By Her Lights

seems odd for an artist who was born and raised in Wales, has a PhD in astrophysics and holds down a day job as a video-game coder, Gwenifer Raymond begrudgingly embraces the “American primitive” label with which her hypnotic and often unsettling brand of acoustic fingerstyle guitar has been stamped. “A label is the easiest way to describe a thing, and I think ‘American primitive’ is probably the easiest way to describe what I do,” she says from her home in Brighton, U.K. The term, which acoustic guitarist John Fahey coined in the late ’50s to describe his own music, was always intended to somehow convey an ineffable and ever-evolving amalgam of influences. “Fahey himself invented the term because he couldn’t think of what it was he did,