Down & Out is a compilation of downcast folk recordings, compiled by NTS, predominantly taken from private press releases from the US and UK between 1968-1980.
Many of the artists who appear on Down & Out only released a small number of recordings, however some figures went on find wider recognition; from Jim Leedy, the outsider artist, professor and ex-soldier (who sadly died in December aged 91), to Brenda Wootton, the Cornish poet and folk bard who had a distinguished career in music.
Boomkat Product Review:
Very special comp from the NTS crew, scraping together some of the most interesting private press folk music made in the US and UK between 1968 and 1980. Obscure as hell, but utterly beautiful music - indispensable for anyone into Anne Briggs, Vashti Bunyan or Devendra Banhart.
Yep, yep - we realize the sheer number of private press re-issues is difficult to comprehend, let alone navigate, but this one's a keeper. "Down & Out" features a haul of music you probably haven't come across before, "loner folk" as NTS describe it. It's the kind of music that led directly to the weird folk sounds of Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom or Espers, but delightfully underproduced and lo-fi in a way you just can't not be charmed by.
The artists here were working in an artistic landscape far removed from our own, where private press really meant that - If you pressed a couple of hundred copies of a record, that was just about everyone that was ever gonna hear it. So plenty of the material featured here has existed in a time capsule since its release, and sounds as if it happened in parallel to more mainstream folk like Joni Mitchell, Donovan, Neil Young and Bob Dylan. It was even more obscure than Vashti Bunyan's output, who only received a boost in the 2000s after getting a cosign from the synching gurus.
These are touching, underproduced heartbreakers, often built around just vocals and acoustic guitar, with tracks like Brenda Wootton & John The Fish's 'Stars' and David Budin's flute-accompanied 'I'll Be Gone' as haunting as anything from Linda Perhacs or Karen Dalton. Great stuff.
Wallowing through the holidays with ‘Down & Out,’ a recent NTS collection of private press glum-folk
Private press folk compiled by Perfect Lives’ Bruno Halper and Samuel Strang for the great NTS Radio.
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It’s no secret that the holidays can be hard. All these songs about joy, happiness, merriness, jingling bells, and fun permeate the ether, and if you’re not in the best mood the lyrical commands can seem almost dictatorial. Tis the season to be jolly? How about we take today off? “I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus?” The narrator should be upset at her mother’s apparent indiscretion. Reality check: We all know Frosty the Snowman’s existence is threatened by sunny days.
Sometimes the most joyful way to spend an evening during the holiday is by wallowing, if only for a few hours, in some of life’s hard truths, as conveyed by obscure, isolated artists pouring it all out for the world to hear – only for them to be met by decades of long, desperately silent nights.
Down & Out is a compilation issued by UK music and broadcast hub NTS that gathers total bummer folk recordings taken mostly from private press albums released in the US and UK between 1968-1980.
The themes can best be understood by highlighting a series of lyrics and lines from across the collection, each more emotionally devastating than the last:
The candle’s burning down low. And as it burns away I’m counting stars till the day. The trees have lost their green. Feel like I should die. Oh baby why’d you leave me high and dry? The grave may have my bones. I quiver with the dampest chill, air coughed by quagmire dawn, to know how little I’ll be missed when I am merely gone. I was told that angels don’t need friends. Where is the little boy that I’m looking for that I used to be? Where’s he gone? Other kids are crying. Can I cry once again? Is sadness all that’s left inside? She sits and weeps in her walled room of gray. He said he loved me but who really knows?
A truly strange and emotionally wrought document, Down & Out is dense with death-dirges, but the most striking and memorable is a song by an artist named Richard Forestier. Called “Soupirs,” it’s a quiet guitar work that, instrumentally, recalls a John Fahey funeral march. But it’s what Forestier “sings” that is truly jarring and creepy.
Instead of singing, he placed his microphone very close to his mouth and inhales and exhales loudly, as if he were in either great agony or ecstasy. It’s a truly freaky track, one of many on this thematically dark collection. It’s so grim – often humorously so – that you exit a deep listen of the 14-song collection with a kind of joyful relief: life may be tough, but at least it’s not Down & Out-level tough.
