In this latest music blog Martin Gray undertakes an excursion into the Welsh music scene and discovers some intriguing new artists that he came across through Radio Cymru, the national Welsh language station. 

I last watched TV more than 15 years ago in 2011 – nowadays my old 1990s-vintage Cathode Ray Tube TV is only used for old VHS videos / DVDs and playing old-skool video games as I also ditched the Digital receiver when I moved house. Post-2000s TV is mostly shit anyway so I tend to listen to the radio if I am not playing my records/ CDs/ tapes, etc. However, being the contrary bastard that I am, I don’t just listen to any old radio stations. For one thing, commercial radio stations are the fucking spawn of Satan. I absolutely detest them, mainly due to the fucking insufferable ads that come on at 10 minute intervals and the fact that every single bastard one of them features truly excruciating sped-up gibbering babbling verbal diarrhoea that is the T&Cs small print which all those ad creators feel the absolute need to end with (yes even fucking food ads for crying out loud).

Local radio stations are not much better either. A lot of those, including all them golden oldies ‘Century FM’ and ‘Greatest Hits Radio’ ones, air the same playlist of around 100 records in rotation every single fucking day to the point of nausea. It’s merely a case of the panacea becoming even more of an irritant so to speak. And most of BBC Radio (1, 2, 4, 5 live) is also garbage too, with the two sole exceptions being Radio 3 – late evening particularly – and 6 Music / BBC Introducing which at least offers us a lot of new interesting stuff for the most part: the closest BBC has come to an ‘indie’ or non-mainstream station since the era of John Peel ended.

As far back as the early 2000s I’d already shunned all these above-mentioned FM stations in favour of twiddling the Long Wave frequencies and landing on some more esoteric terrain, one of these chance discoveries (and soon a new favourite) in the case of the latter being a French language radio station called France Inter. It was all over the shop – with current affairs, sport/football, music magazines, talk shows and some truly entertaining off-the-wall banter (with some presenters undergoing hysterical fits of laughter for minutes at a time) that made every day tuning in nothing less than fascinating.

Despite my rudimentary grasp of French (I can make conversation using basic phrasing however), I soon became a follower of it and in particular a late night weekend music/culture/arts magazine called Osmose. As far as I know the station is mostly intact 20 years later and can still be found online now that the static-strewn scuzzy LW frequencies (oh how do I miss thee!) have long been switched off. Sadly, Osmose the arts magazine has long ceased broadcasting via France Inter, and now operates under its own stand-alone incarnation of Osmose (Web) Radio.

The reason why I mention listening to a French radio station – and Osmose – is that, through this, I also discovered a lot of new music from bands I hadn’t heard anywhere else before – much of it in the native language – as well as some new bands which also got aired regularly on these programmes. One example is a Parisian duo called Holden (Google search this and you’ll find at least another five or six bands with that same name!). Their music – breezy beatnik style French language indie pop with guitars and analogues – is rather similar to the likes of our own Stereolab and Saint Etienne, which was probably why I became enamoured with their records on first hearing them. As for other bands, listening to France Inter introduced me to the US band Midlake – Texan alt-folkers who of course are now very much established, so hearing singles like Balloon Maker and Young Bride (off their first and second albums respectively) certainly opened my ears to their catalogue.

So my current 10 year long daily listening habit – having eschewed pretty much everything else – focuses mainly on Radio Cymru, the Welsh language station (itself the sister station to its English-speaking counterpart BBC Radio Wales). This is the station I tend to have on default for much of the time, and through tuning in, I have discovered some truly wonderful new bands that I hadn’t previously encountered before. It matters not that – as with France Inter – I understand little of what the presenters are saying (though I am picking up more words and phrases now at a gradual rate, so at least I’m trying!), that isn’t the point. What has been so much of a revelation is some of the great music (all Welsh language of course) that I have been getting into by way of a refreshing change from all of the over-familiar tosh that all the other mainstream stations have been peddling ad nauseam.

Here are just four of the Welsh language artists I discovered thanks to tuning into Radio Cymru in this way. I think they are truly exemplary and fully worth investigating further.

 

CARWYN ELLIS

Carwyn Ellis may not be the most obvious example of what we call a ‘household name’ outside of the Welsh music scene. But one cursory glance at any online entry under his name will be truly eye opening. It really is remarkable just how many projects and bands he has been involved with. A true musical polymath : he is a songwriter, arranger, producer, multi-instrumentalist, radio presenter/broadcaster, and more – a staggeringly versatile and prolific creator who has recorded and guested with a veritable galaxy of names, across all conceivable genres.

