On Sunday 12 October, St Matthias Church in Stoke Newington opens its Gothic arches to a very different kind of liturgy: the sound world of Cerys Hafana. From Machynlleth in mid-Wales, Hafana has reshaped the language of the Welsh triple harp: muting strings with blu-tac, feeding it through electronics, and setting it against field recordings and archive fragments. The results is bold new territory where tradition, minimalism and experimental folk collide.

Her latest album Angel (tak:til/Glitterbeat, September 2025), already acclaimed as The Guardian’s Folk Album of the Month, blends Cymraeg songs with instrumental explorations in dialogue with double bass, alto sax and drums. Recorded live in Pembrokeshire, the record moves between hushed intimacy and storm-like swells, its title track drawn from a Welsh folktale of an angel whose song sends a man into a centuries-long sleep.

Live, Hafana carries the same balance of intensity and strangeness: long silences, sudden surges of sound, and harp lines that cover rhythm, melody and percussion all at once. She tempers that gravity with flashes of wry, slightly awkward humour and an understated presence, breaking the spell just enough before leading the audience back into her otherworldly sound world.

This London performance lands in the middle of a UK tour that has already included Bristol, Liverpool, Cardiff and Manchester, and continues on to Glasgow, Sheffield, Falmouth, Totnes, Bradford-on-Avon, Aberystwyth and Dolgellau before European dates in Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Germany in November.

Support comes from South London’s Astra Forward, whose ethereal songwriting layers multi-instrumental textures with themes of grief, mysticism and impermanence. Together, the two artists promise a night that pushes folk music far beyond its boundaries, set against the vaulted acoustics and historic setting of St Matthias.

Book your tickets HERE and hear Cerys Hafana’s Angel 
reshape the Welsh triple harp inside the soaring acoustics of St Matthias