Archive for Free Folk

No-Neck Blues Band -NNCK Meets the Clear People with Mystery Gypped: Live at Ken’s Electric Lake [LIVE] (Locust) 2007

Posted in Free Folk, hippies, Music, No-Neck Blues Band, Sun City Girls with tags , , on September 10, 2009 by noisenoisenoise

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A dilemma. I hate Hippies. No-Neck Blues Band are hippies. I like No-Neck Blues band. Did you see this lot in the Wire. Too many ginger beards I think. Improvisation? Meh. There is a very fine line between inspired improvisation and a two thumbs down clusterfuck. The great thing about this record is that they really hit the mark. No-Neck Blues Band sound kinda like Sun City Girls meets Jackie-o Motherfucker  with the Dead C fucking around at the edges.  This record spans two discs and rather than name the tracks, they split the continuous  improvisation into sections. There are eight sections in all and the music can run the gamit of pastoral, avant garde, experimental, tribal drum circle and drugged out jam band but for the most part No-Neck Blues Band occupy the very left side of the whole free-folk thing. I like it. I don’t know if I need much of it but it’s worth tracking down.

Jackie-O Motherfucker – The Blood of Life (Fire) 2009

Posted in Free Folk, Jackie-O Motherfucker, Music with tags , , on May 2, 2009 by noisenoisenoise

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With a name like Jackie-O  Motherfucker I was expecting a lot of things. What I wasn’t expecting was a band that sounds like  Sir Richard Bishop’s musicianship crossed with Earth’s recent pastoral bleakness. But this is in fact the best comparison I could come up with to describe the melancholic,folk ambiance of Jackie-O Motherfucker. This is just sublime and sometimes I need to take a rest from noise and listen to something as peaceful, mellow and clever  like The Blood of Life. A great deal of this new weird folk stuff I can do without but this bunch of improvising troubadours are an unexpected and welcome addition. I’d really like to hear from anyone who knows a bit more about the band. Is this sort of stuff representative or have some of their earlier releases been  a bit weirder? I know very little about the band and this record is a live-to-tape show they did for a Dutch radio station. It’s a great antidote for all the Merzbow I’ve been listening to today. I recommend it.

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