There is little point me repeating what can already be found online with regard to the sheer mind-boggling number and diversity of projects and collaborations he has undertaken over the last 30 or so years. What does amaze me however, is that this guy is not better known and celebrated. I have to admit myself for not really being familiar with anything he had done until when I picked up the last solo album by Saint Etienne’s Sarah Cracknell (Red Kite) which was released 10 years ago. Carwyn Ellis is there as producer and co-writer/ arranger. He also later featured on the band’s 2017 Home Counties album as a co-writer / co-producer on two songs.

His first notable project though was as part of the wildly eclectic, multi-genre and multi-language project Colorama, with whom he was the lead vocalist, which he started in 2007 and still continues to this day under a plethora of different line ups, featuring an ever rotating cast of guest musicians and collaborators.

More recently Radio Cymru regularly played tracks from an album Joia! released in 2019 under his first ever official solo guise Carwyn Ellis & Rio 18 – another collaborative but more pop-orientated project with distinct Brazilian influences, recorded mainly in Rio de Janeiro, which yielded two fantastic singles (see one of them below) and was effectively my  introduction to his own music. I fell in love with the first hearings of these couple of songs from the album and felt it best to share one of them here.

To think how utterly unique this is – a Brazilian samba actually sung in Welsh and not Portuguese!  This encapsulates perfectly in one 3 minute song just how pan-global Carwyn Ellis’s eclectism is. Just exquisite!

 

Carwyn Ellis has of course issued more new music since these releases, notably two further bewitching albums with Rio 18: Mas (2020) and Yn Rio (2021) – both typically ambitious affairs, the former featuring musicians from not just Wales and Brazil but France, Venezuela, Argentina, USA and England, and the latter recorded with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. It seems that pretty much everything Ellis comes up with has more than a liberal sprinkling of exotic fairy dust about it.

See these YouTube links for more on both Colorama and Carwyn Ellis & Rio 18
Check also Carwyn Ellis social media page and Bandcamp pages for Rio 18 and Colorama

 

SEROL SEROL / OMALOMA

Again, thanks to Radio Cymru, I belatedly discovered the ravishing electronic dream pop of this project – another one created by famed Welsh producers Llŷr Pari and George Amor (who are also the mainstays and writers/producers of another lo-fi-guitar-turned-more-synth-based indiepop project Omaloma), chiefly the single K’TA (below) that was regularly given a lot of airplay. I then quickly sought out their one and only self-titled album which was initially released in 2018.

Serol Serol means ‘Stellar Stellar’ in English and when faced with music as truly celestial and enervating as this, the name is perfectly apt. The two musicians decided to devote a separate project to this dreamy, spaced-out electronic synth pop and wanted female vocals to provide a contrast from their first band thus invited two related cousins (Mali Siôn and Leusa Rhys) to sing on the new songs instead of themselves.

By this point Omaloma’s more guitar-and-drums oriented ‘space’ pop was already beginning to assume more ethereal dimensions but their Serol Serol incarnation – with far more reliance on synthetics and drum machines – made this transition more complete as heard on practically the whole of their magnificently transcendental debut album. This inspired fusion of soaring heavenly keyboards and the twin female voices is nothing short of intoxicating. I have had the album on repeat on countless occasions.

Listen to the track K’TA below and marvel at how the pitch at the precise halfway mark suddenly shifts without warning as if the record was abruptly slowed down from 45 rpm to 33.3 rpm, and then remains that way throughout the fade (it really startles on initial hearing!). Then immerse yourself in the sheer swooning otherworldly beauty of closing track Anadl and wish how the extended synth outro could go on forever. The track is already 7 minutes long but it could easily be 17 for all I care, and I would not complain!

The immaculately-produced songs on the album (along with some earlier stand-alone tracks) all bridge that gap between sci-fi and atmospheric dream pop and it is nigh on impossible to listen to any of the compositions without resorting to using well-worn phrases like ‘interstellar’, ‘celestial’, ‘seraphic’, ‘angelic’, ‘stratospheric’, ‘glistening’, etc…. It’s almost as if the very need for recourse to such descriptive superlatives is to be fully expected!  Serol Serol – the debut 2018 album – is something every discerning fan of entrancing, dazzling synthpop should do well to seek out.

 

More music from Omaloma can be found on Soundcloud and YouTube  
Serol Serol’s album can be found on YouTube

Check out the Bandcamp page for Omaloma  and Soundcloud for Serol Serol

 

MR.

