Folk Music's New Genre Benders

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Sitars, scratchy 78s, hunting horns, acoustic resonator guitars, and field recordings of traffic over bridges can be found in the wonderfully dense music of Cul de Sac in their 2003 Death of the Sun, recorded in East Albany, Vermont. The group's guitarist, Glenn Jones, cites inspirations ranging all over the map, from the writer-musician John Fahey to Skip James, The Ventures, and the German instrument inventor Hans Reichel. With musicians influenced this diversely, 'free folk' isn't so much a new genre as 'genre mangling,' says Wire's David Keenan. It may be a nightmare for catalogers and shelving clerks, but the sweetly droning, spacey guitar music of Heather Leigh Murray and Christina Carter, who perform as the duo Scorces (and with Tom Carter as the trio Charalambides) is lovely by any name.

Brattleboro's Free-Folk Fest co-organizer Matt Valentine typifies these border crossers. With his partner Erika Elder, he's one of many 'free folk' musicians who record and distribute their own work, sometimes on vinyl, often designing their own record jackets and CD packages. In the case of Son of Earth's Man (Apostasy Recordings), the package is made of hinged balsa marked with a wood-burned drawing.

Son of Earth's Aaron Rosenblum sees himself as part of a modern folk community that looks to the Internet for cross-pollination while bypassing the record industry. 'This is a group of people developing entirely new ways of playing the instruments at hand, or inventing new ones, making music for themselves and those around them,' he says.

There are no firm plans for a free- folk festival this spring, but the scene that orbits loosely around Brattleboro is doing just fine. New Weird America, acid hillbilly, psychedelic folk -- call it what you will. Or just forget the labels and prepare for all contingencies. Happily, the unexpected will emerge.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print