Are you ready for a high-concept 112-track sampledelic glitch-pop album about, among other things, the commodification of folk music?
Some background on folx, the new album from the project known as friends&: In 2015, under the name tirestires, a Toronto musician by the name of jc grame released a self-described "brainrotted bedroom pop" album called shadowdog. That album gradually became a cult favorite at terminally online music hubs like Rate Your Music. In the meantime, grame formed a new group called friends& with bandmates include bc power, ct pond, and jk sims and got to work on folx. It's dedicated to "my father, an autistic rateyourmusic user who died before he could retire from his job at td bank."
folx is an album with a manifesto and a bibliography. Maybe "manifesto" is a stretch, but here, read it for yourself:
-------- Dedication:
In Memory of My Father.
Username: vinyljunkie-------- Epigraph:
"Potentials exert influence without being actualised. Actual social formations are shaped by the potential formations whose actualisation they seek to impede. The impress of “a world which could be free” can be detected in the very structures of a capitalist realist world which makes freedom impossible."
- Mark Fisher, Acid Communism-------- Overview:
- folx started as a facebook message sent at 11:55am on june 16th 2017. it took 8 years, 8 months, and 1 day to complete.
- folx is an attempt to reinvent pop music production.
- folx is a concept album.
- folx is about the decade i spent working as a corporate creative.
- folx is about the love employers demand employees feel towards their labour.
- folx is about the history of capital transforming ‘folk songs’ into the ‘folk genre’.
- folx is about the blip in time in the latter half of the 20th century when ageless oral traditions became a profitable industry.
- folx is about living through the death of the music industry.
- folx is about the consequences of shitpost culture subsuming all artforms in the 21st century.
- folx is about the tension between the economic unviability and the creative potential at the heart of shitpost.
- folx is about the death of my father, an autistic rateyourmusic user who died before he could retire from his job at td bank.
- folx is about the contradiction between my belief in marxist ideas and my impulse towards accelerationist cultural production.
- ‘no copyright law in the universe is going to stop [folx]!’ - sonic the hedgehog.
In practice, folx involves building massive, hyperactive sample collages out of sources ranging from the Beatles to My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. The tracks have an overwhelming DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ quality to them. Quite a few of the titles are snippets of political and philosophical rhetoric, especially the many quickie interludes. But most of the main tracks reference classic folk, folk-rock, and country songs by the likes of Bob Dylan, Dolly Parton, John Prine, Cat Stevens, James Taylor, Johnny Cash, and the Grateful Dead. In a brilliant flourish that ties back to folk music's free-flowing traditions, friends& have reconstructed these songs, plunderphonics-style, without regard for intellectual property.
Because grame was forged in the fires of RYM, folx is the kind of album where a Burial melody or the whistling from "Young Folks" might appear out of nowhere — and with that in mind, Girl Talk also feels like a relevant forebear. But Gregg Gillis never built anything quite so thematically dense. I don't know how often I will listen to folx — it does not lend itself to casually kicking back — but every time I've pressed play, I've been impressed.
In terms of sound and ideas, this one's a behemoth. Stream it below.
