Free Folk/New Weird America/Brattleboro festival types

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.