Gwydion

WYDION started to take shape back at 1995, when three classmates (Daniel, Rúben and Gonçalo) plus Daniel’s brother Vitor, found that they shared the same interest for music and had some basic experience with some kind of instrument (or vocals) and the will to form a band… All but Gonçalo were metal addicted with similar tastes, so it was natural that after some time, things started to heat up. Some primordial songs were composed then, but it was only a few months later, with the arrival of the drummer Miguel and the bass player Luis, that Gwydion felt as a whole. In this first period of existence, everyone had much to learn as much as play to compose songs. Most of the material created as this time was eventually discarded, only to be replaced by something technically more interesting. Finally, almost two years later, we thought that we did was good enough to show to the world, so we performed a couple of gigs at that time.
During the period 95 to 98 GWYDION recorded one Mini-CD called «Debt To Morrighan». By the end ‘99 four of the original GWYDION, Ruben, Vitor, Miguel, Daniel joined two new elements, Kaveirinha - guitar and João BM - Bass.
At this time we changed our band name to «StormChild» because we wanted to give a start fresh composing all new songs and give a new image to the band…
This line-up recorded «First Channeling» in July 2000,at Exilium Lynx Studios, starting from that moment, a whole new serie of live performances.
Soon we realised that Gwydion name was the most accurate for the band, we all liked it much more than Stormchild, so we were back to the origins and so we slaughtered that damn child!
In October 2000 Miguel left the band for personal reasons and replaced by Bruno on drums. In October 2001 GWYDION recorded their most recent work - «Augmentation» - at Exito Estudio. After this recording Joao BM left the band and Baronwebb entered for his place. We did some important gigs during this period promoting our demo, and started to spread Gwydion name through our country.
After that in 2002 we went to a time vortex trying to understand what we were going to do next, and meanwhile Baronwebb left the band and Morg signed in with lots of drunken fresh ideas and we immediately started to compose new songs. In 2004 Bruno decided to immigrate to England and damn we were stuck again, so after some drum auditions we picked the one who drank most Luis Abreu… and he plays drums fine too.
Well with this line-up we were ready to prepare our first length album. We recorded it all by ourselves at Kaveira´s house. We went trought a long process of composition and recording and when we were almost ready we got an offer from our current label Trollzorn, who helped us so much in making this album. After we send them our material we all decided it was better to remaster the album, this work was done by Maik from Gernotshagen at their studios in Germany.
After 3 self-financed demos : Debt to Morrighan (1998) - First Channeling (2000) - Augmentation (2001), Gwydion releases his full lenght album (also partially self-financed) ‘Ynys Mön’
It’s been a conjoined effort by Gwydion and Trollzorn, but we finally made it!
Ynys Mön is our first full-debut album and the main sources of inspiration are Viking and Folk metal, reflecting the feeling and the sounds which we most identify ourselves.
Our first album, Ynys Mön, brings not only a significant improvement in terms of quality, when compared with our previous works, but represents also a turning point in the style and influences for the band. If our sonority could be previously regarded as melodic black metal, at the present time it is much more heavily inspired by Viking and Folk Metal ways. This change is also visible on the lyrics, which sums to the already usual celtic mystic and culture, the Nordic, containing also references to thematics like religion and paganism.