finish free folk? (one "n")

Here's another thread that spun me off that Finnish discussion. Jon suggested that dropping an "n" from "Finnish" and turning it into a verb might not be a bad way to deal with this whole "free folk" think that's been all the rage for the last couple of years. While more or less seconding the feeling, Tony noted that while the genre/trend might die off, there may be some genetic predisposition in the rock beast to periodically "go caveman" as it were...

I think there's a lot of interesting stuff in there. For one thing, there's the whole question of how trends develop on the musical "underground"; despite any protestations of purity and art, I think it's pretty clear that the u-ground is as trend-driven as the mainstream (and the "mainstream alternative", whatever the hell that is; and the "alternative alternative", ditto... another potential topic there I guess). So where do these things come from? It's kind of hard to blame "the media" for making up some fad just to sell things when one's working on this level of obscurity...

There's also the issue of distinguishing the work from the label. I'm pretty sure there's some decent music happening right now that I'm missing b/c the way it's being presented just doesn't make it past my radar... For this genre, I think the glut has begun... Thoughts?

And then there's the "caveman" thing too. I'm all for that! "Primitive... That's how I live..." uh huh. But it does seem to come and go -- fairly visible in the psychedelic 60s as an offshoot of communal jamming, hard to find anywhere in the conservative 80s, now seemingly established as its own genre? At least until it's killed off from within by overpopulation?

Would love to hear views on any of this and beyond... 

Just a sub-thought which didn't fit above but which addresses one of Kevin's points at the top of the page regarding separating the work from the label. One of the primary weapons in the arsenal of a CD-R micro-label seems to be the creation of desire through two things, low availablility (get it now or it will be gone forever!) and the creation of lovingly packaged objects, some of which could be exhibited ta galleries, to trigger whatever it is in our DNA that privileges the object over the content (fetishize me!). I don't think this is necessarily malicious on the labels' part, but I think it is conscious. They are probably as much in love with the creating of these object as we with owning them. And with time on ones hands, and the aforementioned control over all aspect of the means of production at low cost, output can be high. I'm going to resist mentioning labels at this points because I'm interested in raising general issues and not personalising it. In this process, the music can sometimes be secondary, and even generic (hey, let's punch out another project by x, y or z 'cause I've got some cool packaging ideas!).

Outjazz makes what I think is a great point: "The "problem" perhaps is that this music isn´t meant just for consumption - it´s a process, something just-for-now..."

I've been thinking that same thing lately about a lot of the newer small-release music I've been scooping up. It's worth saying I guess that my approach to these kinds of releases (self-released, CDRs, ltd-run, etc.) is not totally separate from their object-status, though if I don't care about the music I generally end up not caring about the object either -- in the long run the objects get interpreted through a kind of "use-value" for me, though the content of the objects is more about aesthetics.

Anyway, as some of these artists and labels seem to be releasing new work nearly constantly, it changes the status of each individual release -- especially since a lot of the music is made up of improvised/on-the-spot/un- (or barely) reconstructed stuff. Compare that with the glory/horror (depending on yr perspective) days of the early/mid 70s when bands would spend a year working on their prog opus with full string sections and sound efx and a week spent getting just the right sound from the grand piano suspended upside down from the ceiling... Punk of course supposedly put the end to such excesses, partly b/c punk singles (that genre's ideal medium) were about "right now!", they were more like a news flash from the street than a carefully crafted meisterwerk. Rap probably had a lot to do with that change in the wider cultural mindset as well through 12" singles and etc.

A while back I read a comment comparing dance/electronic releases with conventional rock approaches (I forget who/where it was, so can't cite, sorry!), noting that since the 60s rock albums have kind of been an analogue to the novel, whereas electronic music was more like a magazine -- fans would check in to see what was up with the latest styles and approaches, which would have changed by the next month, etc. -- so each release was more like a catalog of "what's up now" than a formal, fully finished statement.

So I've been trying to connect all this up with the general aesthetic of a lot of the current u-ground stuff. It seems to have a definite link with the "right-now" and "of-the-moment" rather than the "fully-formed-we-thought-this-out-carefully" approach, more off-the-cuff and perishable musically as well as technologically. At the same time, the anything-goes nature of the music itself gives it some overlap with the kinds of excesses perpetrated by certain prog and psych practitioners -- self-indulgence is more a rule than an exception. Which I'm guessing is part of what frustrates Tony's listening experience -- he wants the wheat not the chaff, but on many releases it ends up mixed-up all willy-nilly, since "this is what the band were doing that week" so it's what ends up on the release.

One could decry this as artistically lazy, or one could go with the flow and enjoy the continuing creative output (and as outjazz noted, the often very cool objects it's presented in). I tend to vaciallate between the extremes. If one has the budget and time to do so, one productive response would be to sift through all the latest stuff, weed out the things that don't make the cut, and compile the good parts in some way (I'm still object-centered enough to like CDRs; haven't hit the iPod world just yet). That can also have the positive effect of making me more a participant in the listening process rather than just a consumer.

Of course, most of us have more important (practically-speaking) things to do than sit around sorting through CDRs, which I guess brings us back to Tony's point and leaves the conundrum unresolved, for me at least... Anyone else have the magic answer?