#Cerys Matthews

[thegrandbazaar]

who is the princess of wales?

[all-rock-and-roll-is-homosexual]

Vintage Cerys Matthews/Catatonia postcard from Pyramid intl

scanned by me

[azlyricsdotcom]

I Am The Mob // Catatonia // International Velvet (1997)

i put horses' heads in people's beds

[daisies66]

Cerys Matthews. Melody Maker, 20 February 1999. Scanned by me.

📸: unknown

[pennyplainknits]

Whenever this comes up I'm compelled to share the share the video for the Tom Jones and Cerys Matthews cover, which is so campy and fun and makes the intended subtext very clear. Also you get to hear two titans of Welsh popular music sing together

your yearly reminder that Baby It’s Cold Outside is a song about a woman having CONSENSUAL sex, at a time when premarital sex was frowned upon. The female singer is offering up the token demurrals society expects her to, because it’s expected, not bc she doesn’t fully intend to stay and have awesome sex with a dude she’s into. The male singer knows this, and is in turn offering her an excuse to give to the neighbors in the morning (“it was too cold for me to go home, the only responsible thing to do was spend the night at his place. because of the weather, get your minds out of the gutter”). A 1950s audience would have understood all this, but the nuance gets lost in a modern age where women are actually allowed to say yes when they mean it.  

Also the “hey what’s in this drink” thing was a common joke at the time, where the punchline was that there was in fact nothing in the drink. the woman’s making a joke that she wouldn’t do this if she was sober, oh goodness no! it’s only a joke bc both she and the man are in on the punchline: she is sober, and is only staying bc she wants to

[literarylondonhq]

Uh oh…!

On a working holiday in beautiful West Wales. We discovered the Bookworm Bookshop in Aberaeron. And made the mistake of going inside…! 📚😀 Now recovering in the Pub!

[juliemellorpoet]

Currently reading ...

Currently reading …

Couldn’t have put it better myself. It’s a beautiful little book – bigger than the sum of its parts. Available from The Poetry Business, £8.99.

[vimbry-moved]

the narrator of "cyclops rock" is so amusing to me bc why are they so obsessed with comparing themselves to chucky. they have no other metaphors, it's just chucky.

[looking-with-solidarity]

Listen/purchase: When I Survive by When I Survive

‘When I Survive’ is a musical compilation and project necessitated by over 400 days of genocide in Gaza. As winter arrives for a second time and as famine sets in, our Palestinian brothers and sisters need our support more than ever. The funds raised from this music compilation will go to two friends from Gaza City, Yahya Al Hamarna who is now displaced in Khan Younis, and Yousef Abdellatif who is now displaced in Nuseirat. 2 million people are being subjected to unimaginable cruelty at this very moment, with many of them fundraising in the hopes of rebuilding their lives or escaping the warzone. Every single one of us has an obligation we must uphold: to engage with their campaigns to the best of our capacity, to share their stories, to voice our solidarity directly, and to donate where we can. We cannot simply watch as onlookers. There are rumours that the Rafah Crossing, which has been closed since the spring, may reopen in the coming days. Now is the time to make your voices heard, demand the crossing is reopened and donate to individual and family fundraisers for Palestinians, ensure they have the means to survive this. December 1, 2024 Thank you to all the musicians who have contributed to this compilation and thank you to SPAF Collective for creating the beautiful artwork. Your solidarity speaks volumes. Free Palestine. https://whenisurvive.bandcamp.com/album/when-i-survive

[dustedmagazine]

Various Artists — Creiriau Y Delyn Rawn / Relics of the Horsehair Harp (Amgen)

Imagining new music is nothing new. Individually or collectively, spontaneously or through painstaking craft, research, and development, legions of music-makers have tried to come up with something sufficiently novel out of sounds and (sometimes) words that it hooks listeners’ attention. You can be sure that someone’s at it right now. But you probably won’t lose the farm if you bet it on the notion that the sequential imagining that went into the conception and execution of Creiriau Y Delyn Rawn is an unprecedented process that has yielded a remarkable outcome.

