Cerys Hafana: Sad Welsh Harp Pop

From Welsh legends to Breton folk and the desire to get a bit weird with it

I am a regular reader of Jake Newby’s newsletter on new Chinese music, Concrete Avalanche, where he publishes brilliant posts like

• this roundup of Chinese ambient (including a five-hour playlist), or

• this story about the Daikou phenomenon, a black market that emerged in 1990s China around scrapped Western CDs and tapes.

When Jake approached me with the proposal of a guest post on Welsh musician, singer and composer Cerys Hafana, I didn’t have to think long. I love Jake’s work, and Hafana’s hauntingly gorgeous mix of Welsh and Breton folk influences is a perfect fit for my weird little newsletter. Their new album Angel is out today.

Cerys Hafana, photo: Abby Poulson

Cerys Hafana: Sad Welsh Harp Pop

by Jake Newby

The first time I saw Cerys Hafana live, I had no idea who they were. By the end of their set, as a warm-up act on a multi-artist bill, I was a fan. And not the only one – once the Welsh triple harpist had plucked the last note of their last song, there was a rush to the merch table, as similarly beguiled audience members jostled to get their hands on one of Hafana’s records.

The merch table was similarly busy this past weekend at Hidden Notes festival in the Cotswolds market town of Stroud in southwestern England. Baseball caps scrawled with the words “sad Welsh harp pop”, a tongue-in-cheek reference to Hafana’s music, were particularly popular.

Appearing on the bill alongside the likes of James Holden and Waclaw Zimpel, Arushi Jain and Keeley Forsyth, Hafana played a captivating set mixing original compositions and reinterpretations of traditional-yet-off-kilter folk songs on the Welsh triple harp and guitar. They also teased their new album Angel, which is released today and has been declared “raw, urgent and affecting” by The Wire. The Guardian was equally exuberant in its praise, calling Hafana a “piercingly beautiful singer and exceptional, adventurous musician.”

Recorded in just four days with musicians Hafana had never worked with previously, Angel takes as its starting point, ‘An old man who goes for a walk in the forest and hears an angel singing so beautifully it makes him fall asleep for three hundred and fifty years’. From there, Cerys Hafana explores “innovative harp playing, the incorporation of influences from Welsh legends to Breton folk styles, the keen interest in the evocative power of dynamics and acoustics, [and] the desire ‘to get a bit weird with it’”, as the label info put it.

Ahead of the release, Hafana was kind enough to answer some questions.

live in Hamburg, 19.04.2025, photo: Sebastian Madej

You’ve mentioned before that you don’t come from a folk music family. How did your interest in folk music first emerge?

If you grow up in Wales, especially in Welsh-speaking parts, you’re encouraged to participate in Eisteddfods from a very young age. They’re like big cultural festivals where you compete in music, dance, poetry and art. One of the competitions is folk dancing, and I think I was the only child in Wales who enjoyed doing it.

For whatever reason I felt really drawn to the tunes that accompanied the dancing – played on some out of tune piano in our primary school hall –, and was very excited to start harp lessons with a teacher who happened to only teach Welsh folk music rather than classical. It was also by total chance that she was one of the only people in Wales who played and taught the triple harp, and lived just down the road from us.

You’ve reinterpreted a wide range of traditional folk songs. Is there a particular quality that you’re looking for in them to spark your own versions?

Most of the songs on my two most recent harp albums, including the upcoming one, come from the Welsh National Library’s online archive of ballads and folk tunes. It’s an amazing resource and I have a lot of fun digging for things that have been mostly forgotten for the last couple of centuries.

I also enjoy looking for songs that have slightly different subject matters to the more common Welsh folk songs that you find in the standard songbooks. For this new album I was specifically looking for songs about supernatural experiences, which feel very absent from the canon.

Before Angel you released an album of piano compositions. Can you explain a bit more about why you view the piano as your ‘main instrument’?

It was the first instrument I started learning, and I had classical piano lessons until I was about 22, whereas my harp training was more folk-based and haphazard. I started writing my own music for the harp when I was about 14 and stopped having regular lessons, so I think my technical development hit a bit of a wall and I’m only good at playing things that I compose, whereas on the piano I was being pushed much further for a longer time.

However I’ve always felt more comfortable performing on the harp. I do think that classical training, maybe especially on the piano, has a knack for making tension and stress quite a big part of the experience, and I feel like this can get in the way of being able to perform publicly in an expressive and relaxed way, whereas the harp for me has none of that baggage.

Angel was recorded in just four days and with musicians you hadn’t worked with before. What led to the album being made in that way?

It took a while to find the right musicians, because I had quite specific ideas about what I wanted in terms of instrumentation and style, and in the end found three musicians who live in three different countries, which put a natural limit on how much rehearsing we could do beforehand.

I was worried that four days wouldn’t be enough, but in the end it was almost too much. I’ve discovered after doing several completely live albums that you don’t really get anything worth keeping after the third take – you can really clearly hear everyone start to get tired and stressed and all the musicality starts to vanish. In some ways that was stressful because everyone was learning their parts at the same time as trying to get a good recording within three takes, but it also meant we couldn’t overthink it.

What else changed for you on this new record?

I really wanted to experiment with pushing the dynamic range further than I have before, which was made possible by the instruments available. I think there are also moments where I lean further into minimalist, experimental styles of composing and performing.

And it’s maybe more narrative-based than any of my other albums – it’s all based around one folk song about a man who hears an angel singing in the forest, and I wanted the music to feel as though it was following this old man on his journey through the trees.

photo: Abby Poulson

The album is influenced in places by Breton folk. What interests you about that type of music?

I’ve been going to play at various festivals in Brittany for about five years now, and I think their style of traditional music has a way of getting under your skin. I feel like a bit of a cheat saying that it’s had a big influence on my music, because my exposure to it has been very brief and surface level, but I think I just feel drawn to the repetitive but driving style of playing, because most of the music and singing is meant to accompany dancing. There’s a lot of young musicians doing quite complex and interesting things, whilst also always maintaining that underlying rhythmic feel that can support hundreds of people dancing around in circles for hours.

Brittany seems to have seen a resurgence of interest in traditional folk culture in recent years, something that’s being echoed in other places across Europe. What do you think is the appeal of this type of music or culture more generally to contemporary audiences?

I think other people have better theories about this than I do, I’m just going along with it really. I wonder if peoples’ openness to, and interest in, music from different places and in different languages has opened up as our styles of listening change thanks to the internet. And maybe people are looking for alternative narratives, histories, and senses of identity in the face of the unending horror of the world.

You’ve spoken and written previously of your desire for folk music to be more open to change and new influences, of collaborating with but also challenging history, a view that has received pushback from some traditionalists. Do you feel that attitudes are changing, especially as your music reaches broader audiences?

I struggle slightly with the idea that change has to be pitted against tradition, because I think folk traditions have always been in a constant state of change. To me that feels like the point of folk music. I’m grateful to the people who do the work of archiving and protecting historical instruments and styles of playing but I don’t think that the way something was done in 1750 is more valid or important than how something might be done now.