Neo-Folk

[Almenning]

Jan 14, 2019 13:49:41 GMT -5 Pilgrim's Shadow said:

Has anyone listened to the new Death in June album?
Still had not listened to the album fully, but this one is great! 

Classic DIJ vibe, can't complain, but like The Rule Of Thirds it sounds somewhat unremarkable. This track is quite catchy though.

[DieuxDesCimetieres]

Just picked up the new DI6 on CD and vinyl today, but I've been listening to it on Spotify for a while already. I like that for a change Douglas P has re-constructed instead of de-constructed DI6's sound and added some new elements to it. So far I don't feel it contains any classics like both Peaceful Snow and The Rule Of Thirds did, but it's a good album nonetheless.

[toodarkpark]

Could fit this one in a few places, but here is good as any.
 Oh Now Playing 

[DieuxDesCimetieres]

Here's a treat for all European neofolk fans... just bought tickets for me and my wife today.

[Pilgrim's Shadow]

It's been a long long time since i encounrtered an album which was so haunting and capturing.
Could not stop the playing, it is so unique, especially the second part of Arrowood.

novemthree.bandcamp.com/album/untitled-split-with-arrowwood

[emerge]

falconseye.bandcamp.com


Project of Isaac Faulk (Blood Incantation, Wayfarer).

[Niair de Nasqda]

Mar 29, 2019 13:03:22 GMT -5 DieuxDesCimetieres said:

Here's a treat for all European neofolk fans... just bought tickets for me and my wife today.

ROME should come to Spain to play that entire album

[forrestdweller]

[angbandslasthero]

I've been having a nice time looking through this thread, thank you all for the recs!

I don't have much to contribute but I have been enjoying this Falgar album:





Not really familiarized with the artist, or their other works but I thought this was solid listen.

Nice background music while reading

[amnor]

Like nahadoth, I enjoy a lot of the music from the Scandinavian folk revival of the 1990s.  Hedningarna in particular really turned me on, especially Trä which I think is an immortal masterpiece.  That and Väsen's Gront changed my idea of what kind of drummer I wanted to be and what kind of music I wanted to play.

Then of course there's that powerhouse, that monumental magnificence which is Värttinä.

And, nahadoth, I like your accordion playing and I like Smother.

[talvisynth]

Jan 26, 2024 17:07:29 GMT -5 amnor said:

Like nahadoth, I enjoy a lot of the music from the Scandinavian folk revival of the 1990s.  Hedningarna in particular really turned me on, especially Trä which I think is an immortal masterpiece.  That and Väsen's Gront changed my idea of what kind of drummer I wanted to be and what kind of music I wanted to play.

Then of course there's that powerhouse, that monumental magnificence which is Värttinä.

I used to be a lot into Hedningarna, Väsen and Värttinä among many other similar acts back in the day, but personally I wouldn't really put them under this neofolk genre or topic by any means. Bands f.ex. like these now mentioned have their roots, influences and catalysts in actual old/ancient folk music traditions, folklore and historical aspects. These modern time "new-trad." folk groups are a continuum of that cultural heritage, thus, they come from a very different direction. =)

But as these are now up for talks, here's one of the greatest gems and my personal favs from Värttinä (with two Yat-Kha members as guests doing Tuvan throat singing in the background):



One that I used to like a lot as well is Gjallarhorn:



And ofc Garmarna rocks:




Also, here's my own project from the past. I've played kantele now for 22 years, and this was my take in trying to merge our national instrument and the Baltic-Finnic runo-singing with heavier soundscapes. Between the years '02-'06 I recorded a couple of raw demos and one album with some cheap home equipment of that time, and ofc I lacked a lot in skills too, so the outcome ended up quite robust. But the passion was there nonetheless. The lyrics are all my own: I've got master's degree in Finno-Ugric linguistics (Uni. of Helsinki), so my educational background walked nicely hand in hand with my musical interests of those times.



PS. Playlist for the whole album.

[amnor]

Thank you for the clarification.  I'm listening to your kantele project.  I love the kantele.  I don't have one, but I do have a simple two-octave psaltery.  I've been interested in that idea of combining traditional instruments with modern effects like distortion.

For a while I was listening to Murmur Mori, from Italy.  I was interested in their approach of original compositions on medieval instruments, setting the tunes to medieval lyrics which have no surviving written melodies.  They tag their music as "neo-medieval" but only sometimes "neo-folk" and I wonder about the difference.

Béla Bartók studied peasant music, which I should imagine is about the best definition of folk music possible, but the ways he used folk tunes in his compositions, or tried to let the spirit of peasant music inform his original compositions, produced something that I don't imagine would be likely to be labeled neo-folk.  Then also, there was that explosion of "folk music" that got to be so tremendously popular in the US in the 1950s and 60s: I'm well aware that's regarded as very different, but I'm interested in the reasons for such different musical expressions and attitudes sharing apparently similar labels.  I'm interested in the discussions about how much a musician can or should self-identify as belonging to a genre vs a sense of what's correctly defined - gatekeeping.  On the whole I'm more sympathetic to gatekeeping.

I'm not a virtuoso musician.  I'm a decent drummer, but when it comes to playing other instruments and singing, I think of myself as more like a peasant musician.  That's partly why I chose to play mountain dulcimer, even though I'm more interested in playing medieval music and my own compositions on it (which I think I can call neo-folk) than the "old-time" Appalachian music.