Mr. is the guise of none other than Mark Roberts – better known as one of the founders and main songwriters (along with Cerys Matthews) with 90’s Welsh indie (Brit) poppers Catatonia and Y Cyrff before it. A perversely and deliberately difficult name to Google (try it and see how far you get!), Roberts dallied with various other projects after the demise of his most successful band, notably in record production, as well as forming collaborations with ex-Catatonia bass playing colleague Paul Jones and Dafydd Ieuan of Super Furry Animals among others, before launching his own self-named project in 2018 with the first of five solo outings to date, of which the debut album Oesoedd (Ages)- and its lead single Y Pwysau (The Pressure) gained much radio exposure on Radio Cymru (listen below).

 

Mark’s brand of Welsh language indie pop sometimes falls into the same kind of stylistic bracket as the likes of SFA in their more straightforward phase (e.g their own Welsh-language album Mwng), and comes across effectively like a fusion of left-field folk and indie pop. Tracks like Bachgen (Boy) have an attractive and almost verdant quality from the insistent chiming guitar arrangement whilst Y Pwysau is a wonderfully rousing slow-build of a track pinned by a nagging pitch-bent guitar motif and is reminiscent of the kind of thing  Gruff Rhys from SFA would attempt (in fact it would probably not sound out of place on the latter’s 2005 album Love Kraft). This evergreen song is still played regularly on Radio Cymru, such is its grandeur and uplifting, anthemic quality.

Since this intriguing debut, Roberts has issued a further four albums of enjoyably idiosyncratic indie pop: Amen (2019), Feiral (2020), Llwyth (2021) and Misses (2023) which have all been released on the small Cardiff-based independent label Strangetown Records co-founded and run by Mick Hilton along with SFA’s Dafydd Ieuan and Cian Ciaran, which also has among its considerable roster of acts most of the various solo SFA members’ ventures as well as those from their more recent splinter project Das Koolies.

These later albums show Roberts moving away from the more guitar-oriented approach of his debut and pursuing more playfully eclectic and unpredictable directions with much of the material – with all kinds of eccentric touches thrown in for good measure. In this way his output is as beguiling and hard to pigeonhole as that of his label owners’ main bands SFA and Das Koolies.  Wilful experimentation and eschewing predictability would seem to be pretty much wired into his songwriting DNA and that of course is always a good thing.

Mr./Mark Roberts’ music can also be found on his Bandcamp  and YouTube pages.
Some tracks can also be streamed on Soundcloud

 

ADWAITH

Adwaith (Reaction in English) is a female indie / post punk outfit formed in 2015 who have the distinction of winning the national Welsh Music Prize on two separate occasions with their first two albums released in 2018 and 2022. The trio of Hollie Singer, Gwenllian Anthony and Heledd Owen featured in the 2017 bill for the annual No 6. music festival held in Portmeirion’s hotel grounds and their guitar-based indie rock sound soon found a lot of new followers and garnered them much admiration and respect from critics and cultural / arts organisations alike who lauded them for not just their contributions to Welsh language music but also for their increasingly trailblazing and game-changing approach.

For instance, this year actually saw the trio make history as the first ever all-female Welsh language band to release a double album, entitled Solas. A truly remarkable feat especially when considering that their previous two albums (2018’s Melyn and 2022’s Bato Mato – from which the key single Eto, listen below, is taken) were ostensibly the trio still, by their own admission, ‘trying to find their feet musically and establish themselves’.

 

Adwaith’s initial forays into brash fuzzy post-punk notwithstanding (the guitar intro to Wedi Blino off Bata Mato for instance, brings to mind a very scuzzed-up and lo-fi Luxembourg Signal), they later branched out into more adventurous terrain, hence their resolute determination to show off the whole scope of their expanding palette with that audacious 23-track double album released earlier this year.  It’s always encouraging to see how the profile of bands like Adwaith continue to get ever bigger, thanks in no small part to increasing exposure on the radio and through festival appearances, (as well as a prestigious support slot opening for Manic Street Preachers at Swansea Arena in May 2025).

As their music continues to evolve from the straightforward indie / post punk of their early beginnings to more varied terrain embracing psychedelia, shoegaze, pastoral folk, quirky chamber pop, and even dance-influenced sounds, one gets the distinct impression that Adwaith are forever restless and not afraid to experiment, refusing to be constrained by whatever stylistic boundaries may be imposed upon them.

Adwaith’s music can be purchased on Bandcamp and can be found on YouTube

 

 

All words by Martin Gray
More blogs and articles can be found in his profile