Another True/False music video! La Operación Jarocha came to Columbia, Missouri from Mexico to busk all over town during the film festival. They played “La Bomba,” - a.k.a. the American people’s cheese of Mexican folk music, the shredded taco-seasoned cheese, if you will - as well as a 10 minute long English and Spanish version of Leonard Cohen’s “La Frontera,” one of the many songs they contributed to the scoring of the documentary film “Who Is Dayani Cristal?” Here’s a fun video of their performance at Sparky’s Ice Cream, complete with badcreepyfunamazing art and the passing of a jawbone.
Sonic Rhetorics
A while back, internet friend-quaintance Jon Stone told me he’d be co-editing an edition of Harlot digital magazine focused on sonic rhetorics. The issue came out this week and I’m looking forward to reading/listening through all of this beautifully curated and collaborated content with titles like “The Sonic History of Eau Claire,” and “A Sonic Memoir of the 1960s.” But here’s an excerpt from a piece by Dan W. Lawrence, a graduate teaching instructor and PhD candidate at Michigan Technological University, considering folk music in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and the use of digital technologies to create communities even when sharing physical spaces is difficult.
Many musicians are turning to the web to escape the traditional and narrow forms of “making a living” in the music business. Downstate Michigander Sufjan Stevens has been an advocate of using BandCamp to sell his work. BandCamp takes an almost insignificant share of the profits for using their digital storefront, which is absolutely liberating when we understand how very little of the profits musicians are given in major record deals.
And for a community of musicians stuck up in a snowy peninsula who have few venues and no presence in physical storefronts, the Internet has promoted an intense resurgence in musical creativity and inspiration and a way to found an identity that isn’t determined by the giants of corporate music.
Perhaps that’s what real folk music does: it doesn’t have to be recorded on reel-to-reel or with your great-grandfather’s banjo to be authentic. These are illusions. It has to come from a people who are fighting to be themselves in opposition to a power that’s trying to take hold of their culture. To make folk, to be folk, is to build a backyard bonfire of cultural autonomy.
That’s who we are as Yoopers: we’re the quiet, reflective winterfolk of the great wooded north. And that’s why we embrace these digital technologies to assist us in the production and sharing of our songs and timbres. But none of us, not a single one of us, must be zealous through overt, unquestioning techno-optimism.
Read the rest of “The Quiet, Wintry North”: Digital Folk of the Upper Peninsula and explore Sonic Rhetorics. It’s not just words! There’s audio and video to sink in to.
Here’s another video from our journey to film buskers at True/False Film Festival 2013 in Columbia, Missouri last month! Scott and Zack of Mountain Animation play fast fiddle, banjo, suitcase music on the streets of NYC (catch them on Brooklyn subway platforms if you’re lucky). I’m pretty sure Scott (fiddle) was in a trance during this song - it was the last of their set and he didn’t look up once or even stop to pull up his pants.
"I had given up on playing music by the time I was fourteen or fifteen years old because I wasn’t a trained musician. I didn’t think I could do it because it seemed like everyone that did it were professionals. That’s why punk rock was so important to me. I realized that here was a space that I could operate in the way I wanted to which would never go over with mainstream people whatsoever. To find that space made so much sense to me."
— Ian MacKaye
We traveled to Columbia, Missouri last weekend to film buskers at True/False Film Festival 2013 (if you didn’t already figure that one out from our photo postings)… and it was f***ing awesome. We met so many people doing inspiring things, from musicians to organizers to artists to filmmakers. The whole town comes together to pull off this independent festival every year, creating a community we were so happy to be apart of, even if only for 4 days.
We’ll be posting performance videos we shot with some of the many, many buskers in town, starting with New Orleans street band Yes, Ma’am.
Help me out. Crowd funding is the jam.
We got to see Zoe performing some rough cuts from this project in Fairfield, IA at the end of her month long Beauty Shop residency. It was great - can’t wait to see how it’s evolved. Support her if you can!
True/False portraits
Fotos from the first few days of True/False! More coming atchya soon.
Some True/False stills!
We interviewed Taylor Ross, one of the founders and organizers of The Beauty Shop, a DIY space and music residency program in Fairfield, Iowa, in late August 2012. You can read some thoughts on this awesome space and community in a previous blog post, written fresh from the road back in October, here.
