41 f
Here’s one she made earlier…
Band. “I love putting the unusual next to each other because I think it gives a chance for them all to just blow your mind,” Cerys begins before launching into her reasoning. “If you play the one note too many times your ear stops being able to hear it. That’s true, isn’t it? That’s a true biological fact right here! So it’s the same with music: if it all sounds the same… shove off! Your senses get deadened. What better way to showcase all this beautiful music than to have this variety? I love it.”
“World music at the moment,” she continues, arguably chal- lenging prevailing opinion at present, “is just sounding fresher. And the thing is it’s informing all of those indie acts at the moment so much.” She may not get credited enough in world music circles, but there’s no denying Cerys’s commitment, with recent guests including Lucy Duran and James Parkin, Grupo Lokito, Lucas Sant- tana and Aurelio. “I put names up for the sessions, but I don’t deal with the diaries so I don’t even remember who’s coming in from week to week, so it’s like, “Oh Aurelio Martinez is in, nice one, and then it will be Jackie Oates, and then it will be Connan Mockasin who’s like completely indie, it really does mix up.”
s well as being a vivacious inter viewee, Cerys, rather touchingly, seems genuinely interested in where I am coming from musically, quizzing me on my favourite performers and scribbling down recommendations. Does 6Music, I wonder as she notes the names of Emily Portman and Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, support her varied enthu- siasms? “I do have pressures to play more… familiar stuff, shall we say,” she admits. “It’s the ratings game. Thankfully there are stations [like 6Music] that do allow this eclecticism and hopefully that will continue.”
A
Inevitably, the music she plays on her show feeds into her own recordings, notably on her latest album, Explorer. “I’m listening more and more and more to new instruments – new to my ears! Explorer was just my little attempt to enjoy these new sounds”. The album reflects Cerys’s love of travelling and her international- ist perspective after the rootedness of Tir. It was going to be called D^
wr and be an album of songs about water and the sea. “But again, as with all albums, you think you’re in control, you’re not in control,” she chuckles.
A mix of her own and traditional songs, Explorer ranges from
the blues of How Can You Say So Little When You Talk So Much to the flamenco of La Tarara, via a gorgeous Wade In The Water with harpist Serafina Steer, a song about the expulsion of the Arcadians in the 1700s, a couple of Welsh folk songs and Robert Burns’ Ca Ya Yowes. A few remainders remain from the D^
wr concept – on the
Irish lullaby, the Connemara Cradle Song, Tigran Aleksanyan’s Armenian duduk represents the wind and waves. Also playing on Explorer, among others, are Attab Haddad on oud, Jasdeep Singh Degun on sitar and Frank Moon on an ancient banjo, meaning that no one song necessarily sounds as you expect it might.
Before we have a chance to talk any more about Explorer, our time runs out. In the rush I forget about the ‘Nadolig Llawen’ card I meant to ask her to sign for my Welsh partner’s family, forget to get a photo together and even (as I later discover) forget my wal- let. I do allow myself to relax into fanboy mode though, and regale her with my clumsy comparison between her and Hildegard von Bingen. She blushes and looks embarrassed, but then stops and irreverently concedes, “Yeah, and I’m a great bloody cook as well!” F
www.cerysmatthews.co.uk
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