Free Folk/New Weird America/Brattleboro festival types

Arthur magazine music basically

this was a sweet era. i really dug Jackie-O Motherfucker and Sunburned Hand but that first Raccoo-oo-oon record rules. so many band names on here i haven't read in years.

Certainly one of my favorite shows from this crew was Born Heller.

an interesting time for sure about which I don't think I have anything of substance to say

Would put Cerberus Shoal as the representative, then Big Blood as an offshoot. Both really good (and good people too).

I adore Charalambides, and their discography, I assume, was a big influence on this scene. Where's Akron/Family?

Paavoharju

I saw Charalambides them play with GHQ and it was mind-bending.

I probably booked at least 1/3 of these at some point in the mid-2000s. It wasn't really my favorite stuff, but people were into it, and then a lot of them moved onto being into other things.

i also used to like ilk, back in the day

Richard Youngs is like a version of every band/artist on the list at one time or another (well, close enough I guess). One man wrecking crew on this scene.

not really into this stuff but i think Jackie O'Motherfucker are incredible

the lo-fi-ish Islaja stuff is legit, magical

first Paavoharju is incredible, beautiful overdriven sounds, great vocals.
couldn't make it past the first couple songs on the second album, though. was a totally unmagical buzzkill

im very partial to MV+EE, they are unabashed about their VT hippieness and neil young worship and have albums full of really great psychedelic rock and roll and were/are the heart of the brattleboro freak scene (great town btw, my wife's folks have a place about 20 minutes away in the VT woods and going to brattleboro in particular mcneill's brewery is my favorite thing about going there)

a ton of those six organs records are killer obv

jack rose is kind of a legend now

paul metzger's "three improvisations for modified banjo" is outstanding and one of my favorite post-fahey raga folk records

i was very into this whole scene a while back, coincided perfectly while i lived in northampton MA and went up to brattleboro a lot

first Paavoharju is incredible, beautiful overdriven sounds, great vocals.

yea it is really good

lau nau is good too for the euro side of this stuff

i think i downloaded too many charalambides albums when emusic was still a thing and i think many of them are good but some of them are boring as fuck

first Paavoharju is incredible, beautiful overdriven sounds, great vocals.
couldn't make it past the first couple songs on the second album, though. was a totally unmagical buzzkill

― brimstead, 15. november 2016 23:40 (eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Nah, the second one is the great one, where they balance their mystical side with their genre pastiches. The third one, the one with the rapper, I've never quite understood, but my Finnish friend tells me it's really smart and well made.

Top 10 from this lot:

MV + EE/Bummer Road
Meg Baird/Espers
Charalambides/Christina Carter/Tom Carter
Fursaxa
James Blackshaw
Paavoharju
Califone
Marissa Nadler
Spires in that sunset rise
Josephine Foster/Born Heller

Paavoharju and MV&EE being probably my favorites by a long shot but this was overall a very interesting music scene... probably one of the consistent in quality of the whole decade.

It wasn't meant to last because it wasn't music designed for the spotlight in the first place.

Voted Metzger cuz he deserves a vote and he's always amazing live

As to why it got popular in the first place I guess the hip crowd was really into Animal Collective and Devendra Banhart in the early/mid 00's and they wanted more of that and the more obscure the better so they could impresse their other hip friends into saying yeah yeah Sung Tongs is ok but if you really want to listen to some new freak-psych folk you should check out this Finnish import vinyl I bought.

did it work for you?

The revival made forgotten 70's artists like Linda Perhacs and Vashti Bunyan get the attention they didn't get back then so I'm deeply grateful to those hip people.

it's almost like... those hip people made them... hip

I unfortunately don't have any hip friends to spread my cred.

But really the best thing that came out of the whole scene was getting Parallelograms and Diamond Day reissued. Those are some really good albums.

