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Weird folk

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KharBevNor:
Man you are not endearing yourself to me at all!

I just posted a load of albums in the MFFFF thread why not start with Looking For Europe and the Current 93 live album?

Kai:

--- Quote from: KharBevNor on 07 Jan 2011, 00:11 ---@ Kai: I find myself increasingly in the But, What Ends When the Symbols Shatter? camp, a place I never thought I'd really be! Btw, have you heard Down in June? They're a band that plays nothing but relaxed, occassionally slightly trip-hoppy occasionally slightly jazzy scandinavian pop covers of Death in June. I upped their album in last years wink wink thread a few months ago but it caused nary a ripple which is ludicrous because it's incredible. If you are a Rome fan (VUK PAGING VUK) then you will cream your fucking pants over this*. It is perfect totenpop, and great because it really exposes what a dang good songwriter Douglas P can be when he's not faffing about with amorphous noise/tone constructions which he's not really suited to at all. Down in June's version of some Di6 tracks (Kameradschaft for example) are actually a ton better than the original. Here are some tracks that have been youtubed:

Little Black Angel
The Enemy Within
To Drown a Rose in White...Rose Clouds of Holocaust  (TDaRiW is one of the weakest tracks on the album, but sit through it for the Rose Clouds of Holocaust bonus track, which is so tasty)
--- End quote ---

I haven't heard of Down in June, but the premise makes me curious. I'm really digging the version of Little Black Angel. Will have to go dig the album up somewhere.

I know it's not really the same genre at all, but while we're on the subject of Douglas P. anyway, I figure I might as well ask it. Has anyone listened to Crisis, the band that Tony Wakeford and Douglas P. were in before Di6? Is it worth my effort to check out?

KharBevNor:
Crisis are actually a pretty good marxist punk band, if you like that sort of thing. Punk77 memorably described them (along with Crass) as signalling 'the end of punk as fun, spontaneity, mischieveness and anarchy (as a way of feeling)'. You can find a lot of stuff by them on youtube. In fact looking around it looks like every single song they ever did might be on there, they don't have a very extensive discography. PC 1984, White Youth and No Town Hall are stand out tracks. Crisis are pretty interesting because they really make the questions about Di^'s politics complicated. Conventional thinking might be that they just flipped political spectrum from hardcore militant left-wingers to hardcore right-wingers, but it's obviously more complicated than that. I think they dabbled with third positionism in the 80's (that's where all the quotes from Douglas P about Ernst Rohm and so on come from, though they're taken out of context), and there's the well known fact that Tony Wakeford was briefly a member of the National Front, which he describes on his website as "probably the worse decision of my life and one I very much regret". To be honest, as someone with experience of the British far-left, particularly the Socialist Workers party I think it represents mostly a process of desperate political disillusionment, a frantic search to find something more nuanced and interesting and escape a dull ghetto of bearded marxist pontificating. They made bad decisions and got into some weird and frankly stupid shit but that sort of politics is a very weird world, and was weirder still back in the 80's, and they obviously recognise the mistakes they made. I've always said that I find it hard to believe anyone who's listened to Di6 and Sol Invictus can honestly think they're nazis. Like, you can cherry pick certain lines from Sol Invictus about disliking capitalism and the media and America (I've seen "Media", "Death of the West" and "Gold is King" used like that) and say "oh it's a code, he means Jews", but he's married to a Jewish woman so you're frankly an idiot. And Death in June make a lot of oblique references to fascist mythology among other things but it's really hard to argue that songs like Heaven Street ("Rifle butts to crush you down/The earth exploding with the gas of bodies") or Lullaby to a Ghetto ("So this is your life, this is your world/A lullaby to a ghetto, where you murder boys and girls") are glorifications of fascism. I think Death in June come closest to explaining their position in the song "C'est Une Reve":

Ou est Klaus Barbie?
Il est dans le couer
Il est dans le couer noir
Liberte
C'est une reve

Translated:

Where is Klaus Barbie?
He is in the heart
He is in the black heart
Freedom
Is a dream

Although of course there is also the fascinating article by Douglas P which explains some facts about what certain Di6 songs and images mean in response to the banning of Di6 albums in Germany, which lead to the darkly ironic revelation that the song 'Rose Clouds of Holocaust' is actually about Douglas P breaking up with his boyfriend in Iceland. Admittedly, I'm fairly sure after a certain point Douglas P (probably under the influence of Boyd Rice, arguably the original inventor of trolling) started using certain imagery deliberately to annoy people, ie. Stewart Home, aka the dude who hates Death in June so much he has written more about Death in June than Death in June has.

onewheelwizzard:
Does Pelt count?

Nodaisho:
If the top rated youtube comments are anything to judge SI and Di6's fanbase by, they probably aren't helping Tony Wakeford's reputation any. That actually seems to be common for a lot of folk-influenced music, for some reason. Draws the racists in like flies.

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