The Welsh language title translates into English as Relics Of The Horsehair Harp. It was produced by harpist Rhodri Davies as a companion to Telyn Rawn, a solo album that he released on his Amgen label. Telyn Rawn is named after the instrument that it introduced, a horsehair harp that Davies commissioned to be made by a couple harp makers and a leatherworker. Harps have a particular cultural resonance in Wales, since despite the instrument’s popularity, the art of making them nearly died out before making a comeback as part of a larger resurgence of Welsh culture. The original telyn rawn was made from wood and equine byproducts. After the sturdier Italian triple harp made it to the British Isles in the 1600s, it replaced the telyn rawn so thoroughly that for a couple centuries the triple harp was actually known as the Welsh harp (it was replaced by the pedal harp in the 20th century) while its predecessor was practically forgotten. When Davies, whose wide-ranging music encompasses free improvisation, modern composition, Konono-inspired junkyard noise, and rock and roll, got curious about those early harps, no one knew how to make one. The instrument on Telyn Rawn was designed using descriptions in early Welsh poetry and a couple pages addressing harp-tuning practices in a 17th century manuscript by Robert ap Huw.

When Davies finally set about playing the thing, he did not revive antique repertoire; he improvised short pieces equally informed both by his research and his own practice of playing freely, alone and with musicians like John Butcher, Andrew Leslie Hooker and the trio IST. Intricately plucked or vigorously bowed, some of the album’s eighteen tracks hinted at folkloric models, while others undid dense knots of sound that burst with harmonics and radiated overtones. Telyn Rawn came out during that first COVID summer, which was bad for many things, but was not so bad for spending some of that time that one wasn’t gigging cooking up new ideas. After its release, Davies reached out to friends and associates with this request: “I asked each contributor to imagine that the musical material improvised in 2020 was an ancient musical form that had fully existed in the medieval period, and that each of their responses were to have happened centuries after the imagined formation of the Telyn Rawn pieces.”

Such a brief can be taken in many directions, depending on the respondent’s experiences, equipment, and willingness to dig a new network out of someone else’s wormhole. Sixteen participants gave a response to one or two specific tracks from Telyn Rawn. Laura Cannell’s  opening piece, “The Tattered Skies Above,”  wastes little effort on interpreting Davies’ “Penriwh.” Instead, she constructs a fanfare from overdubbed recorders whose jolting sonorities and processional air establishes a through line linking a span of fantasized centuries. Next up, Orphy Robinson makes like a free-bopping jazz man. On “Nude, Lewd, Rude, Mood Food” he transfers bits of Davies’ intricate “Gorchan Sali” to a salaciously bulbous-sounding marimba, accelerates the tempo and lets it rip. Jem Finer plays “Y Geseg Fedi” pretty faithfully, simply transposing bowed harp to hurdy-gurdy; guitarist C. Joynes is similarly respectful to “”Dygan tro’r Ebill.” Credited as playing computer and mouse, “C. Spencer Yeh” visits a cut-and-splice surgical strike upon Davies’ recording of “Afon “Dewi Fawr;” Pat Thomas might do something similar on the turbulent electronic eruption, “Maddad.”

Not only does Davies have a strong musical personality that transcends the particular harp he plays and the century his head’s in; he has picked his emissaries wisely. Despite the disparity of instrumentation and approach exhibited by the sixteen contributing musicians, Creiriau Y Delyn Rawn feels pretty cohesive as it carves out an imaginary timeline of musical evolution.

Bill Meyer

[all-rock-and-roll-is-homosexual]

Way Beyond Blue by Catatonia ad scanned from the November 1996 issue of Select Magazine

if you like my scans and want to repost them off of tumblr or crop/otherwise make edits to any of the photos contained within this article please credit my blog and the original photographer (where applicable), and if you're feeling extra generous and want to help me out you can donate via my ko-fi donating will allow me to obtain more magazines to scan and upgrade my equipment.

[shawolsos]

Matthew and Hanbin together are so funny cuz it's like getting a little window into a weird parallel universe were "innocent schoolboy nextdoor that you wanna take home to your parents" era one direction and "beloved of drag queens serving cvnt bratz doll" era little mix somehow manage to coexist

[fiskgrace]

A tale of five photos

[skydaemon]

that poll reminded me of one of the songs of all time

[joezcafe]

New Mini-Cover: Oer by Gwilym