As for Paavoharju their first two albums are great... MV&EE go all over the place so it dependa if you like your music more electric or more acoustic.

i was pretty into this stuff at the time but i dont really listen to much of it anymore. although weirdly on saturday morning i had to come into work and put on 'market square' in my office and let it echo through the empty space and it sounded really lovely. theres a bunch of stuff i associate with this scene that you didnt list that i really love - the angels of light records that young god put out in particular. most of the other young god stuff kinda wore thin for me (and i think at one point i owned literally everything they put out) but i liked it a lot ~10 yrs ago. also espers 'II' is a really beautiful record i still put on.

paavoharju are cool but thanks to rym i feel intensely ashamed of how much finnish music i listen to

No Neck birthed this scene. Kemialliset Ystavat is a close second. Corsano gets a nod for his fluidity through this world. I'll have to revisit Arthur and Blastitude before voting.

Good poll/thread

Needs Wooden Wand and the Vanishing Voice but James Blackshaw gets my vote

I mean in 2016, I would still listen to most of the primitive crew (Glenn Jones, Blackshaw, Tucker, Seven Woods) the drone team (Charalambides, Double Lepz) and the noisy end (Jackie O/Corsano/Racoo-oo-oon), but the rest of this is pretty fuckin boring

+1 on Wooden Wand

yeah where tf is wooden wand

still listen to a bunch of this regularly. No Necks at the top for me, based on amazing live shows. and then Pelt, Charlambides, Skygreen Leopards (love Disciples of California so much) and would add Labradford to the list.

Much as it pains me to admit it, David Keenan's New Weird America Wire cover story in 2003 was crucial in bringing this scene to the attention of a wider audience.

lots of good-ish stuff here, but Rose kinda towers over it all, no?

more than any one album, i just reach for Arthur's Golden Apples of the Sun comp these days:
https://arthurmag.com/2010/01/18/golden-apples-of-the-sun-compilation-by-devendra-banhart/

Also Rangda ended up being better than all of this

I was well into no neck blues band and jackie o motherfucker at the time but I had no idea there was so much other stuff in this vein (?) and I haven't heard anything else of this list (except califone who I thought were a post rock band?)

I always thought jackie o motherfucker had the best song titles ("chiapas! I must go there!")

Btw I made a mixtape for a friend a year ago... it's not strictly psychfolk but it might be of interest in this thread since it features some of these artists. (Warning: It might be a terrible, half-assed playlist. Couldn't get my friend into the genre):

Oldies (not strictly psychfolk):

01. Linda Perhacs - Parallelograms
02. Iva Bittova & Vladimir Vaclavek - Uspavanka
03. Nuno Canavarro - Bruma
04. Sir Richard Bishop - Morella
05. Peter Zummo, Arthur Russell, Mustafa Ahmed - Lateral Pass: Song IV
06. Emmanuelle Parrenin - Ce Matin A Fremontel
07. Ilous & Decuyper - Berceuse
08. Comus - The Herald
09. Exuma - Dambala
10. Sun City Girls - The Flower
11. Lula Cortes & Ze Ramalho - Não Existe Molhado Igual ao Pranto
12. Bobb Trimble - Armour of the Shroud
13. Baka Pygmies - Yeli
14. Henri Texier - Amir
15. Paul Giovanni & Magnet - Willow’s Song

Revival thing (again, maybe not strictly psychfolk):

01. Big Blood - Oh Country (Skin & Bones)
02. Tenniscoats - Hours
03. Lau Nau - Painovoimaa, valoe
04. Pocahaunted - Riddim Queen
05. Faun Fables - I’d Like To Be
06. Natalie Rose LeBrecht - 06
07. Kemialliset Ystävät - Gelsomiinan Naama
08. Spires that in the Sunset Rise - Sort Sands
09. Larkin Grimm - The Last Tree
10. Colleen - Push the Boat Onto The Sand
11. Paavoharju - Puhuri
12. Vashti Bunyan - Here Before
13. Wooden Wand - Guru Femmes
14. MV&EE - The Burden
15. Animal Collective & Vashti Bunyan - I Remember Learning How to Dive
16. Skuli Sverrisson - Seria

Also the By The Fruits You Shall Know The Roots comp is a really nice introduction to the big hitters of this scene.

