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- Cyfoeth Gwlyb

Things have been deathly quiet with regards songs sung in Welsh this year. There are notable exceptions: Jen Jeniro, Y Niwl (instrumentals, I know - but made by minds that think yn Cymraeg), Race Horses, 9bach, Yucatan... maybe there are more exceptions than I thought! Still, the general feeling is that it has been a quiet 2010. Penmachno's Sen Segur arrive, then, to find an audience of famished ears. Lucky, then, that the miracles within their music can transform the bread and fish of Cyfoeth Gwlyb into something to feed them all.

This track, excellently produced by John Lawrence, starts off like a hibernating bear dreaming Eno's Here Come the Warm Jets, double-tracked, misty eBows rolling into fuzzy earholes. The hammond and twangy bass tumble in through a time tunnel straight from the mid '60s. It's craggy psychedelia, not two thousand light years from Jen Jeniro, with all the compulsive mystery of silhouetted other worlds just out of reach and a similar twilight charm to Cate Le Bon's best work. The lyrics are sung like a nursery rhyme obscuring a terrible truth, but they're all the more compelling for that.

Then massive guitars fall unexpectedly from the sky like napalm on Nant Ffrancon. It's one of the best musical moments of the year.

Sen Segur are a pagan Mercury Rev, maybe more somnambulist, certainly less maniacal than that band's early recordings. But this is spaciously claustrophobic and delightfully unsettling. Ace work.

- Stay Invisible

Dafydd Spink is originally from Aberystwyth. He's been in Sheffield for a few years now, collaborating with former Long Blondes and other denizens of that city's music underworld. Liars Beware aren't nodding their head to the beat of the Zeitgeist. This is an irony-free zone. There are resolutely no synth pads, no Buggles spectacles, no reverb units masking half-inched half-baked tunes. I suspect Dafydd likes The Fall and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. I suspect that the hyperventilating fuzz that swathes this barracking recording is a deliberate attempt to remove Liars Beware from a world of artifice that'd otherwise suffocate them. It works. They stand far apart, lepers ringing a bell plugged into a SuperMuff BigFuzz. Brilliant.

This track is from their second EP, Endless Adolescence, available on cassette only through Kicking Against The Pricks.

- Raiti

Every piece of Mathew Mayes' work that I have heard is an amusement park of dizzying ideas that demonstrate a profound sense of infinite sonic possibilities. If you were ever in thrall to the patchwork samples and scrapbook wonder of the Avalanches' début album, or you're at all drawn to the beguiling weave and weft of Air France, you're going to love Channel Swimmer's music.

Raiti is an organic swell of sampled voices, house breaks, grainy organs and crystalline plinks and plonks that bring to mind a reanimated 70's soundtrack. I get completely lost in this. Good lost.

- The Night Will Absolve Me

Dean Scott is originally from Bridgend and currently studying at Aberystwyth University. This is a piece of wonderfully minimal drum 'n' bass that's thankfully free of the clichés that have weighed that particular movement down. The haunting, cut 'n' paste use of the female vocal here is brilliant. You can trace a lineage back all the way to A Guy Called Gerald's massively influential Voodoo Ray, through some of the more esoteric and ambient house tracks of the late 90's, right up to this. I love the production, too. The slight distortion as the organ resonates gives the track a burred edge that reaches beyond the sterilised norm. Any club, any dancefloor, would reach some kind of apogee with this shaking the early morning sound system. And like all of the Gwych Sounds this month, bar Liars Beware, it transports you elsewhere. Maybe you'll be thinking of sultry beach parties in Ibiza or Thailand, but I'm freezing my nethers off on the pebbles at Aberystwyth and loving every second of it.

- Oil Change

I could write an essay on this. It's an incredible piece of music. But I'll have to be brief due to an imminent deadline and out of respect for 1) the band and 2) your valuable time. Consider this, though, while you're listening to this track from The Damn Blag's eponymous début album: when was the last time you heard a piece of music from a Welsh band that managed to so effortlessly absorb a love for so many disparate influences? I can hear The Fall, The Meters, Captain Beefheart, Beck, the Art of Noise, the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, Chic, Parliament... Many of these are unashamedly funky influences for a bunch of white Welsh guys from Wrexham. And why not? It's about time someone reclaimed 'the funk' from those who have made it funkless. The album is available, now. This track is so good I haven't explored the rest of it much. I fear that anything else I hear this year will pale wanly in comparison. Are you listening to it, yet?

GARDENING - Resting On A Planet (no website)

No website? What kind of luddite makes music in 2010 without a website from which to inflict it on people? Well, the kind who couldn't give a stuff whether people like it or not. Gardening is Joss Mcmenemy from Llanfairfechan. Normally he makes the kind of hairpin bend, nosebleed techno that'd unhinge Venetian Snares and have him running for shelter in a soundproof cave. This piece, however, is probably the glowing ember of a brain burnt out by all that hyperactivity. It's Boards of Canada reduced to a constituent part and some barely functioning technology. It's so world weary and beautiful I want to inject it into me, or me into it. I don't like needles, so I don't know where that thought came from or where it's going. Resting On A Planet is a little bit Eno if Eno had been more heart than brain. Gardening shares a house with Klaus Kinski. Which probably explains everything.

Please send your demos/self releases to: themysterytour@gmail.com