch Y Fenywod, it’s kind of a synthesis of things from my inner world which are at the foundations of my childhood self-development and this newer framework of adult selfhood.
I’ve always felt my own Welsh identity is connected to the landscapes I grew up around. Does singing in Welsh allow you to explore themes of nature more readily?
It allows me to directly voice aspects of my formative experiences, growing up in places like Eryri and Ynys Môn that I had always sort of alluded to, but never really addressed as geographically specific to Wales. Nature themes—like being entranced by a forest or a landscape or invertebrate life—have always been in my music to some extent. So it isn’t this completely new vocabulary from a spiritual perspective.
But knowing the Welsh words for things definitely makes me feel even closer to these landscapes that I have always held an almost romantic love for. I feel the same way you do: My Welsh identity is deeply connected to places that I grew up. Things like eithin blodeuol and pebble-dash bungalow facades pull me into a reverie almost as much as the more obviously majestic mountains and coastal zones.
Singing in Welsh but being based in England, do you find that language is a barrier to audiences?
No, it’s pretty much the opposite, really. People seem really curious about it and think it’s cool even though they don’t know what I’m saying. I can only really speak for the “audiences” that we usually encounter as part of the underground DIY experimental music-adjacent community, who are generally very open-minded, international, and celebratory of the unfamiliar.
I think the philosophy and ideas of our music come across despite the language barrier. If anything I’ve had quite a few people come up to me and tell me that they want to start learning Welsh now after hearing us! Also, even when I sing in English, no one knows what I’m saying generally—haha!
Historically speaking, Welsh contemporary music audiences have been very open to different genres and sounds. Is it possible to make experimental music reach a wider audience by singing in Welsh?
Yes, in the sense that by singing in Welsh you are then exposed to the whole community of Welsh speakers who show interest in your music regardless of the genre, because it’s a minority language and culture.
We’ve met lots of people who we would not have met if we weren’t a Welsh language band, people who are quite different to the kinds of personalities you come across in a strictly experimental/underground music sphere. If we ever got to go on [Welsh-language public television station] S4C or play a gig that was connected to Cymdeithas yr Iaith [The Welsh Language Society] or [Welsh cultural festival] the Eisteddfod, we would be reaching a very ‘general’ audience of Welsh speakers that may never have heard the bands we’re inspired by. Time will tell if that actually comes to pass!
There was this amazing program on S4C called Fideo 9 that was broadcast between 1988 and 1992 which had tons of highly diverse and a lot of quite experimental music which was united purely by the language, so I think something like that is a great example.
Despite the name and the gloomy sounds, is it fair to say there’s a sense of optimism woven into the songs?
For sure, yes. The ‘chorus’ of the song ‘Byd Mewn Cysgod’ has the lyrics ‘We must try to remember/ Even though it’s hard not to cry/ Even though the world is in shadow/ Love still exists.’ I think it’s quite central to our beliefs: Not giving up hope for a better world, and not falling into toxic pessimism even though we are very aware that much of current global human affairs are disastrous and there is an environmental crisis.
The vinyl has been sold out on Bandcamp since long before the album’s release. Has this been a word-of-mouth success? What do you put this down to?
We are all really taken aback by the level of interest and praise we have received, I don’t think any of us were expecting it at all. I honestly don’t know what to put it down to. We do have very sweet friends who have promoted us on social media and yes, I think Night School has done a really good job with announcing us to the world.
I don’t know if it’s just the apparently niche fact of being a modern, Welsh-language avant-goth band of three queer women that piques people’s interest. In all honesty it’s probably the most accessible music I have ever been part of, since ‘gothic rock’ is a form of pop music, really. All the other music I am known for is, I think it would be fair to say, wildly inaccessible to the ‘average listener,’ and would certainly never be played on BBC radio—whereas TyF has had multiple plays on BBC radio, which is so strange to me.
There was a surreal moment shortly after we put the live recording of our first ever gig up on Bandcamp, where our friend Theo Gowans (Territorial Gobbing) posted about it on Twitter and the algorithm somehow directed his tweet to the feed of Gorwel Owen (who recorded and/or produced basically every good Welsh language record released after 1981) and Leila took a screenshot of the conversation between him and Rhys Mwyn from Anhrefn, basically saying ‘Who is this? I’ve never heard of them before, who are they?’ That was totally crazy. I was able to comprehend the lineage of alternative Welsh bands that we were kind of entering into—all these groups I was really inspired by, like Fflaps, Datblygu, Eirin Peryglus, Pop Negatif Wastad. Ten minutes after putting up a recording of our first gig [on Bandcamp], the guy who engineered literally every one of those records is on Twitter going, ‘These lot seem interesting!’ Mental.
How do you see your music as fitting in with that lineage of contemporary Welsh language music?
By my very nature as a transsexual woman singing in Welsh about things like depressive lesbian love in the industrialized liminal landscape of Gwynedd, I am creating a new context for the language to articulate things which, as far as I can tell, have not been articulated publicly before in this culture. I don’t mean that in any sort of boastful sense—I’ve felt incredibly intimidated by it, to be honest.
I think it’s really interesting how Datblygu—who are now rightly hailed as a legendary, pioneering band and heroes of Welsh-language music—were not well-liked in Wales for nearly the entirety of their career in the ‘80s and ‘90s because David R Edwards sang about taboo issues, attacked tradition/nationalism, and criticized Welsh culture. From speaking to people like Alan Holmes from Fflaps, it was the same for them and many of those other radical punk bands. They were not sentimental, and were not using the language simply to say, ‘Isn’t our culture/history/country wonderful?’ They were expressing their authentic feelings, which encapsulated positive and negative, psychedelia and realism, and was still politically and socially aware. This is the lineage of Welsh language music that we feel the most affinity towards.