Missing Vibracathedral Orchestra and Natural Snow Buildings.

I guess Vibra were a bit more Terry Rileyesque drone than most of the ppl on this list, but the one time I saw them live there was definitely a freak folk side to their music-making, too (not least in the way that they swapped instruments during the course of their set). Think I've said before that this was at an ATP where Jackie O Motherfucker were on the same stage, same day, and were absolutely wretched in comparison.

I instead voted for NNCK, who I saw live twice, first time a very late night show in a church in Hackney (attended by at least three other former/current ilxors that I know abt) when David Nuss placed a big drum on top of a speaker stack that miraculously didn't topple over. Wonderful bit of in-the-moment showmanship and bravado.

really dug some of the Thuja stuff.. would love to hear more of it. Any album suggestions for them?

This was definitely a "thing" but a lot/most of these people are still active, many of them in the same or very similar projects. Probably the single most important scene for shaping my taste overall.

Missing Paul Flaherty, he could've been lumped in with Corsano I guess

"Btw I made a mixtape for a friend a year ago... it's not strictly psychfolk but it might be of interest in this thread since it features some of these artists. (Warning: It might be a terrible, half-assed playlist. Couldn't get my friend into the genre):"

that looks like a really good mixtape to me!

Voted for Charalambides, even though a lot of my favourite works of theirs were released in the 90s, before this scene really got started.

What's a good place to start with MV + EE?

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.

I don't think the kind of people who bought those CDRs would be put off from doing so by any perceived decline in their desirability. It's true that touring has become less and less economic but that applies across the board I think. I remember the first time I saw Sunburned Hand of the Man there were seven of them. The next time there were four and last time I saw them they were down to a duo.

interesting to read everyone’s takes on this and how they encountered it. just before I heard this stuff I’d been into jim o’rourke/cul de sac etc., read perfect sound forever, was fast getting into the likes of skip james, dock boggs etc. and had just bought 20+ Fahey albums so it felt like the most natural thing in the world to me.

I see the key aspect which brought a lot of this together as an attitude, a certain mode of looseness. stylistically loose and open, rhythmically loose - which has obvious pragmatic origins but a lot of these people kept/developed/aimed for that feel - as well as an often oblique approach to structure and developing tracks that seemed distinctive to me. it felt very purposefully narcotic and detached. as a result I see the core of this as the big improv groups - sunburned/nnck/jomf/tower recordings - and the live shows where no one had any idea where things were building towards, those pieces where the guiding energy was diffuse, and things might suddenly coalesce round some unexpected moment, which could be a guttural cry or someone getting up to crawl over chairs at the side of the room. the anonymous/egoless quality of a lot of this music was crucial, in terms of shaping the scene and politically, as well as in giving people confidence to let loose and get weird. if everyone’s an outsider then no one has to worry about it. the primacy of the collective was important.

spiralling off that core you had the proper droners (lots of people going modal and championing Indian music), the loop pedal solo acts (some regrettable live shows but will always v fondly remember fursaxa getting out the sellotape mid set to fix down her droning keys, and my friend talked v fondly of a swirling alexander tucker set that culminated in him hitting the wrong pedal, everything suddenly cutting dead and then a quiet cry of “bollocks!”), the singer-songwriters (ranging from british-tinged prettiness to desolate primal thumpers like dead raven choir), and my beloved fingerpickers, which was always a slightly separate strand & which has been able to continue under its own steam.

this was the first scene I followed that had a decent number of women involved. idk if its whiteness would have seemed offputting to anyone but I thought it’s relaxed coolness made it pretty approachable. the fluidity was a big part of the appeal, the way it reached out to incorporate/mingle with other scenes and acts, lots of great and unexpected bills.

other omissions/adjacent things: sun city girls/richard bishop, tetuzi akiyami, ignatz, current 93, michael hurley, steffen basho junghans

"Btw I made a mixtape for a friend a year ago... it's not strictly psychfolk but it might be of interest in this thread since it features some of these artists. (Warning: It might be a terrible, half-assed playlist. Couldn't get my friend into the genre):"

that looks like a really good mixtape to me!

― xiphoid beetlebum (rushomancy), miércoles 16 de noviembre de 2016 11:35 (seven hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thank you! Most of those are not on spotify which is a damn shame (at least latin spotify, it seems us and europe have more artists).

This poll/thread comes at just the right time for me. This is the right season (in the northern hemisphere at least) for this music. Been listening a lot of psych folk + beth gubboms & rustin mann + goldfrapp's seventh tree.

Going off topic but criminally inderrated album that one by Goldfrapp. Recorded on october/november and released in february which I think is the fault of its failure to conenvt. Should've been released at the end of summer.

Connect*

Underrated*

Writing on mobile is hard.

xp I guess I think of MM because Pete Nolan was in like a bunch of these kindsa bands: Virgin Eye Blood Brothers, Vanishing Voice, Believers, Spectre Folk, etc. And John Shaw (Magik Markers bassist after Leah left) was in Son of Earth (also neglected in this poll), Believers, etc. Also, Elisa made some great (and overlooked) records with Chasny that absolutely fit the bill here

I get that if you open the poll up to everyone who ever played a tambourine on an MV record it would get quite unwieldy and ridiculous, but as far as the Magik Markers connection, I feel they belong here way more than Glenn Jones does. I get that he's very popular right now with the post-Takoma people but I don't remember anyone jamming Cul De Sac records back then.

As for the "pull of the twang," I have no idea! It is a good question worth exploring, though, and I'm glad you (ogmor) made a poll about it (despite all the bellyaching about exclusions / inclusions!)

Also weird how little overlap this scene had with the No Depression / alt country crowd, despite sharing many aesthetics / influences. Weren't these things happening more or less simultaneously? Was Son Volt just too trad for Double Leopards fans and Kemialliset Ystavat just too darn weird for Wilco bros? This still doesn't explain why the Vetivers, Devendras, etc of the world didn't penetrate the alt country universe

i dunno, someone like steve gunn at this point has his foot in this scene and whatever's left of the alt-country thing.

Writing on mobile is hard.

― No longer active (Moka)

true but it makes me irrationally happy to see you talk about "beth gubboms" :)

I'd have to vote for the orig tower lineup of mv/hr/pg6, for reasons many of you can fathom.

other top 9 many of whom have become friends-

charalambides
pg6 solo
nnck
6 organs
willie lane
jack/pelt
blithe sons (unforgettable live)
currituck co.
& write in for bardo pond who were contemporary w the roots of this scene

and
good doors covr
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYF1WAMnV48

Excerpted rundown of this scene: folks who could, and possibly would, do a righteous Doors cover.

jack rose loved the doors!

u kno, i'll thro in a write in for loren connors.

i talked to metzger abt his influences once, he said Indian classical music, a kinda breezy not-hip but great fingerstyle player Duck Baker...he said DEVO changed his life and was the most amazing thing he ever saw, then he listed a bunch of classic rock bands like Pink Floyd, the Doors, Zeppelin, Queen etc

he claimed to never have heard of Fahey until the name started popping up in his reviews

:)

Blackshaw, Jack Rose and Charalambides are the three that jump out at me. I don't know if there is anything particularly unifying about that list, beyond a kind of vague, questing secular transcendentalism (which I couldn't hope to define with any rigour, but might be just fine to be going on with).

Baird/Espers, Jack Rose, Glenn Jones and Six Organs are probably the ones listed here that I jam on a regular basis. A lot I haven't even heard! Does seem like you could put together a cool box set documenting this scene ...

Give Numero or LITA about six years

^^^ vomit

Three Lobed has done a good job covering this over the years with their box sets: MV+EE, Wooden Wand, Bardo Pond, Six Organs, Jack Rose, Tom Carter, Magik Markers, Sunburned Hand, etc. etc.

With the Espers love, the Greg Weeks solo records are really great as well.

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.