#62

Great, thanks for your suggestions

#63

Do you have access to the Oxford Handbooks? Link goes straight to their music titles.

#64

Awesome, Florist are definitely on the list, but I’m not sure I have this specific interview :slight_smile:

Thanks for the offer! I shall definitely be gathering a certain amount of first hand stuff, so I keep you in mind! :slight_smile:

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#65

This is in fact the podcast that sent me to this brilliant community! But thank you for the suggestion!

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#66

Shall check that all out, thanks!

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#67

When I read your post bibio was the first artist to come to my mind. He fuses that singer song writer and electronics so well. Also mount kimbie might be worth a look.

#68

Having a watch now :slight_smile:

#69

gosh :blush:

what a welcoming feeling. i find myself with some downtime in between two tours and a lot of interesting and exciting llllllll s to catch up on.

yes i am giving a talk/workshop at moogfest this year that is about this exact subject, or at least one of the forms it takes for me.

florist is a project that has always been inspired most by both folk song structure + melodies, and the sounds that synthesizers and sampling can make. the idea is pretty simply making arrangements of “band” songs that break down the guitar-guitar-drums-bass mold. we always approach arranging a song without any preconceived ideas of what timbres or textures or instruments should be involved. some florist songs are very straightforward with a rhythm section and a keyboard part, and some have no real structure at all. you don’t ever have to produce songs the way that you think you’re supposed to. (also reminds me happy belated release day to grouper’s “point of grids” my great musical love)

the ambient music that i am making as emily a. sprague has a little bit of a different approach (at least for now)… my practice with modular instrumental music is to get far from song structure, far from audible lyrics, and far from the way that my brain is operating when i sit down with an acoustic guitar. but still making music that doesn’t feel mechanical, music that feels like some strange creatures play it amongst friends and family in alien places.

at the end of the day, at least for me and us in florist, it all comes down to feeling and doing what comes most naturally. i think if you’re interested to explore the melding of folk music and electronic music, just try doing whatever feels right to you. i’m afraid i wouldn’t even be able to explain the methodology behind it because it really has always just been what we wanted to do because we wanted to combine all the things that we like. i love playing and writing folk songs on acoustic guitar, we all love synthesizers, and we love recording all of that together and just seeing what happens.

my workshop is more focused on thinking of modular synthesizers more or less as organic, ecosystemic instruments that pull away from structure but are (for the way i compose) very natural feeling. it’s really about the philosophy of folk music (or maybe anti folk music lol) in a purely electronic context.

it’s hard to speak so broadly about all of this, but truthfully i make music that incorporates these two things because they are the things that i love the most. gonna send you a pm now and maybe i can answer more specific questions.

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#70

Hey, great to get a response from you! Definitely agree with a lot of what your saying here. I’ll elaborate a little more in the pm :slight_smile:

#71

I’m not sure I’m seeing this one…folk music is often pretty strict in terms of what instruments are involved, the repertoire of songs performed, etc. The eurorack community is hyper-focused on the equipment itself, and the diversity thereof. It seems more similar to the hot rod community than a folk music culture. BUT - my model for folk music is the bluegrass community I grew up in, and the Turkish folk I fell in love with as an adult. I can distinctly remember my dad getting criticism after a bluegrass show for using chords that were too ‘uptown’.
That said - I much prefer the modular community and I sure as hell hope it becomes a folk music culture in the future! Needs another 30 years min to bake IMO.

#72

i’d argue that ‘folk’ ultimately has one of the least ‘restricted’ contexts because it is purely immanent production from the Real and is thus constituitively ungraspable from any musicological or technical standpoint that would provide anything such as a context … one can perhaps at some moment detect consistencies in ‘structure’ or ‘instrumentation’ but anything like an ‘essence’ lies elsewhere… or the essence IS the ‘elsewhere’… in perhaps rejected knowledge that no longer becomes rejected when absorbed/totalized back into musicological conceptions of givenness… i.e. such descriptions do absolutely nothing to get at the ‘folk’ part of folk.

Anyway some examples I mentioned were from the early 70’s. But yes these continual appropriative gestures from Four Tet / Caribou / Floating Points (any more heads on this hydra?), they do not do what they claim…

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#73

I’m not so sure about that.

Speaks to a very real set of class consciousness that is frequently imbued throughout the canon. I wouldn’t dismiss this lightly. Eurorack sort of fails out of the gate, due to the very high cost/barrier to entry.

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#74

I was following you up until here ahaha

#75

I’d be interested as to why…

#76

The next thing I typed was an attempt at explaining…

#77

Harry Smith, for instance. The Anthology is a great artistic achievement, and one can’t help but listen to it in the context of Robert Frank’s The Americans, but therein lies the problem. It totally transforms, and in fact aestheticizes its subject. Would any of the musicians compiled in the Anthology have recognized themselves in how they were presented? Why would their own positions be any less legitimate? Why, indeed, does any of this stuff need recognition much less appropriation from the official art world?

Smith and Frank were complex characters, both had reasons to be considered outsiders. But let’s take a look at Smith’s film work and who else constituted his milieu, there was Oskar Fischinger, Stan Brakhage, Warhol, Brecht and so on. In other words, urban avant-gardists. Frank was compared to Diane Arbus, Lisette Model, people at the time who were pushing the edge of what was possible with photography. Certainly not Frank’s subjects, did they not also take photographs?

Look, Smith is one of my favorite artists in any medium especially as far as Americans go but there are problems that go along with the tremendous achievements including that of the Anthology. I don’t mean to exaggerate my criticisms here it is just a standpoint worth considering.

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#78

But there’s the rub.

To what extent do those from largely privileged, urban and academic contexts who determine the overall ‘structures’ and ‘essences’ of folk music really comprehend the consciousness(es) from which it emerged?

What results when the ‘art world’ gets involved is an aestheticization of the material, an inventive reprisal of such ‘structures’ and ‘essences’ that leaves the economic violence behind such consciousnesses largely unaddressed.

How much “folk art” these days is stored in freeports?

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#79

LOL I think you have misunderstood the use of “uptown” here- as an Appalachian colloquialism this is probably closest to telling someone you think their music is too bourgeoisie.

(EDIT: Sorry, I think I misread you - will leave this clarification in here in case others do not speak hillbilly)

#80

No, I understood you correctly.

Which is to say (in response to @ht73) that the art world is largely irrelevant to folk.

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#81

But then when speaking of ‘structures’ ‘essences’ and the like one invariably falls into the language of that world, especially as understood on a forum such as this and from a standpoint such as that of an academic study. While the art world may be irrelevant to folk that does not absolve the former of a certain ethical responsibility, it is precisely the inscrutable face of the Other that demands such responsibility.

I’m reaching for a concept such as Levinas’ “beyond essence” or “otherwise than Being” and failing badly, so I’ll stop here.