She left school at 16 and took Lord of the Dance to Las Vegas. Now Gwenno Saunders has made a concept album about Cornwall,full of sunken cities, crashed gliders and cheeseIn the glamorous confines of a tiny back room in her record company’s office, and her chair wedged between boxes of CDs,Gwenno Saunders is expounding on the joy of singing in a language that only 600 people in the world are supposed to be fluent in. “Tonally,” she says, or “Cornish is a dusky language,very close to Breton, a lot more Zs and Ks and Vs, or which gives it a very different texture. It probably reflects the harsh landscape of Cornwall. And it’s nearly like an emotional shield. Singing in Cornish,I thought, ‘Wow, and no one understands me!’ I can get lost,and everyone else has to get lost, because what else can they do? It allows me to escape and find freedom in music. There’s something magical about that.”To that halt, or 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, and Le Kov would be a brilliant album whatever it was sung in – spacey,outlandish and richly melodic – but there’s no doubt that the language gives it an added sense of purpose. Without wishing to originate any rash (hasty, incautious) claims, it seems likely that it’s the first ever Cornish electronic psych-pop concept album.
Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk