As we approach 2025 we’re soon to reach being one quarter of time that has passed in the 21st century. Seems like a short time ago we were worried about “Y2K” blowing out all of the computers going into the year 2000, yet at the same time so much has happened in that time. Even looking into something as specific as the sub-genres of “goth” or “dark synth”, it’s definitely expanded out to all corners of the world — especially in the last 10-15 years. What started in countries like the UK, USA, France, Germany, Italy and other select countries in the early 1980s has brought forth a lot of great bands working in those general genres from all continents of the world, making it all truly multi-national.
And with this spread of inspiration for creating “darker” music, we now have far more variety in the languages that are used for the lyrics for newer bands, as well as a far greater open-mindedness for fans of these genres for music where the lyrics are in a foreign language for your average listener. It used to be — especially in anglophone countries — that musicians singing in languages other than English were sort of pushed to the wayside, but this is far less the case these days. One can only look at the success of bands like Molchat Doma (Belarus) and She Past Away (Turkey) — just to name a couple — that regularly tour staunch anglophone countries like the UK and the USA to large crowds and committed fans, singing in their own native languages.
This affect is also probably broadened by a general awareness of music from other countries, understanding of other cultures, and the musical underground across the world due to what we can all now access through the internet — peeling back the surface to see what interesting art and music is happening all corners of the globe.
I personally love it when musicians sing in their own native language. I may not understand what it is they’re saying but I definitely love hearing the different sounds of language and getting a feeling of how a vocalist might be putting a lot of themselves into a performance sung in their own native language that they feel most comfortable in.
The UK itself is a land of many languages, a lot of them brought over here by people that have immigrated to the country over the past 100-200 years, making for a more colourful and interesting cultural fabric. But to a lot of folks outside of the UK, there are also the Celtic languages native to parts of these islands that have been spoken for hundreds of years that many don’t know about, with many of them existing in some form or another far longer than modern English.
I can’t remember how it came about, but it was a number of years ago I went down some internet wormhole on the Welsh language and then in turn musicians that sung in that language. Welsh is a far older language than English, and one of the oldest intact languages spoken in Europe and is pretty much unrelated to English. Many of the letters in its alphabet are pronounced differently to most other European languages and those without any grasp of the language would have a very difficult time trying to pronounce any Welsh words or place names properly. It’s also a language that has successfully had a revival in the UK, with it being taught in schools alongside English and with increasing amount of younger generations being at least familiar, if not fluent, in speaking the language.
Maybe I had an attraction to the language, as when I was a young kid I had read a number of fantasy books pulling from Welsh language and mythology, by authors such as Lloyd Alexander and Susan Cooper. Lord Of The Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien even modelled some of his “imaginary” languages in the fictional Middle Earth to some degree from Welsh.
So naturally, when I went down this aforementioned wormhole, I was thinking: “I wonder if there’s any “lost” post-punk, synth or minimal wave type music that’s sung in Welsh?”
Eirin Peryglus (which translates to “Dangerous Plum” in English) — from Anglesey in Wales — were such a group active from the mid-1980s to sometime in the 1990s. Their first release was a 7″ single called Bronson that was released in 1987, with its title track “Bronson” being an amazing slice of Welsh language, synth and drum machine driven post-punk that I latched onto after discovering it, and is a track that I like to include on mixes or on occasions when I DJ radio or a club night. It’s propulsive with some nice fuzzed out guitar leads in all the right places, with a vocal performance by singer Fiona Owen that soars.
The B-Side — a track called “Y Dyn Newedd” (“A New Day”) — is a slower, more lush track that there’s a video performance of included below, likely on Welsh television from around the same time period.
The band continued to release various singles and EPs for the rest of the decade on an underground Welsh label called Ofn (possibly run by the band?) and then finally releasing an LP called Noeth in 1992. By this time the music of the band had progressed out the moodier post-punk of their earlier releases and more taking on sounds and production styles of more 90s electronic dance music.
Concurrent with the timeline of Eirin Peryglus was another related project called Plant Bach Ofnus (“Frightened Little Children”) which was the pairing of Fiona Owen and her husband Gorwen Owel and was far more experimental, pulling sounds from samples, tape loops and more avant garde sources, perhaps in a sonic realm familiar to those into groups like early Current 93, Swans 0r Throbbing Gristle. A good cross section of their recordings from this period are collected on a release called Dwrm, available on the Bandcamp store of Gorwel Owen.
And it would seem that the releases of Eirin Peryglus have been brought back into availability, with the band posthumously putting up their archive of releases on their own Bandcamp account, and it looks like they’ve even re-pressed some of their seminal releases on vinyl through this store for those that might be interested. Here the single “Bronson” has been compiled on a compilation release called Ffrwyth Cynnar (1987-1990), with the original 2-track Bronson 7″ being available to purchase.
Wrapping all of this up with a little footnote, I’ve included a clip from the mid-1980s of the Welsh group Freur performing their most famous track – a great one at that — called “Doot Doot” on a Welsh-language music TV show that I can’t seem to find any information on. The costuming of the band is pretty strong, perhaps taking cues from the visual presentation of a group like New Zealand’s Split Endz, or even mid-70s Genesis when Peter Gabriel was still in the band. Although Freur were and still are relatively obscure, two of the band’s key members — Rick Smith and Carl Hyde — found far, far more success in the project they started afterward, that being the legendary electronic group Underworld, probably most well known for their 90s classic “Born Slippy”.