Other folk

Posted on 27/02/2016 by admin

I don’t feel I can speak to industrial folk as I was the farmer’s grandson and farmer’s son, not a farm labourer. In the way of boys, I took everyone for who they were and had no formed perceptions on different roles. We were also a long way from the centres of class struggle. I felt no kinship with the gas meter readers and glass & aluminium warehouse workers I later rubbed shoulders with (in fact, even that exaggerates the closeness of the connection) and I know this is much down to my attitude and proclivities as their perception on things. It doesn’t qualify me to write about my time as an aluminium racker.

It is a big part of what folk music comprises of, concernes itself with.. It is impossible to think of folk without the stirring political anthems. Then, as now, this was about the action of civic authority in making life harder for the (as the term was) working man.

Now as for neofolk, I do have an insight into pagan practice and have read extensively on the subject(s). I haven’t lent this knowledge to my songwriting endeavours and, not being a practicing witch, don’t feel qualified extolling the virtues of astral travel or scrying.

Portent

A flood of foiled philanthropy blamed for 
falling through the cracks  
A parched earth position that rarely enacts
Shelter 'neath the helter skelter
This is important this is a portent

Quake in our boots don't try to take up roots
Not a pot to piss in or a well to wish in 
A lost at sea lucidity
Department deportment this is a portent

Hearkened as horizon darkened
Felt the folds of fields
an otherworldly undercurrent
Pinned intent with penitent this is a portent

Move along Folks, nothing to see/hear

Posted on 20/02/2016 by admin

Contemporary folk would, I expect, focus on the bat-weilding thugs that went on a recent rampage rather than ones who did so in 1916, but how do you make the distinction?Choose something too contemporary, like a drone delivery, and you risk veering from the course of folk altogether.
Folk punk, just mention the Pogues and Roaring Jack. Folk metal.

Indie folk is so full of quirky talent that there is an impulse both to explore it and be intimidated by it. I won’t lecture on the folly of feeling intimidated because there are artists you like and respect working within a genre as, if I scratched, there would be whole genres that I avoid as not my thing. That said, the essence of indie anything is that you attempt it without too much reference to what others are doing.

Victim Statement

Being about my business I didn't notice  
seldom so unwelcome said accomplice
to the gang who had harangued and nearly hanged
all those read of claw and fang

You hear how weary defeat up and down the street
hardly discreet in descriptive deceit 
Carrying on in a cluster there 
Keeping away the customer

Being of temperate bearing 
I've done my share of caring
For those who care for nothing themselves
they won't find it on my shelves

Freak folk facts

Posted on 18/02/2016 by admin

I don’t know any. As I gather, musicians use acoustic instruments but take their songs and performances into unusual directions. To this end, in repurposing recent samples here, we can see that We’ll Take Them In has the subject matter for a conventional folk song but the lyrical approach that is both dense ‘We’ll absorb the orb of their undoing’ and has multiple points of indeterminacy.

Rather than being a combined voice that a political event can get behind, the first verse is a clumsy reach to understanding and sympathy and the second is both self-condemnation and a lash out at other ways. It then leaps again, in the third verse, to the viewpoint of those captives who are just to glad to experience freedom but ends with a couplet that examines the debate itself and what fuels it.

Would this be freak folk if you played it on a guitar and a set of bongos, or would it constitute something different again? I think the subject matter gives it the license it needs to remain in the freakier fields of folk. We’ve been crying out for that old firebrand folk that picks up on issues and it wasn’t like you could escape it; other premiers got on board and there were protest groups spouting up on street corners across the region. Whether the folk groups are okay with the ambiguity is another matter.

There’s a couple of Berkoisms that threaten the plain speaking of folk rock in Barbed Wire Blues. I deliberately chose an object from my childhood in the broader landscape and wanted to use it literally rather than to, say, engage in a metaphor for the plight of those asylum seeker children or – stretching it further – a kind of mental imprisonment. And there is a rambling feel that is troubled at the same time.

It is the double meaning of the third verse that freaks the folk then the fourth eases out of it only to freak out completely in the fifth. I mean, what the heck does ‘I’m green to the mean‘ mean, man?

III

Careful of the Freak

Hail the hairlip let the truth slip  
grasp what you clasp close in your grip
Sneak up on the snaggletooth
wagers in stages the solemn sleuth 

Jumps at the bumps leaps at the lumps
packs in acts all wearing pumps
Jaws that jut and see sore strut
The reason you'll find you're anything but
Shiny dome in gnomic pose
tip of ear to bridge of nose
In tatters that matters
a taste for waste and seldom chaste
The guidance of the guards replaced

The nurses in nightsweat have noticed   
the way that they fit in the photos
Clubfoot closeness humpback humility
what harm to the charm of humanity

Revival tenterhooks

Posted on 08/02/2016 by admin

When I read about the American and British folk revival(s) it does get me thinking that I am a listener and not a composer. All of my information is second hand; either through the media saturation or visitors from those climes.

I did, however, write a song based on the Victorian premier stating he would take in the refugees. It takes its title from this and is called We’ll Take Them In

We’ll Take Them In

We'll absorb the orb of their undoing
a little bit of what they've been through-ing
We're in such a state
where we can relate
 so we'll take them in

We'll redirect the rude aspect
Negotiated as benign neglect
The faith you hold a bride's scold
which culture could you   leave in the cold
 so we'll take them in

No mistaking free for fear
in that sense where we can disappear
It's that incessant intersect
both sides saying they protect

From the Sound of It

Monthly Archives: February 2016