With songs about love, travel, death and tricksters, Fernhill's authentic musical exploration of Welsh culture both equals and updates the more experimental work of UK folk artists like Donovan, Sandy Denny and Pentangle. Hynt, the Welsh word for journey, is a fitting title for Fernhill's third and latest CD (on the UK Beautiful Jo label), as the group has traveled the globe from Ho Chi Minh City to Uganda to Europe demonstrating the timelessness of Welsh culture.

The group disavows any similarity to previous UK folk revivals. "It's about expression," Fernhill co-founder Julie Murphy insists via phone from her home in rural Wales. "And it's not about listening in a sort of technical sense, or celebrity."

The sound of reels being rehearsed on a flute are audible in the background while she shares touring stories. One of the most colorful involves her encounter with an oud-playing, turban-wearing stranger backstage in Khartoum, Sudan. Seeing that Murphy was a singer, the stranger sat down and quickly taught her how to sing along with a melody on the oud. He then rushed her into a room, where he gathered up his orchestra of 20 musicians and pushed Murphy out in front of a microphone, with the entire band following them onstage. About 6,000 Sudanese were waiting in the audience, and welcomed the group with worshipful applause while the MC introduced the turbaned stranger as African oud star Abdel Gadir Salim.

It was a "very humbling experience," Murphy recalls.

Not all of her learning experiences have been quite as exotic or dramatic. Much of Murphy's musical journey has been what she describes as "hearing people singing in the pub or on records," and finding what she calls "voices that can communicate to anybody."

Murphy's husband and Fernhill co-founder Ceri Rhys Matthews may have not written the book on Welsh folklore, but he did write the liner notes for The Rough Guide to Welsh Music. Although his art school and punk-rock drumming creds may account for his creative approach to making songs, and his percussive acoustic guitar style, he gets some flack from Welsh traditionalists. Still, Murphy's musical montages may not really be all that off-kilter with Welsh tradition. "You take the tune of your choice and the words of your choice, and put them together," he says simply.

The Welsh poetry that inspires Fernhill is not the narrative bardic poems that are more highly regarded by certain bulwarks of the Welsh and English establishment, but a unique thread of Welsh poetic tradition that is, as Matthews says, "far more like psychodrama ... and of the people." The subjects, he says, are closer to "love, people, and death." That's part of what lends Fernhill's lyrics a timeless quality — as Matthews wryly reminds, "Because they are about people, and people really don't change much."