The opening of Neo Folk at the Lithuanian Club in North Melbourne brought many artists into a lounge room setting to enjoy the handmade and DIY to a vinyl backbeat. Julian Holcroft's catalogue essay talks about 'folk transitions' like the folk comedy The League of Gentlemen and the plastic folk of Gershwin. He writes, 'If folk transitions can question and examine aspects of contemporary life and create fertile ground for the development and renewal of a new cultural aesthetic, then Neo Folk is the first step in an exploration of different concepts of folk -- an opening up of possibilities that reintroduces the notion of the artist as a new kind of ethnographer of popular culture'. It's a fresh approach, but there seems to be something missing. According to Craft Victoria's 'neo folk' officionado, they haven't yet made the transition to social concern that occurred to American folk during the Vietnam war. Where's the message?
Monday, 5 December 2005
Neo folk revival
The opening of Neo Folk at the Lithuanian Club in North Melbourne brought many artists into a lounge room setting to enjoy the handmade and DIY to a vinyl backbeat. Julian Holcroft's catalogue essay talks about 'folk transitions' like the folk comedy The League of Gentlemen and the plastic folk of Gershwin. He writes, 'If folk transitions can question and examine aspects of contemporary life and create fertile ground for the development and renewal of a new cultural aesthetic, then Neo Folk is the first step in an exploration of different concepts of folk -- an opening up of possibilities that reintroduces the notion of the artist as a new kind of ethnographer of popular culture'. It's a fresh approach, but there seems to be something missing. According to Craft Victoria's 'neo folk' officionado, they haven't yet made the transition to social concern that occurred to American folk during the Vietnam war. Where's the message?
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actually what I said was that it will be interesting to see if this movement, so attached to music and counter culture becomes politicised by the Iraq war in the same way that the american folk movement of the 60's did as a result of the Vietnam war, because at the moment intentional issues based practice seems to be marginal.
just for the record.
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