Lammas Night's Laments

Diggedy Derek

Stray Dog
Recently I've been listening to this fairly staggering 14CD compilation of wyrd folk stuff. There's your Wickerman and Pentangle stuff on there, but lots of more unusual stuff too.

Really wonderful. Anyone else encountered this? I promised to do a copy for jwd, but I keep on losing one the CDs.
 

mms

sometimes
Diggedy Derek said:
Recently I've been listening to this fairly staggering 14CD compilation of wyrd folk stuff. There's your Wickerman and Pentangle stuff on there, but lots of more unusual stuff too.

Really wonderful. Anyone else encountered this? I promised to do a copy for jwd, but I keep on losing one the CDs.

that looks amazing - always looking for some bands that extend this thing as the wicker man is my fave soundtrack
i heard a band called red dawn chorus who sounded like boc crossed with popul vuh/pentangle - they were amazing but they split before they put anything out

glad you bought this up as i'm not impressed with the newer folk stuff
got an lp by a lass called josephine foster in the other day and although it s nice its the most indulgent privilidged retro thing ever - more impressed by coco rosie but you would hope artists would move the sound on a bit past their sandle wearing rice cake munching coseted hippy daydreams - else the past just gets treated in the same way as boring idiots treat any music from outside their country .That whole daft world music mentality
 
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Diggedy Derek

Stray Dog
Yeah, I'm kinda in the same ballpark. The new Devandra album was playing in our shop, and was very very nice but somehow entirely pointless.

I do love loads of the Finnish stuff though.
 

mms

sometimes
Diggedy Derek said:
Yeah, I'm kinda in the same ballpark. The new Devandra album was playing in our shop, and was very very nice but somehow entirely pointless.

I do love loads of the Finnish stuff though.

yeah i don't want to kill this one off - there is another thread on animal collective going on afterall
;)


that cd set looks impossible to get hold of - what are the highlights and why?
 

Grievous Angel

Beast of Burden
Two quick points:

On the site it says: The term 'wyrd folk' was originally used by musician Tim Renner of 'Stone Breath' during the late 1990s to describe a music being made from the sixties (and continuing to date) which brings together elements of folk / acoustic music and psychedelic influences. I think the starting point for this style is Planxty, particularly Words And Music. The wife's had this for years and I used to listen to it with my mate Bill who was a 60s original and was later big on the trance scene. Planxty is wonderful.

And I played in a wyrd folk band in 1987/88.
 

appleblim

Well-known member
i came across that site a few years ago and was told that those comps. weren't available any more....where did u get them derek?

love a lot of that stuff......sod 'New Weird America' (what a horrid name for a genre!).......

pretty obvious i know, but 'gather in the mushrooms' on castle and 'folk is not a......' by votel are both good sources for this stuff.....couple of dodgy selections on both tho...its easy to mistake a joni mitchell wannabe for the real deal just cos her record is rare i reckon.....

pentangle and steeleye span were the way in for me ('hail to see the king' by steeleye is a magical record) but since then i've foraged a little deeper....

Anne Briggs 'Time Has Come', and her early works on Topic, The Albion Country Band 'No Roses' , Linda Perhacs 'parralellograms' , the new Comus re-issue on Castle all spring to mind as fairly easy to find great examples of this kind of stuff.....

i heard Wizz Jones at a mates once and remember him being amazing, apparently a big influence on the Jansch/Graham/Renbourn axis.....is the track on there any good derek?


the Tudor Lodge LP is actually good too, despite being known mainlyfor it's rarity.....Mellow CAndle always sounded pretty naff to me, tho its ages since i heard that album.....i thought at the time it was just another example of rarity equating to greatness in collectors minds.....

inspiring stuff tho eh? i love the way it exisited so far from the mainstream, and yet is still having a real influence....gives u faith for the future....
 

KaBuT

Member
After a couple of weeks listening to Paul Giovanni's Wicker man sountrack and far too many Watersons LPs i'm up for listening to as much folky stuff as I can get my hands on.
 

KaBuT

Member
Just had a poke around that site and that 14CD set seems to be exactly what I'm looking for - If someone makes me a copy i'll happily make another one or two (28cds!) to send out.

