spiders

squircular reasoning

@spiders

daydreams, imaginary friends

traitorous fifth column secret fae here to tear apart the human world floorboard by floorboard with my teeth

we are always learning things about the world, and so excited to share them with you

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spiders
@spiders

i think it would be kind of fun to do a tag like #folk friday but it kind of begs the question of what even is folk music? of course the answer is, it's a fake and arbitrary categorization, oftentimes imposed on to music, at other times self-identified. like here's a incomplete list of things that can be described as "folk music"

  • the traditional repertoire of songs of a particular region or cultural group, often of unknown or legendary authorship
  • very old popular songs, where the author is a known person in history, the song or tune having now passed into the public domain
  • recent original music of known authorship, in the style of the previous two categories
  • experimental music ultimately rooted in the previous three categories, often involving significant deviations, subversions, and deconstructions of them, and frequently using unconventional instruments or techniques like synthesizers
  • entirely recent music which prominently utilizes or is primarily made with "folk" instruments, but which isn't even particularly strongly connected to any of the first three categories, such as folk punk (and what is a "folk" instrument? is a guitar a folk instrument? is a clarinet? an oboe? is a piano? can a synthesizer be a folk instrument? a gameboy? is music of an entirely different genre, simply played acoustically folk?)
  • some people call folk music from some (generally nonwhite) places "world music" and i think that's weird. i guess this bullet point isn't really a type of folk music as much as me complaining about a term being weird and kind of othering and newagey.
  • could jazz be folk music? it's kind of its own little culture with its own traditional repertoire, it reminds me of other folk music traditions in a lot of ways.

ultimately i feel like if i made this a tag i regularly posted to so i can share cool music, i would just have to embrace the chaos. mostly i just think it would be fun to share more music that is largely acoustic or else playing with the ideas of traditional folk music in a electronic way. my definition of folk music would just be "whatever album i'm posting about this week".

i just often feel like one of the only people in my friend group who regularly listens to and rights non-electronic music and that's kind of a shame because there's so much to love about folk music and acoustic music.

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DiscoDeerDiary
@DiscoDeerDiary

It's interesting, as a former tin whistler I tend to think of folk music as music that's primarily created to be performed in person and passed from person to person in informal gatherings. Which is to say that it can be written down, audiorecorded, and performed in formal concert halls, but all those are peripheral to core of people getting together and sharing music. Thus while folk music can be plenty virtuosic and complicated, it has a long tail into the simple, the easy, and the inexpensive. A pub song where everyone can sing the chorus. A pentatonic melody that's quick to learn and easy on the voice. A whistle constructed in an afternoon from wooden dowel and cpvc. The low barrier to entry is part of what keeps the tradition alive.

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spiders
@spiders

this is honestly my favorite iteration of folk music, and the one that in an ideal world i would love to see more of and be a part of. it also feels like the one that is most inaccessible to me.

as i've been learning about irish traditional music i have such a strong desire to experience and participate in music sessions, because that feels like so much more the "real" experience than sitting at home stationery in a chair listening to recorded music by myself. it feels like music that's meant to be experienced in the context of getting together, it feels like music that wants to be danced to or played yourself. but because of a quadruple threat of being trans, being autistic, having social anxiety, and the fact that sessions seem to mostly take place in indoor environments and there's still covid, as well as just feeling like an outsider, it just kind of seems terrifying to even show up to one assuming i could find a public one in the first place.

and i guess i could try to do it with my friends but i hang out with like 3 people irl and 1 of them is leaving the area soon, one doesn't really play music, and one is mostly an electronic artist, and these only people i ever really see in person know far less about folk music than even i do. like everybody around me, really both online and in person, mostly listens to electronic music. plus one of my best instruments, guitar, is one i can only play for short periods of time anymore because of chronic pain.

it's like the genre of music i most enjoy is one who's most authentic expression is not particularly available to me as a shut-in who i think most local people kind of don't want to spend time with in person (and probably for good reason). and that kind of sucks! which is a large part of why i'm not very quick to dismiss primarily-recorded folk music as a medium, even though i think that it's not really as preferred to me as in-person stuff.

it's in the spirit of this that a lot of the music i write, especially stuff that i consider to be "folk" or inspired of it, i make it cc-by (though really i don't even care about attribution that much, it's just that band camp doesn't have a cc-0 option). i don't really want to "own" my music in the first place, i want it to be truly for anyone to do with whatever they like.

unrelated, gosh i kind of want to get a tin whistle and try playing it.

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spiders
@spiders

PLEASE

i know very little about it, don't really know how playing in different keys works (is it like the harmonica where i have to buy a different one for every key i want to play? which keys are the best to own?) i also have no idea where to buy one and i don't really want to buy off of amazon if i can avoid it.

also because i'm kind of sensitive to high notes i think it would be kind of cool to get a "low whistle" to play with too. but i would guess those are probably more expensive because they are rarer and also are bigger

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DiscoDeerDiary
@DiscoDeerDiary

Yeah the low whistle is incredibly fun and I find it calming the way it kind of sets sound waves vibrating through my windpipe. I don't know as much about low whistle brands but I've played a Dickson and been pretty satisfied with it. As far as tin whistle brands go, I really like the Jerry Freeman mellow dog: Jerry takes cheap mass-produced whistles and hand-tweaks them to improve the tone and ease of playing. They sell for under like $40 I think? But if you need to go lower I can probably scare up some tutorials on tweaking whistles yourself. As for keys, yeah they're basically like harmonicas. Buying a C and a D whistle will allow you to play along with most of the recordings out there. And then for the learning itself, I think The Online Academy of Irish Music has some free videos online at least for the beginner stages.

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DiscoDeerDiary
@DiscoDeerDiary

Yeah that was always a big issue for me. Used to play in parks and on balconies. I found I really needed to be in a headspace of "no one's bothered by the noises I'm making" in order to get my throat to relax enough to make a good tone.

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jeroknite
@jeroknite

Folk music is music that makes you want to folk someone

It's an unfortunate reality that music genres (as a categorization system) are such a garbage trashpile mess (seemingly moreso than other mediums). It's difficult to define a song's genre under the best conditions, and I don't even know how you'd begin in a situation like this >.<

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