Free Folk/New Weird America/Brattleboro festival types

Some sleepers and also-ran operators from this scene:

Asa Irons And Swaan Miller
Cursillistas
Steven R. Smith
Grouper
Barn Owl and related
Joshua Burkett

this keijo guy looks cool, must be a grandpappy of Finnish psych weirdness?

I wonder if the 'demise' of this scene - and the associated noise scene - can be partly traced to the decline in the desirability of CDRs. At pretty much every free folk/noise show I went to there would be a table full of handmade CDRs etc that were obviously v cheap to produce (and sold inexpensively) that must've generated a decentish slice of income for these groups/performers - at the very least, they must've helped quite a bit with touring expenses.

― Darcy Sarto (Ward Fowler), Wednesday, November 16, 2016 6:49 AM (eleven hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is otm. i remember so many shows in the mid/late '00s with noise bands and this whole scene with march tables just overflowing with stuff, CD-Rs all with handmade covers/containers covered in sticks and leaves and shit. usually spray painted. that completely died off around the turn of the decade.

tbh I hated trying to file CDRs made with twigs and fingerpaintings and stuff, usually just stored the discs in slimline cases and stuck the 'artwork' in a box someplace. As an unintended result, I'm sure most of the CDRs I bought back then still actually play!

I remember some of these CDrs going for >$75 on eBay at one time. Crazy days

The massive '08-'10 (?) Recession, and high gas prices, hurt many artists surviving on the margins. It's one thing when you're breaking even and having fun, going for it... and who knows what will happen next. It's another when you're losing money doing live music and your dayjob has disappeared too. Very hard to get thru that. And of course, as always, life happens.

I'm afraid that I'd vote almost entirely on who of these were cool to work with and who were entitled prima donnas and assholes. Like some of these artists in this scene were the shittiest to work with as a venue person/sound person of any of the "scenes" that came through.

not to come across as super negative -- some were totally awesome. Jack Rose was probably one of my favorite touring musicians to work with.

^^^^^^^^^^^ No Neck Blues Band ^^^^^^^^^^^^

Like some of these artists in this scene were the shittiest to work with as a venue person/sound person of any of the "scenes" that came through.

― sarahell, Wednesday, November 16, 2016 7:18 PM (forty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

name and shame!

Xxxpost Lol I didnt even notice I wrote Beth Gubboms.

Liked/loved a lot of these artists and hippy posturing aside I think a lot of the music still stands up. Um:

No Neck Blues Band
Six Organs of Admittance
MV + EE/Bummer Road
Jack Rose/Pelt
Meg Baird/Espers
Hush Arbors
Charalambides/Christina Carter/Tom Carter
Paavoharju
Marissa Nadler
Josephine Foster/Born Heller

I only saw a few of these live but for me this music is strongly associated with some of my first Internet wormholes, also blog/shop combos like Digitalis and Volcanic Tongue.

:/ This looks like a list of artists with no relation to each other either in genre or intention or effect

If it's free folk then I'd vote Cerebus Shoal/Big Blood by a long shot, my favourite records are the one they made with Larkin (Parplar) and their side of the split with Herman Dune (The Hows And Whys Of)

If it's primitivism then it's James Blackshaw. If it's "songs" then Josephine Foster. What the heck is Kemialliset Ystavat doing on this list, imo they are the best act on this list.

"Why did this happen" + "what was the appeal" + "how does this relate to mainstream tastes" = I don't know if there ever was a time when the genres these artists respectively represent didn't exist. There was a bubble where suddenly Sunburned Hand Of Man and Supersilent and Black Dice were getting high numbers on Pitchfork and people my age were paying attention. Then, the meritocratic nature of decimal-based rating systems started to have their influence on what was considered "good", and bands like NNCK and Wolf Eyes who other artists who made great-but-not-good records were less covered and/or paid attention to, in favour of artists who ticked all the boxes for "what qualifies as a great album" (S*fjan, J*anna); bands that could've been great like gee idk Vetiver? started chasing that decimal-point dragon, making good records instead of great ones, and then acoustic instruments went out of style for a decade

Surprised no one has mentioned Terrastock as the uniting aesthetic here.

xp I guess I'm slinging around "good" and "great" kind of weirdly but when I type "good" I mean "functional, broadly appealing, well-mixed, saleable", and when I type "great" I mean "actually worth listening to"

All this happened before the years when Pitchfork meant anything, fgti

idk about that

Hm well, I only have the experience of myself and my social circle, which saw 2002-2003 as the year we were all still reading it daily, and we all bought "Here Comes The Indian" and Keith Fullerton Whitman and Xiu Xiu and Supersilent and Wolf Eyes and Sunburned Hand and many other of the above listed artists (and then became confused as to why the same website was also bumping The Wrens and The Postal Service and Shins and so on) (and by 2005 publicists and booking agents were looking up a potential client's ratings before checking their ticket sales and few of the above artists were winning any more)

JACKIE O

love califone, glenn jones and blackshaw equally tho

xp yeah that was pretty much my experience. there's a reason Sung Tongs is mentioned at the top of this thread.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Very tough for me, but for many personal reasons went with Jack Rose/Pelt. Am still into a lot of these folks.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

fair enough, but zero votes for JOMF is crazy

lol whoops forgot to vote that woulda been mine

lol I forgot to vote in this, but the results seem about right. I’m sympathetic to the impulse behind fgti’s objections & I think the differences between groups/pieces are always worth bearing in mind and sometimes more salient than the similarities, but I don’t really agree on any of the specifics. to say that ‘primitivism’ is a coherent style discrete from ‘free folk’ is a nonsense which ignores acts like SOOA&Pelt as well as the massive upswing in finger-picked guitar round this time, and I don’t see much use for the term primitive, which includes lots of guitarists who sound nothing alike while excluding many others, mostly on a demographic/audience basis (which ofc has social/political implications). You can try to broaden it out and talk about alternative tunings and looser, repetitive structures but then you include a lot of other acts on this list.

I still think there was a core impulse/vibe, which manifested in different forms but drew a lot of different strands together and created a lot of overlap, its messy, woolly nature being part of the point. If there were bands that sounded like this stuff in 1990 or whenever I’d love to hear them. I think the reissues and acts that had their reputations boosted during this period is a crucial part too, moka mentioned vashti bunyan and linda perhacs, and there’s also robbie basho, henry flynt, & pleasing weird little one-offs records

anyway here’s a top 10 of records that don’t fit together & yet do:

Sunburned Hand of the Man – Jaybird
Six Organs of Admittance – For Octavio Paz
NNCK – Sticks and stones maybe break my bones but names can never hurt me
Christina Carter – Living contact
Chris Corsano – The Young Cricketer
Jackie O’Motherfucker – Change
Glenn Jones – This is the wind that blows it out
Pelt – Ayahuasca
Double Leopards – Halve Maen
Jack Rose – Red horse, white mule (or really the ‘two originals of…’ CD with opium musick)

Good list Ogmor. Definitely some favorites of mine in there (that I still listen to regularly). Spot on with the 90s reissues I think as well. Stuff like Henry Flynt becoming somewhat available, or at least more acknowledged, certainly worked its magic into informing a lot of this stuff.

I was listening to Graduation earlier this week and the guitar on that is unlike anything else I've heard & so sweet. love to hear more people borrow from flynt

Oh yeah man, I could listen to endless variations of that. I would if I could hah hah.