Please.....
 

Diggedy Derek

Stray Dog
I got it from a mate who grovelled with someone via email to burn him some copies.

Been thinking about this, and I'm willing to do a few copies for people here, but not too many! If I do some for mms, appleblim, kabut and baboon, perhaps they can do some for anyone else who wants them. I'm only going to do CDs though, you lots can download your own covers. Plus, I on;y have CDs 1-12, although they apparently are the best ones.

Now, let's talk about the music. As regards mms' question about what are the highlights and why, there really aren't any names I can pick out of there as being better than the rest. It's all pretty good, and some of it is amazing, but there's no real differences of approach that I can spot. Wizz Jones wasn't a track I particularly loved- it had a bit of a rambling quality to it, too many chord changes and fancy rhymes.

I guess that suggests what's good about the other stuff on the compilation (a couple of highlights being Owen Hand's The Garden and Broselmaschine's Godanken - who knows who these guys are...)- it's very succinct, understated folk music with just the slight touch of weirdness/wyrdness. So you get long, fluent songs with just a slight electric bass underneath, or a distorted guitar, or an echoed flute or whatnot. But the performers are really INTO the folkyness of it, chanting along and emoting weirdly, it's utterly atmospheric and beautiful. You get the sense that all these artists had gone into communes and given up on rock music, but created something really mature in the process. Well wrought wyrdness.

Hold tight for these compilations for those that requested them.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Diggedy Derek said:
Been thinking about this, and I'm willing to do a few copies for people here, but not too many! If I do some for mms, appleblim, kabut and baboon, perhaps they can do some for anyone else who wants them. I'm only going to do CDs though, you lots can download your own covers. Plus, I on;y have CDs 1-12, although they apparently are the best ones.

Auch, you're an absolute gent. I'm willing to pass on some more should anyone else want them.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
As for the music, sounds fantastic. Trying to think of anything I already have (save the Wicker Man s/t) that compares....my research into wyrd folk suggests things such as 'Pentangles' and 'Desertshore' as prime examples, but I'm not sure if they fit exactly into my idea of the genre...

Oh, and Derek (or Diggedy, depending on how you prefer to be addressed), in recompense for your generosity, please make me aware of any music you're looking for and I'll see if I can help you out (as far as 'rare' stuff goes, don't have THAT much, but a fair bit of esoterica in Miami bass, desi, grime etc).
 

Diggedy Derek

Stray Dog
Thanks guys, and nice one for that link to the compiler himself. That's a really interesting read. I like doing this sort of stuff when I can get my act together, which isn't that often (where's the fourth Lamas CD, here or at the girlfriends? arghhh!).

Is MP3 good for people? That's a good idea, that. If it's no good for people, I'll just burn these babies. Off topic slightly, but The Wickerman really is an astonishing film isn't it? Often with cult films, they're merely "good", but The Wickerman is so poignantly of it's time it transcends mere cultdom, and is possibly one of the most resonant British films of the 70s. One of those films that, because it's dated slightly- ie the emphasis on religion- that makes it all the more poigant, something we've left far behind, even though the movie is only 30 odd years old. In fact, to ramble further, it's one of the most moral films ever I think, a real fire and brimstone encounter, even more so than films of the 50s, precisely because they didn't have that powerful sense of an conflict between morality and amorality that you get in this film.

If you haven't seen it, you really need to, although I'm sure people have said that to you before.
 

Diggedy Derek

Stray Dog
Ah, I've just stumbled across a track on here called Nottanum Town (this version by Fairport Converntion), which is of course the track Dylan adapted for Masters Of War! This is the kind of great thing you discover with these compilations!
 

Grievous Angel

Beast of Burden
I can't quite believe that I still haven't seen the Wicca Man... :)

Few comments on the piece:

But I had gone too far and now the mythical islanders of The Wicker Man were flooding my in-box wanting me to join them. I wasn’t prepared to be anyone’s sacrifice…
Unlikely to be Wiccans per se doing this.
very nice, tea drinking pagans not one of whom cavorted naked under a full moon
Pagans no doubt but not Wiccans...
 
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