astral-folk

  • Rather than belabor you with nonsense trying to rectify itself as a theme, I’d rather rectify something I didn’t do last year: share my special hour-long Halloween mix for LYL Radio. For those that tuned in, you were treated to one of my deepest loves: British Folk Rock.  Today I’m taking it a bit further.

  • In these dark and foreboding times, it’s important to latch on to things that provide hope. Maybe that’s why the music of Poland has seemed so striking to me lately. The vast majority — at least the majority which remains unheard and “out-there” — of this music was the product of unimaginable restraints. Before the rise of Glasnost and Perestroika,…

  • It bears repeating: nostalgia is a powerful thing. When used for nefarious purposes, we get horrible people like Donald Trump trading on delusionary illusions. When used for sentimental reasons, well, that’s when lines blur, and comfort starts to go through that inarticulate process of myth-making. What starts out as a simple idea, present a reflection on…

  • Let’s blur boundaries. Let’s begin with English singer-songwriter John Martyn’s fascinating ode to the music of Jamaica.

  • jansch

    There’s a struggle whenever you try to invoke something. How exactly do you communicate to someone something they have to imagine? There was a time when naturalist John Audubon had to struggle with art critics who looked down upon his realistic depiction of birds. Painting with watercolors, chalks, and pastels he’d distill to the bare…

  • Sally Oldfield – 1979 Something that struck me the first time I encountered Sally Oldfield’s Water Bearer was its brilliant album cover. By combining something real, a staged photoshoot of Sally idling next to a waterfall in some forgotten Irish glen, with an altered color scheme that blends objects and edges to mimic some kind…

  • Nigel Mazlyn Jones Nigel Mazlyn Jones, now this is another great artist waiting to be rediscovered. His album 1976’s Ship to Shore introduced a thoroughly unique take on the singer-songwriter genre. He was part of the second wave of progressive folk styles that Roy Harper, John Martyn, and Al Stewart sorta introduced earlier in the…

  • John Martyn (Danny Thompson in the back) If John’s fans thought that he had gone out there for Solid Air, imagine the look on their faces the first time they heard Inside Out. Now trekking further beyond what any artist was doing at that time, John amped up his experimental side until it broke from its seams.…

  • John Martyn When you hear the first percussive taps of John Martyn’s acoustic on “Solid Air”, you know this is something special. Written about and dedicated to his friend Nick Drake, it represented something even more beguiling, a fork in the road. His friend was in the throes of depression, to the point that any…

ambient art pop art rock balearic brazilian electro-acoustic england environmental music experimental folk-rock fourth world Funk fusion japan jazz minimalist neo-folk neoclassical new age walearic