This is Video of the Week from Wales Arts Review. We’ll be showcasing some of the best art in Wales with a new video shared every week. From music to drama and everything in between, videos will not be limited by medium. Today’s video is ‘Tresor’ from Gwenno.
Happy Friday! And welcome back to video of the week! This week we’ll be taking a look at the music video for ‘Tresor’ by Cardiff musician Gwenno Saunders. ‘Tresor’ -meaning ‘Treasure’ – is the title track from her new record, set to be released on July 1st via Heavenly Recordings, it follows on from previous single ‘An Stevel Nowydh’. It will be Gwenno’s third full length solo album and is set to explore many different themes, such as the impact of motherhood on the psyche, and the challenges of wielding women’s power.
‘Tresor’ is the second album of Gwenno’s that is almost entirely in Cornish. The other album being ‘Le Kov’, which presented the Cornish language to the world as Gwenno toured and headlined in Europe and Australia. Gwenno is fluent in both Welsh and Cornish, due to her Welsh mother and her Cornish father, and she therefore places a strong emphasis on keeping the Cornish language alive, which she pursues through her music.
The album was also written in Cornwall, just before the Covid lockdown in 2020, and was then finished in Cardiff in the midst of the pandemic. In this sense, ‘Tresor’ has a focus on home and self, commenting on the global isolation of the past two years.
Piccadilly Records writes that: “Ultimately, Gwenno is asking what are other ways of understanding and being in relation to one’s self and to one another? What are our roles in both shaping and being shaped by the cultures we move in, in a world that is ever changing, and where we all have a place? Tresor does not provide easy answers, for Gwenno shows us that we exist in paradox, our threads of place and story entwined like knotwork, our many selves shining as beautiful entanglements.”
Gwenno’s Album, ‘Tresor’, will be released on 1st July. You can watch the music video for the title track, ‘Tresor’, below.
