ireland
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Yes, it does look like it’s that time of the year again. When the dog days of summer fade into the early turn of fall, I tend to tune into music that falls in between seasons and moods. And I can’t help but to think that it’s actually my favorite kind of music. From Shinsuke…
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It almost seems criminal to listen to Gaia (An Ecological Meditation) by Belfast’s own David “Hopi” Hopkins through headphones or inside (through speakers). Created, initially, as an exercise to create spontaneous, organically-generated music using as “lo-tech” instruments as possible, morphed into David tapping into more of that primordial power found within ancient tools. Drone tubes,…
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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…
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The Bothy Band – 1977 Where do we turn next? That’s the question I imagine many new breed neo-folk musicians were asking themselves then. The rise of Punk, Metal, and New Wave groups, coupled with the further fragmentation of Rhythm away from Blues had many musicians searching for a way to go forward. Take a…
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Horslips – 1976 Let me go back in time for a bit. Back in April, when I had a small kindling to start this blog, I wrote of a track from The Book of Invasions, “Warm Sweet Breath of Love”: “[This track] has everything that could be so right about music. Its all of these…
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Clannad In this brief sojourn to Ireland, for some neo-folk goodies, lets not forget a true behemoth of Celtic music: Clannad. Now famously known for giving us oodles of egregiously bad tin-whistle and keyboard-laden approximations of Irish new age music, and introducing the world to the wonderful Enya (who I’ll defend to no end!)…before, there…
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Planxty As we continue to flesh out England’s neo-folk lineage it becomes ever more important to visit their Irish brethren. A brief sojourn there, around that time especially, starts to bare much more fruit to sample. Groups like Planxty who originally started out as young lads helping older traditional singers, only to find their own…
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Horslips Can you almost feel the finish line? Allow me to go back a year, to a year 1973, when another band of Dubliners such as Horslips, whose name derives from the wordplay of “The Four Poxmen of The Horslypse,” figuratively rained Celtic rock bombs on the masses. Spurred on by the sound of early…
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Van Morrison, his pooch, and Carol Guida November, has gone and past, but its effects still linger. Physically, the body feels the languidity of the environment taking over. Emotionally, the fog of memories and an overabundance of pressures; whether work, relationship, or fraternal, start to weigh on you. Spiritually, you attempt to draw on the…
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Van Morrison – 1968 My track of the day, “Astral Weeks” by Van Morrison, needs little introduction. If, you’ve ever heard the album its off of, you’re more than likely already been shrouded with its all-encompassing feeling and uniqueness. No other folk song, or album, has ever had its kind of mystical worldliness. Most of…
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