Post-Industrial Folk // An embryo-manifesto

What is Folk music? My friend Tiago Pereira defines it as all the music that is not a product and is not twice the same thing. I would add that it is also music rooted to a place, expressing the relationship between humans and the particular material reality they inhabit, ultimately sublimating it to an immaterial state. As a Portuguese women once said, tradition is what is at hand.

Since the industrial revolution, the gradual replacement of human labour for machine labour has been causing irreparable damage to the symbiotic relationship between humans and their environment. As a result, we seem to have lost that sense of belonging to a place and if we happen to still have it, all sorts of mysterious forces seem to be perpetually conspiring to uproot that umbilical connection to our surroundings, whether it is by the hands of corporate power, gentrification, virtual realities, political ideologies or literally ravaging those environments.

In my work, I am venturing to make sense of this uprooting tendency by creating a sonic metaphor where the lurking alienation of modernity and “..that profound, unfathomable thing we have lost..”, are both tangible and coexist in a musical tapestry made out of modern and ancestral condiments. This is Post-Industrial Folk: a musical attempt to reconnect to a sense of rootedness from a position of uprootedness.

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