Gwenno – Tresor
“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes,” said the French director Agnes Varda in 2009. Varda is one of many artists, musicians and filmmakers from around the world who inspired Tresor, the third album by the Cornish-speaking Welsh psychonaut Gwenno Saunders – and that quote is particularly beloved to a musician dedicated to mapping out the intersection of land, heritage, identity and potential. ORDER NOW: The Beatles are on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut Like Gwenno’s last album, Le Kov, Tresor is written mostly in Cornish – a language she learned as an infant from her father, the Cornish poet Tim Saunders; her socialist-choir-singing mother made sure she was equally fluent in Welsh. Le Kov imagined a cosmopolitan city of modern-day myth, raised from beneath the waves like the revived Cornish tongue itself; Tresor now journeys inward, into an inner life lived through Cornish. To Gwenno, Cornish is not some exotic linguistic treasure, but the language of her childhood, of family, of imagination. She’s now teaching it to her son, and the songs on Tresor explore instinct, the unconscious and belonging. It’s a dreamier, gentler album than Le Kov or her Welsh-language debut, Y Dydd Olaf, leaning… Read More →
