Punk Aesthetics and New Folk

Joanna Newsom, Will Oldham (a.k.a. 'Bonnie Prince Billy'), and Devendra Banhart are perhaps the best known of a generation of independent artists who use elements of folk music in contexts which are far from traditional. New folk artists challenge our notions of 'finished product' through their recordings, intrinsically guided by practices and rhetoric inherited from punk. Encarnacao provides detailed analysis of recorded works, underlining the point that the performative traces that define the immediacy of punk are equally present in folk, and find expression in the innovative and intuitive forms and sounds of new folk.

John Encarnacao is a composer, performer and educator. Recent projects include albums with song-based groups The Nature Strip and Warmer, and improvising trio Espadrille, as well as commissions for the theatre and chamber music. He lectures in music performance, composition, and musicology at the University of Western Sydney. An archive of John's recordings is being built at johnencarnacao.bandcamp.com.

Contents: Introduction; Part 1 Frames: New folk and analysis; Institutional factors and the writing of history; Genre: folk and punk. Part 2 The Old Plank Road: Folk antecedents: the Anthology of American Folk Music; Folk and rock antecedents: the 1960s; Punk aesthetics 1: outsider music; Punk aesthetics 2: lo-fi. Part 3 New Folk: First stirrings; 'Freak folk'; Free folk; Conclusion; Bibliography; Discography; Index.