[talvisynth]

I'm sensing we're using/understanding the terms a bit differently. Apparently "folk music" has a slightly different tone and meaning depending on people from the US or Europe viewing it. *)

I don't know what your take is on the "neofolk" itself as a genre (or how much you checked the artists/bands mentioned in this thread already), and I must say I'm no expert either on this particular style, but I'd consider this Wiki-article quite helpful: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neofolk

Now with that article in mind, here's what Wiki says about "folk music" just for comparison and seeing the difference: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_music

So in a nutshell, "neofolk" is not to be taken literally, but instead it stands for a certain predominantly European genre and subculture emerged in the post-modern times. "Folk music" on the other hand refers to the actual traditional music cultures around the globe. The 60's "folk music revival" in the US stands as its own thing completely. But ofc, the traditional European music traditions (ie. what I myself understand as "folk music" in the 1st place) have surely influenced and affected both the neofolk genre and the US revival, and naturally, also any post-modern trad. influenced/inspired folk groups. Thus, my point tried to be solely about which terms to use to avoid possible confusion, as there's now been talk about 1) a particular post-modern music genre, 2) a musical phenomenon from some decades ago in US, and 3) traditional music cultures + acts continuing that heritage today.

Béla Bartók - among other things - was a classical composer, who - like many other composers of the time - drew inspiration and elements from traditional music. However, his works were classical music, not "folk" per se. Also, as the scientific fields of research tend to develop over time, I'd recommend searching for some newer sources on ethnomusicology as well.

I used to live and breathe traditional North-European and North-Eurasian music long time ago, I learned the kantele well and still got the skill left, I studied my mother tongue and languages related to it on an academic level and navigated through all the scholar studies I could find about the Finnish and Finno-Ugric culture and traditions, and for years I saw myself among those continuing our cultural heritage via bringing the kantele playing and runo-singing traditions to post-modern times and soundscapes.

But, as time has passed, I've changed a lot both as a person and musician. My "folk years" are long gone and new pages in life have turned. Nowadays I see myself as an explorer and experimenter who just likes to fiddle around with things that give me joy and inspire me to create stuff of my very own.

===================================================

*) To open this a bit more I give a local example: for my generation, the kantele was the first instrument that we played in music classes at school when we were kids. We also read the Finnish national epic Kalevala, and generally we had a lot of cultural history as a part of our school education, traditional music included. My later studies at uni. during adult years have only broadened my knowledge and understanding, but these matters are sort of in our blood already since the start. Ofc, younger generations are more detached from all this as everything's so different nowadays, so I'm very happy that I was born and raised during an earlier kind of world where these matters were more present in everyday life.

[amnor]

Thanks Talvi, this is giving me more to think about and understand better.  Reading the Wikipedia article, it's interesting that it cites Leonard Cohen as a forerunner.  I'm getting a different idea of what the genre is about than I was by browsing the tags on bandcamp.  What does that mean?  

I want to investigate more about how Europeans and Americans approach and understand the genre, as well as old music traditions.  It's true, we generally don't have that continuous connection to old traditions - although as I understand, musicologists have shown a continuity from folk music of the England-Scotland border to the Appalachian region.  But that's not the right "flavor" of antiquity or fantasy for a lot of American tastes.  I guess since our culture as a whole is so disrupted we often hunger for something that sounds ancient. Maybe some school children in northern Minnesota get to play the kantele; I grew up in southern Minnesota and we played recorders and autoharps.  One of my classmates. whose family was German, played the accordion.  When I started playing mountain dulcimer I listened to Jean Ritchie's instructional record from 1964 I think, and I got chills.

I live in Utah, which was built up by people of mostly British and Scandinavian descent, but the social mechanisms of the settlement shaped our music traditions along different lines.  I haven't heard much musical development or experimentation around here building on that.  I've sometimes been involved in a local group which seems to want to act neopagan (several of them show an interest in occultism.  I myself read Tarot cards and maybe I could consider myself an occultist, but I think it means something a bit different to me).  But they don't write their own songs: they sing Scandinavian, Slavic, and Balkan folk songs - as well as a few medieval Spanish songs that are definitely Christian - but since they're Marian, I think the singers like to appropriate them as pagan and as some kind of statement against the majority religion here.  Maybe I'm being unfair. But I've also seen people try to take up practices of Appalachian or Pennsylvania folk magic as a "pagan" thing, even though those traditions were firmly rooted in Christian belief.

Maybe I'm straying too far from the subject.  In any case, my involvement with that group probably skewed my idea of what "neo-folk" means... well, that and browsing tags on bandcamp.

Thanks again for your patient and thoughtful writing.  I appreciate reading your perspective.

[Hoz Seca]

Hello all! Love to find this topic, found many new interesting references i didn't know before (like Steeleye Span or Neun Welten). Just leaving here some other links in exchange, some more focused on the pure 'folk' part of the term, others looking more at the 'neo' side:

Virrentakoja:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCDWcbLw5fk

Véronique Chalot:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxN15CmmK9U&list=PLBzNs-4_ekvaEEeFRKxYQCsTE2TIgXvjF&index=8

Lassi Logrén:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4NTaABLpvM&list=PLBfDjSgRyF0EakHv_z3V4WcdWy3eqywv3&index=3

Vévaki:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aWMF7rIVsg

And last, hope you could forgive a bit of self-promotion. Last Hoz Seca EP is more focused on the west mediterranean traditions, here's a bandcamp link in case you want to take a listen as well:
hozseca.bandcamp.com/album/jai-vu-le-loup