What is it?
Folkswitch is a journal. A few years back the three of us started making music. The technology exists to record your own music in a somewhat professional manner. That sounded like more fun than playing bars.
For material we use folk songs and the poetry from dead poets. Nearly everything’s been said before. What changes is how we say it.
Over time it became a journal, of where we were at a particular moment. It could be a tragic folk song which caught our attention, it could be a poem that says how I’m feeling better than I could put into words.
Music is meant to be played, art is meant to be remembered – not ran into the ground, and if you do the same thing again and again, play the same songs over and over, you’ve forgotten the magic of both.
Bio
FOLK MUSIC BELONGS TO US. To you and me. It’s music of the people that’s been around long enough to become part of our treasure as a culture. For musicians, it’s a giant toolbox of thoughts, moods, emotions and stories to play with.
The poets of the past were journalists of the soul, reporting how we’d changed and what we were becoming. The romantic poets kicked away the restraints imposed on them and yearned for freedom. Their stanzas are a blueprint for who we became.
Music is witchcraft. It’s altering a person’s mood, thoughts, behavior through vibration, rhythm and melody. Music can take you from your seat to a frenzied dance without a word. If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.
There’s a degree of madness to Folkswitch. From setting the romantic poets to rock music stylings of the early seventies, to obliterating the standards of the folk music idiom, Folkswitch is nothing if not ambitious.
Folkswitch mines the past, sometimes to shed light on the present, sometimes just to relive times long gone, except for in the imagination. From the inspired paganism of the romantic poets on Seasons, to the tragedy and debauchery of Celtic and American folk music on Before the War, their music is that of time travelers, navigating the dark and twisting hallways of minds and voices, long silenced.
Poets and singers have long sought to make sense of the world, but understanding human nature isn’t easy work. So the music found here isn’t easy music. This is music for people who like to think, who like to listen and aren’t afraid of following a story told in song. It’s recorded for people who like to have their minds twisted by music, who aren’t put off by thoughts deeper than that allowed by the verse-chorus format of modern music. The music here is short on choruses, long on verses.
Our civilization once celebrated those who thought, those who took the time to encase the human experience in words nuanced and beautiful. It was through the poets and other artists that the boundaries of who we are stretched and grew, and made much of the world more free.
Folkswitch is about telling how we got here, so we can blaze new trails to who we want to become.
Folkswitch is …
Teelin Atteberry: Fiddle, Mandolin, Guitar, Drums and Percussion, as well as occasional vocal tidbits
Todd Atteberry: Guitar, Vocals, Drums and Percussion
Todd Lane: Bass, Vocals, Guitar, Percussion and good vibes.
