One week in January 2020, Gwenno Saunders dumped her bags in an artist’s cottage in St. Ives and found herself having a crisis. She was there to write her third solo album, and had grown up speaking Welsh and Cornish fluently in her hometown of Cardiff. Although she’d bumped into friends quickly, passing time in the pub with them, she began to question her exact position in this town.
“I’ve always gone to Cornwall with a function,” she explains. ‘It’s been by invitation to play shows, or for various reasons… but I was having an existential crisis as well, because it was like, what am I doing here?”
Welcome to the world of ‘Tresor’, Gwenno’s third solo album. Tresor is Cornish for ‘treasure’, and the pearl of this album is its exploration of beauty and home. It’s a universe soundtracked with lilting, fingerpicked guitars, idyllic ambient drones and gentle, meandering vocals. Made with her husband, Rhys Edwards, ‘Tresor’, tries to find meaning and beauty in a language at once familiar and foreign to Saunders.
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Saunders’ second album, ‘Le Kov’, gained traction for being written primarily in Cornish. It prompted conversations about the status of the language at present; figures are a little sketchy, but they tend to fall in the ballpark of 2,000 to 5,000 speakers.
In ‘Tresor’, Saunders drew more from the visual world of Cornish mythology on her videos. You’ll see the mischievous Obby Oss imprinted on her conical red hat, bright woad-blue pigment under her eyes. On the album cover, she embraces the eerily circular Men-an-toll, the three standing stones near Madron. The distinctive stone inspired Saunders to lean into an ecofeminist imagining of the world – even its form was inherently feminine to her.
“It’s really refreshing to find old monuments that actually are celebrating the female form rather than the male. I wanted to do something that was distinctively female, and I mean that spiritually. It’s the female spirits of the earth, which doesn’t always have a clear form.”
Where ‘Le Kov’ evoked a “very green, wooded environment” harkening back to ancient times, ‘Tresor’ focuses on the enticing pull of the sea, which she attributes to her interest in the earth goddess movement. “It’s just the flow of it and the unpredictability and the energy of it, it’s all in the sea. Especially with the earth goddess and things like that, it just feeds into that understanding that she is the all-powerful and there’s nothing you can do about it. And you really need to be working with – you can’t dominate the sea! So it’s a perfect example of what we can’t control.”
Of course, the awesome power of nature also brings up memories of COVID, which Saunders tries to retrospectively find the beauty in. “It was maybe twenty-four hours where it was like, stop – which I was like, amazing. Then it was like, ‘value healthcare workers and the people that are willing to look after you’. Amazing. It was just like this flash of how we could be. And then there was this huge rush back into like… hell. I was like, what? We all felt it!”
“I think about that feeling a lot, because it’s hard. It’s hard to keep the faith with everything going on. I just keep hold of that and think, oh, there can be positivity. It’s like, socialism, come on – it’s a good idea!”
I bring up Mick Lynch as another example of the silver lining in increasingly stormy discussions about socialism. “He’s part of a working class, an articulate, intelligent, educated working class that never gets any airtime – ever, ever, ever,” Saunders agrees. “You get a dose of serotonin just listening to the news, trying to find all the videos because it’s like, finally, this person exists. There is a population of this person. It was just so refreshing.”
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Another world Saunders wanted to explore was using Cornish purely as a vessel for expression. She thought she would finish ‘Le Kov’ and hit a dead end – but in reality, the opposite came true.
“What’s amazing about Cornish, because it’s a language that has had quite a precarious history in terms of its survival, is that it draws an alternative because it’s about rebuilding the world,” she enthuses. “That what I find very exciting about it, is that it’s all there, but it’s also at a point in its history where it could go in any direction. I just think there’s something quite interesting going on with the Cornish language in terms of people being able to express themselves again in a safe and very alternative space.”
Where exactly does Saunders fit into that space? Her father, Tim Saunders, is of Cornish descent, and a poet who writes in the language as well. He spoke Cornish to her growing up, so Saunders has a linguistic and genetic claim to the space. But she’d never lived in Cornwall, only visiting for brief periods. How would she graduate Cornish from being a language restricted to the home into something more artistic?
The answer lay in something rather simple – by rooting it in the domestic, magnifying the miniscule emotions she felt. “I love trying to communicate words that perhaps most people won’t understand in a room and experimenting and seeing, can I communicate an emotion? I know it’s possible, because it is, isn’t it? We understand music is beyond words.”
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Abstractness and minimalism are two concepts that are important to the production of ‘Tresor’; the language itself Saunders describes as “bold”, which “encourages minimalism.” This space enabled her to roam free in a language that reminded her of her childhood days, where her imagination was unshackled.
“You know, I’m still quite abstract in how I express myself – hence my using Cornish, because it’s fantastically abstract to a lot of people and it isn’t to me at all,” Saunders reasons. “It allows me to just be completely honest and not self-conscious. There’s room for the subtleties as well as the bold – they’re both as valid as each other, but I definitely fall into the sort of more intimate, more abstract camp.”
Surely intimacy and abstraction are a juxtaposition?
“Well, it’s about freedom, isn’t it? And I think that intimacy comes from a feeling of freedom, because you can’t you need to be free to feel comfortable, to be intimate. I use abstraction in a way to access intimacy and feel comfortable in expressing it as well.”
Minimalism, for Gwenno, is also a product of experience: “You become a bit more confident and not having to fill all the space, because when you’re younger, you just need this wall of sound and then you’re comfortable and then you realize you can’t hear yourself, if there’s a wall of sound… You can suggest things, and it’s more enjoyable because there’s more room and more space.”
Going forward, Gwenno wants to explore her artistry more, and for now, that seems to be in Cornish. Though she doesn’t rule out the idea of an English-language album, for her, Celtic music and mythology are embedded in her brain.
“I think I would just like to explore it more, that’s what’s been exciting. Going into the third album, you’re starting to set your stall up. I’m working out musical methodology, songwriting methodology, thematic message. Visual methodology. Everything is about process. And I’m much less so about outcomes.”
With an album like this, it’s easy to look to its more intellectual roots to explain its beauty – the ardent dedication to minority language activism, the exploration of a collective unconscious. What Gwenno wants to take from ‘Tresor’ is shockingly simple, and perhaps the biggest argument to its beauty.
“I would just love them to sit with it and have a really, really lovely 40 minutes,” she beams. “We just wanted to make something beautiful. That was the main aim – as something as beautiful as possible.”
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‘Tresor’ is out now on Heavenly Recordings.
Words: Alex Rigotti
