published under the headline "Free Shtick"
Village Voice, October 25th 2005
by Simon Reynolds
Call it the “what it’s all about” factor. See, I’m digging this free-folk stuff as pure sound, but the movement’s unwritten manifesto is harder to grasp, and for me that’s always an impediment to buying into a scene wholeheartedly. Perhaps that’s why I literally don’t buy it (the f-folk scraps I have were all acquired by, erm, other means, shall we say). Just as well, maybe: Mapping this genre properly would entail a financial bloodbath, given its norm of incontinent productivity. Just check the intimidating discographic delta—cassettes, lathe-cut 7-inch singles, 3-inch CDs, side projects, and collaborations galore (see woodenwand.sinkhole.net)—that’s issued from a single group, New York–turned-Knoxville-based Wooden Wand and the Vanishing Voice, during their two years of existence. This season alone sees Wooden Wand’s solo debut and two re-releases of small-run vinyl-only albums (Xiao and Buck Dharma), while an all-new Vanishing Voice full length, The Flood, is due this month.
“Pure sound” assessment first: “Free folk” verges on a misnomer. As genre expert Jon Dale points out, it’s a highly recombinant style whose warp’n’weft includes threads of not just traditional music but West Coast acid rock, prog, free jazz, Dead C–style noise, musique concréte, and “outsider” minstrels such as Jandek. Xiao‘s best tracks, “Caribou Christ in the Great Void” and “Return of the Nose,” resemble nothing so much as the raga-rock trance and narcotic wah-wah torpor of “We Will Fall” by the Stooges, while Dharma‘s “Satya Sai Baba Scuppety Plays ‘Reverse Jam Band’ ” is a strange shimmer-slither of a keyboard étude, like Morton Subotnik turning into the Blob. If Vanishing Voice have a standard mode at all, it’s long pieces like Xiao‘s “Weird Wisteria Tangles Carrion Christ But Intends No Harm” (and yes, the track titles are another stumbling block to full-on fandom) or The Flood‘s 14-minute “Satya Sai Sweetback Plays ‘Oxblood Boots.’ ” Cantering cavalcades of barely integrated instrumentation (rustling bells, tunelessly parping woodwinds, Cale-like drones, listless percussion, thrumming steel-cable bass drones, and so forth), these tracks either dissipate into oxbow lakes of abstraction or gradually accumulate disparate jetsam into tripnotic juggernauts. Still, we’re not exactly talking “Scarborough Fair,” and the only truly folky aspect is a slight bias toward sounds of acoustic provenance.
But what’s it all about, Alfie? I fear that Wand (real name, James Toth) hits the nail on the head with his self-description as “spiritual dilettante.” The f-folk genre gestures at the shamanic and visionary, but in this easygoing way that feels not so much syncretic as plain eclectic. Isn’t the spiritual path actually hard work, though, a discipline? When Vanishing Voice overtly invoke the transcendental, with the group’s intermittent female vocalist Satya Sai Baba Scuppety ululating lines like “I sought the truth so long” in her piercingly pure-toned voice, the mystical-me vibe verges on schlock. In Dharma‘s “Wicked World,” Toth mutters like a bum/seer whose desolation-row jeremiad gets ignored by passersby. His solo album exhibits a similar penchant for parable and prophecy (Toth’s a Scripture fan) but the accompaniment is pared-back minstrelsy elevated by an exquisite attentiveness to the creak-glistened textures of semi-acoustic guitar. “Spiritual Inmate” distills an f-folk tendency that can be traced back to its ancestor, the Beat movement: condescension toward the benighted square, who’s “passing so much beauty/passing on so much beauty” because he’s, like, imprisoned by being “obsessed with protection.”
A follow up post on Blissblog
Everything is glam rock performative enactment of the authentic free folk Wooden Wand
kid shirt weighs in with some interesting thoughts in
semi-response to my wooden wand piece, some cool compare-and-contrast vis-a-viz
grime... his idea of free folk being about wanting to disappear is intriguing
(theory triggered unconsciously by "vanishing voice" maybe?), yes
yes, makes sense: a bourgeois-bohemian impulse to get lost, to unmake the most
of yourself, (which makes the Animal Collective's "You Don't Have to Go To
College" the closest point at which the scene gets to writing that
unwritten manifesto) .... tune in, turn on, drop out... dissipate and
radiate.... And some of his comments about WW&VV made me think the closest
parallel/precursor to them is the Butthole Surfers (think about the pastoral
weirdness on Hairway to Steven, the cover of "Hurdy Gurdy Man"; the
Living Theater-esque stageshow; also the thread of classic rock pastiche
running through the buttholes c.f. WW's comments re. deep purple, jefferson
airplane, etc etc), and the Buttholes would have been something I'd have
analysed in those terms, a middle class youth stepping off the career track
(gibby trained as an accountant), laying waste to their own potential as a sort
of proto-political act of refusal
i was talking to jon dale (who may be on the verge of
staging a reappearance act) about this, he having his own dissensions with the
piece, and i realised the stumbling block for me is actually not the unwritten
manifesto aspect at all, cos when all that stuff says implicit and latent you
can groove along with the trippy untethered soundswirl; no the stumbling block
specifically with WW&VV is when they do write the manifesto, or at least
get into spelling out the "what's it all about" too literally --
either in the lyrics (Toth intoning about how "the mystical power of the
beautiful flower has turned sour”, or Satya Sai Baba Scuppety ululating about
how "I sought the truth so long… all things must pass away… there is one
path to choose” or visioning “a land of wondrous beauty that far exceeds my
wildest dreams/where the air is pure and clean”) or just the mode of address:
invocational, i-be-the-prophet. Cos, for me as
not-ready-to-sign-up-for-membership-in-the-movement bystander-onlooker, it's
like you're suddenly put on the spot: you either have to say "yes, i
totally buy it, this guy is a visionary" or you hold back. and for a whole
bunch of reasons possibly more to do with me than the guy's performance, I hold
back from that suspension of disbelief. Woebot described the Wand solo album as
"more Bonnie Prince Billie" than the group's stuff, and that's it
exactly, cos Will Oldham' another one where I don't quite buy the persona,
there's a "you're kidding me, right?" element.
