Gwenifer Raymond - Last Night I Heard The Dog Star Bark (LP Vinyl)

‘Last Night I Heard the Dogstar Bark’ is a line from Grant Morrison’s ‘The Invisibles’, spoken by Tom O’Bedlam; a half-mad hobo occultist who sees holy words reflected in the wet cement of the city. My last album was recorded and released mid-lockdown during a global pandemic; Since then the world seems to have been taking on an increasingly surrealistic tilt, and ol’ Tom makes more and more sense.

In some ways the album is split down the middle: I’ve been playing in that folk-horror style for a while, and that’s still there (dream-making birds from the Mabinogion and the worst night of a rabbit’s life, etc.), but also it’s moving on to dally with science-fiction and esoterica (meditations on the set-theory afterlife, and pioneering rocket scientist-cum-Thelemite Jack Parsons, etc.). Around the time a lot of those were written I was reading a lot of pulpy science and strange fiction - by coincidence several that dealt with various ideas surrounding the concept of infinity. And so the album enters from the cosmic void and exits through the galactic plane.

I’ve always felt a strong pull to the world of the weird, and I don’t think there’s a lot weirder than infinity: the product of a division by zero. Something that compels me about experimental and instrumental music has always been its ability to give form to the otherwise inarticulable. But I also believe talking about the meaning of it all sort of ruins the point. So I think about Tom O’Bedlam, who could either be a prophet or a madman. But if it sounds good who cares, we all get divided by zero eventually anyway.

1 Banjo Players of Aleph One
2 Jack Parsons Blues
3 Champion Ivy
4 Bliws Afon TÂF
5 Bonfire of the Billionaires
6 Dreams of Rhiannon's Birds
7 Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark
8 Cattywomp
9 Bleak Night in Rabbit's Wood
10 One Day You'll Lie Here But Everything Will