Cynefin (Wales / UK)

Cynefin (pronounced kuh-neh-vin) is the creative project of Owen Shiers, a singer-songwriter from West Wales. Drawing on folk song, the Welsh beirdd gwlad (folk poet) tradition, and living oral history, Cynefin explores the intersection of music, poetry, agriculture, and the natural world. The project is, in Shiers’s own words, “a stake in the ground for the diverse and the disappearing in our age of homogenisation and mass amnesia,” a personal reflection on the struggle to maintain a language, culture, and way of life.

Featured Songs:

“Pryd Y Potsiwr” (The Poacher’s Meal) was inspired by Shiers’s conversations with Caradog Jones, who spent over 40 years as bailiff of the River Teifi in West Wales, one of Britain’s finest salmon rivers. The Celtic Voices song looks back at a time when poaching was a matter of survival for rural communities, and forward with alarm at the river’s declining salmon population: “Life was hard and money was tight / And the occasional salmon was a rare treat / Standing in a court was not a subject of shame / For catching a fish by the water’s edge / Trouble is at hand while we pol-lute our land / Will the fright be enough to save the poacher’s meal?”

“Faerdre Fach” (Faerdre Fach), featured on Putumayo's Lotus Lounge, is originally from Cynefin’s album Shimli (2025). Sung in Welsh, the song takes its name from a historic farm in West Wales that was rebranded by new owners as “Happy Donkey Hill,” an act Shiers treats as a small but pointed instance of cultural erasure. Place names, he argues, carry memory that disappears in a single generation when left unprotected. It is performed by Shiers on vocals and piano, with strings arranged by Shiers, Tom Greed, and Laurence Greed. “On top of the stand in Faerdre Fach / There is a small basket of pretty flowers / And a new name for the place / The fair premises, formerly a hearth / And the land cries desperately / That we never forget.”

Artist Website

Featured on:

Click image to learn more