With "performative enactment of the authentic", I
guess what I’m suggesting or playing with is simply the idea that nothing is
“real” once it takes place before a microphone or on a stage (how could it
be?). Everything is glam rock, it's all artifice, the make-believe dependent on
suspension of disbelief (bothon the performer's part and the audience's). So
Humble Pie, despite being very much the kind of shabby blues-bore drivel that
prompted glam rock into being, were no less contrived, absurd, or even
grotesque, than Roxy Music. Everything is glam-rock too because it all works
through glamour, of which there are many more kinds than "glam" or
Hollywood (the glamour of anti-heroism or "ordinary joe" is still the
stuff of fantasy, from Springsteen to Mike Skinner). Glamour in its original
sense--witchy enchantment--might be a big part of free-folk's allure; the
mise-en-scene that is conjured by the music works through exoticisim and
mystique--you imagine a raggle-taggle commune on the periphery of society,
banging instruments in some Finnish wildland or Vermont grove (or with the
ancestor-influences: Incredible String Band and extended family in the woods,
Vashti in her caravan, etc).
All the things that Kid Shirt lists, seemingly to refute the
idea that there is a manifesto or needs to be a manifesto to the f-folk scene,
do actually amount to a charter of principles, albeit quite diffuse and
low-key. Not a manifesto in the sense of bulleted declarations and exhortations
to be shouted in bold and capitals from a soapbox, but certainly a cluster of
tendencies-verging-on-tenets:
-- looseness and spontaneity, a be-here-now approach to the
jam
-- flux and mutability
-- shifting line-ups, collaborations, nucleus-groups orbited
by solar dust-rings of freefloating occasional participants
-- trance states, creative automatism, music-as-ritual
rather than "show"
-- tribalistic/family/commune-like image (and often
structure)
-- "I am the music. There is no
separation"--Heather Leigh Murray
-- “it’s all music, man” as overtly stated principle of
all-gates-open fusion
-- yet at the same time countered by very definite zones of
non-influence and attractions to other areas; bias to the organic, the
acoustic, the hand-played
then when you factor that in with the hand-made, cottage
industry aspect: the lathe-cut vinyl, the small-run pressings and odd formats
(painted and decorated cassettes etc), the attempt to de-commoditise the
commodity while also re-enchanting it, making it more precious and treasurable;
you see an impulse to escape and transcend commerce that echoes the original
folk movement's (in both US and UK) drive to reject the commercialism of
popular culture music.
yes it does amount to a taggable worldview/philosophy, one
that's in the continuum of the hippies, the beats (Woebot nailed it all a while
back with his Are You a Beatnik or an Avant-Yob thesis, plus afterthoughts).
and a subculture too, there's strong elements of homology between sound,
clothing, discourse, economics
it reminds me a tiny bit of psy-trance: the syncretic
spirituality (psy-trance's postmodern tribal package of Tao, Hinduism, Zen
Buddhism, Hatha Yoga, Mayan cosmology, wicca, and alien abduction theories),
the trancey-trippy music, the internationalism and dispersed rhizomatic scene
structure, the cult of the great outdoors, the freak image
the musical coordinates for psy-folk are a lot cooler than
psy-trance, of course, but i reckon that both scenes are expressions of a
recurring and perennial syndrome, something that is
almost a structural fixture (if not quite requirement) of
Western society... the children of affluence who become see through their
parents values and the spiritual void of a life based around
ambition/acquisition, become disenchanted with its lack of enchantment and try
to build another path that will re-enchant the world ... you could probably
even trace the impulse back through the centuries... here's a chunk from the
Sex Revolts on those Medieval gnostic heretics and millenarian cultists the
Free Spirits:
"The 12th Century initiated a period of unprecedented
prosperity, just as in the post-World War Two West. But this materialism
prompted a counter-reaction, in the shape of a new class of voluntary poor who
renounced riches in search of spiritual values. These downwardly mobile
bohemians formed 'a mobile, restless intelligentsia' who went 'on the road',
following the trade
routes and preaching a contempt for wordly things. Like the
beats, the Free Spirit brethren divided the world into square and hip, a 'crude
in spirit' majority and a 'subtle in spirit' elite who could access the Divine
Oneness in this life rather than having to wait until the afterlife. "
In the end though, I have to give the f-folkers a cautious
"big up ya collective chest", if only for being one of the few things
in the last five years (and i know the scene's got longer-back roots than that,
but then so's grime: as fruitions, both are really Noughties phenoms when it
comes down to it,) that actually amounts to a thang--a movement/scene, with
something approaching a manifesto (however buried and vague, which is in itself
in keeping with the manifesto, after all), plus accompanying canon it's pulled
together for itself (interesting to me that they leave out the straighter
Britfolk-Steeleye, Carthy, Tabor, Ashley Hutchings--in favour of the kooky
stuff; again, makes me think it's Vashti's biography--and precisely her
commercial failure--that inspires as much as her music per se). The whole
package is something I can feel the pull of, to an extent, but well, I doubt I
could fully get on board.
