Britain’s Gwenifer Raymond puts her own spin on American primitive with Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain.

BY TOM BEAUJOUR PHOTOGRAPH BY TOM RANFT

ALTHOUGH THE CLASSIFICATION seems odd for an artist who was born and raised in Wales, has a PhD in astrophysics and holds down a day job as a video-game coder, Gwenifer Raymond begrudgingly embraces the “American primitive” label with which her hypnotic and often unsettling brand of acoustic fingerstyle guitar has been stamped. “A label is the easiest way to describe a thing, and I think ‘American primitive’ is probably the easiest way to describe what I do,” she says from her home in Brighton, U.K. The term, which acoustic guitarist John Fahey coined in the late ’50s to describe his own music, was always intended to somehow convey an ineffable and ever-evolving amalgam of influences. “Fahey himself invented the term because he couldn’t think of what it was he did, right?” Raymond asks. “So in and of itself, the moniker is kind of representative of the idea that I don’t really know what it is I do, I just play instrumental guitar that has some influences from American folk music — and then a bunch of other shit thrown in there.”