The terms used for experimental folk music in recent years-- "free folk," "psych folk," "freak folk"-- have been stretched so thin, they've lost a lot of their meaning. But one, "New Weird America," has held some water. That's because when David Keenan coined the phrase in the August 2003 issue of The Wire, he meant it less as a style than a region-- a specific collective of Northeastern artists centered around the Brattleboro Free Folk Festival in Vermont. Getting even more specific, Keenan noted that most of this group were influenced by one particular record: Dredd Foole's 1994 classic In Quest of Tense.
That album is a mesmerizing collection of exploratory guitar, haunting vocals, and dark reverb, evoking the rituals of Velvet Underground associate Angus MacLise, the psych of early Pink Floyd, and the outsider art of Jandek. But In Quest of Tense didn't make a huge dent when first released-- Foole even conjectured in a 2004 interview that 80% of its 1,000-copy run still sat unsold in the Forced Exposure warehouse where he once worked. But it did impress contemporary avant-folk musicians like Christina Carter of Charalambides, Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance, and Matt Valentine of Tower Recordings. The latter has worked extensively with Foole, releasing his work as small-edition CD-R's on the Child of Microtones label. Valentine and his MV/EE partner Erika Elder also play on the 2xCD Kissing the Contemporary Bliss, the second Foole release on Microtones to get reissued by Family Vineyard, following last year's Daze on the Mount.
Though In Quest of Tense was completely solo, Foole's projects are often collaborative. He's played with a diverse array of musicians since the early 1980s, when his group, the Din, consisted of post-punk pioneers Mission of Burma. The Din has since counted among its ranks Thurston Moore, Chris Corsano, J Mascis, and members of Pelt and Sunburned Hand of the Man. On Kissing..., Foole incorporates Valentine and Elder's contributions smartly, and you can hear their signature string plucks, note loops, and kitchen-sink rumble, all bubbling inside Foole's improvised tunes.
Still, no one familiar with Foole's work would have trouble identifying this album as his. The first track, "Dog Star Waltz", establishes his trademark tone immediately: Over a scraggly collection of sliding strums, Foole chants and raps impulsively, forging coherence from what at first feels like random, unsynchronized elements. A few tracks do resemble written songs, such as the spacey "Above Ground Friend" or the aching "Once I Was Not", which sounds oddly like a fried, backwoods version of Joy Division. But most of Kissing... marks the farthest Foole has ever ventured musically, from the squawking bird-call of "Jungle Nigh High" to weird tone-poem covers of Bob Dylan and Robert Johnson. The latter-- a fired-up take on "Stones in My Passway"-- even re-imagines the King of the Delta Blues as a noise artist, like Prurient with an acoustic guitar.
Indeed, as fascinating as these 16 songs are, their relation to traditional folk is more one of spirit and instrumentation than actual sound. Much of Foole's approach is unstructured and anti-melodic, and his singing is unfettered by notions of pitch, much the way Jandek expresses raw emotions through off-key exploration. So anyone just now approaching the avant-folk pool might want to dip their toes in something closer to the surface. But if the far reaches of experimental folk-- the truly Weird America-- keep pushing forward, Kissing the Contemporary Bliss could provide a blueprint, much the way In Quest of Tense did 14 years ago.
