neo-folk

Kate Bush: Breathing (1980)

2015/01/21

Kate Bush with her Fairlight CMI Sampler. The 80’s presented a perfect turning point for neo-folk music. More so, it signalled a turning point for truly one of the eras pioneers. Fresh off her wildly successful first tour, she was experiencing for once great tumult with how to go onwards with her career. Now known…
Steve Hillage: Garden of Paradise (1979)

2015/01/19

Miquette Giraudy and Steve Hillage Soundtracking a true visual experience of sorts, “Garden of Paradise” from Steve Hillage’s Rainbow Dome Musick stirred many a visitor’s brains when it debuted looping at London’s massive proto-New Age Mind- Spirit-Body Festival. Listeners who just wandered through booths filled with info from vegetarian, vegan, yoga, shamanic, and lords knows what…
Bert Jansch: Avocet (1979)

2015/01/16

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: The Sun in My Eyes (1979)

2015/01/14

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…
(Album of the Month) December 2014: Kate Bush – The Kick Inside (1978)

2015/01/12

Kate Bush – 1978 Its taking me a while to suss out how I was going to give due diligence to an artist I admire as highly as Kate. One of the wonders of December is that its a month so long, and at times so cold, that you settle into the warmth of comforting…
Paul McCartney: Mull of Kintyre (1977)

2015/01/10

Paul McCartney at Mull of Kintyre Let me set the stage for you. Sometime in 1977, EMI and a young 19-year old artist tussled over what single to release and launch her career with. Finally released in January 1978, few expected how absolutely out of the norm a song like this would take the whole…
Duncan Browne: Wild Places (1978)

2015/01/08

Duncan Browne – 1978 Someone who turned to many places and never found the audience he merited was Duncan Browne. When we last left him in 1973, he had released one of the most sophisticated neoclassical folk albums ever. Neo-Romantic but modern, perhaps too modern for its day that self-titled release languished in the forgotten…
The Bothy Band: Old Hag You Have Killed Me (1977)

2015/01/06

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…
John Martyn: Black Man at Your Shoulder (1977)

2015/01/03

John Martyn – 1977 Talk about a meeting of worlds. At the intersection of Echo and Delay, in 1977 met John Martyn and Lee “Scratch” Perry. By then, they had treated listeners from both of their traditions to mind expanding sounds that stretched and blurred the lines of roots music. In England, John’s treatment of…
Al Stewart: Year of the Cat (1976)

2014/12/22

Al Stewart – 1976 You all know or have heard Year of the Cat right? It was nearly four decades ago that this single became neo-folk steam train that could. Little things about its creation distilled in a wonderfully universal way nearly all the transformation, and rungs that neo-folk had taken by then. You hear…