EVERY GENRE PROJECT - October 17 - Avant-Folk

Genre of the Day - Avant-Folk

Album of the Day - Mount Eerie by The Microphones (2003)

Avant-folk slots in as another genre entry that exists somewhere suspended between a vast, communal musical past and an unconstrained future, ascending past those inevitabilities and basking the full creative freedom of the present moment. Today’s genre draws upon both visionary, electronic, and completely deviational music as well as the wealth of folk traditions that brought our conception of music to its present, a blending of human attributes with what lies on the next plane of our musical communicative abilities.

Avant-folk emerged almost soon as folk as a phenomenon rather than just music from a particular cultural background did. Folk as a defined genre, entailing traditional song structure heavily relying on guitar instrumentation, only arose in the US around the 1950s. Folk quickly intersected with the psychedelic movement, and weirder, wilder takes on its traditionally-inclined rootsiness bubbled up, imbuing folk with a renewed, colorful naturalism harkening back to olden pastoral days but also optimistically looking towards what seemed a promising future of love’s free exchange. It was often European artists whose cross-Atlantic purview produced early avant-folk takes, such as by Nico, Brigitte Fontaine, and Catherine Ribeiro + 2 Bis. 

Freewheeling and whimsical, avant-folk lifts its roots up into a floating state, transmuting folk ideas into whatever the artist sees fit; all manners of rhythm, song structure, instrumentation, or sonic contrasts can roam freely. The label avant-garde indicates that artists are noticeably breaking away from preconceived structures of a genre; avant-folk has always meant to stand out from and widen people’s view of folk music. Folk is rife for avant-garde, existentialism questions to begin with: what constitutes folk? Is it a sense of the people’s proprietary ownership over the music? Does it lie in its musical and instrumentation qualities, unvarnished and made by instruments you could easily reach for? Avant-folk raises an eyebrow at this relativity and smiles as it creates sound collages of what can be easily identified as folk with experimental sound design, drone usage, and highly intense theoretical work in minimalism and other areas of modernist music. 

The Microphones’ sonically expeditionary trek up Mount Eerie requires a hefty pair of musical hiking shoes to navigate its jagged cracks and steeply sloping ascents, but the view at the top is magnificent. Soft microblipping that gradually and almost imperceptibly inflates up into into crashes of drums and horns in “I. The Sun” akin to Joni Mitchell’s experimentalist “The Jungle Line.” After we hear the star explode into existence, the gentle folk strums afterwards in “II. The Solar System” almost feel like a joke, though we continue to an intergalactic journey. “III. Universe” is a genuinely beautiful existentialist odyssey, Phil Elverum’s vocal delivery primitivist, earnest, and wise as he contemplates circularity before the ominous, gripping suite at the summit of “IV. Mount Eerie.” Its electronic, folk, and drone landscapes simultaneously feel as if they always existed, or maybe they just appeared; it’s the tallest recorded peak of avant-folk capturing the best of both possibilities.