NTS' label arm reaches out into the desolate void of US and UK private press folk & country to assemble this 14 song, double LP collection of markedly obscure lonesome ramblings and laments. The private press world is a strange space, simultaneously sort of both hopeful and disarmingly depressive. All these hopes and dreams, and self-determining energy to bring them into existence, and yet no-one really present to hear them. Fate to the gods or the wind or just plain circumstance, this is music made by outsiders with little way in, and if it were not for a particular type of strident collector, outside is pretty much where most of them would remain. Sometimes the desire for the unknown can clog up our ears, but it's fair to say that the artists contained here are not just an obscurist's delight - these are songs well worthy of wider audiences, some so remarkable it's a surprise they've been left alone so long. All drawn from between 1968-1980, this is music of the post-folk, acid-psych era, and also the shifting sands of late-period capitalism, when suddenly the future didn't feel as good as it used to. Down and Out proves an instructive title - everyone's sad, and no-one gets paid, everyone fights and all there is to do is quit. I understand some of these artists either found other notable career paths or led a lifetime in music, though the songs and sentiments speak mostly of uncertainty, doubt or longing. It's tough to make it past the opening two tracks - on first listen, Brenda Wooton's vocal performance on Stars had me scraping my jaw up off the floor, and Bob Hughes might be the most heartbroken soul i've heard from in sometime. You could imagine both shoehorning their way onto Sky Girl, that other high watermark private press compilation. Indeed, these songs sound born of that same feeling that charged Nora Guthrie or Scott Seskind, an endorsement if you ever needed one. If you can make it past that opening one-two, the moments keep coming, Richard Forestier's Soupirs a surprisingly avant reframing of folk-simplicity, and Bill Clint's 11 minute Sometimes Angels Don't Need Friends a John Denver meets Tim Buckley slide into epiphanic misery (with possibly real tears as its climax). Grand work from NTS. No surprise there, really. -https://worldofechomusic.com/
Various – Down & Out
Label: NTS – NTSC2V
Format: 2 x Vinyl, LP, 45 RPM, Compilation
Visit: https://n-t-s.bandcamp.com/
Country: UK
Released: Sep 17, 2022
Style: Folk
Sourc: Digital
1. Brenda Wootton & John The Fish — Stars (UK 1968) 2:29
2. Bob Hughes — High & Dry (UK 1976) 4:09
3. Harry Waller — Merely Gone (USA 1969) 1:53
4. Jim Leedy — Move Inside My Head (USA 1971) 4:52
5. Franz Scheurer & Murray Hinder — Farewell (Australia 1978) 3:10
6. Jack Lucking — Death (USA 1972) 2:38
7. David Budin — I’ll Be Gone (USA 1967) 4:10
8. Skip Prokop — Blue Boy (USA 1977) 0:57
9. Peter Berkow & Friends — Sometimes My Life (USA 1975) 11:07
10. Bill Clint — Sometimes Angels Don’t Need Friends (Canada 1975) 3:54
11. Dana Westover — From A Tower Window (USA 1972) 4:19
12. Richard Kneeland — Present Your Errors (USA 1976) 4:34
13. Richard Forestier — Soupirs (France 1980) 5:08
It’s no secret that the holidays can be hard. All these songs about joy, happiness, merriness, jingling bells, and fun permeate the ether, and if you’re not in the best mood the lyrical commands can seem almost dictatorial. Tis the season to be jolly? How about we take today off? “I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus?” The narrator should be upset at her mother’s apparent indiscretion. Reality check: We all know Frosty the Snowman’s existence is threatened by sunny days.
Sometimes the most joyful way to spend an evening during the holiday is by wallowing, if only for a few hours, in some of life’s hard truths, as conveyed by obscure, isolated artists pouring it all out for the world to hear – only for them to be met by decades of long, desperately silent nights.
Down & Out is a compilation issued by UK music and broadcast hub NTS that gathers total bummer folk recordings taken mostly from private press albums released in the US and UK between 1968-1980.
The themes can best be understood by highlighting a series of lyrics and lines from across the collection, each more emotionally devastating than the last:
The candle’s burning down low. And as it burns away I’m counting stars till the day. The trees have lost their green. Feel like I should die. Oh baby why’d you leave me high and dry? The grave may have my bones. I quiver with the dampest chill, air coughed by quagmire dawn, to know how little I’ll be missed when I am merely gone. I was told that angels don’t need friends. Where is the little boy that I’m looking for that I used to be? Where’s he gone? Other kids are crying. Can I cry once again? Is sadness all that’s left inside? She sits and weeps in her walled room of gray. He said he loved me but who really knows?
A truly strange and emotionally wrought document, Down & Out is dense with death-dirges, but the most striking and memorable is a song by an artist named Richard Forestier. Called “Soupirs,” it’s a quiet guitar work that, instrumentally, recalls a John Fahey funeral march. But it’s what Forestier “sings” that is truly jarring and creepy.
Instead of singing, he placed his microphone very close to his mouth and inhales and exhales loudly, as if he were in either great agony or ecstasy. It’s a truly freaky track, one of many on this thematically dark collection. It’s so grim – often humorously so – that you exit a deep listen of the 14-song collection with a kind of joyful relief: life may be tough, but at least it’s not Down & Out-level tough.
NTS' label arm reaches out into the desolate void of US and UK private press folk & country to assemble this 14 song, double LP collection of markedly obscure lonesome ramblings and laments. The private press world is a strange space, simultaneously sort of both hopeful and disarmingly depressive. All these hopes and dreams, and self-determining energy to bring them into existence, and yet no-one really present to hear them. Fate to the gods or the wind or just plain circumstance, this is music made by outsiders with little way in, and if it were not for a particular type of strident collector, outside is pretty much where most of them would remain. Sometimes the desire for the unknown can clog up our ears, but it's fair to say that the artists contained here are not just an obscurist's delight - these are songs well worthy of wider audiences, some so remarkable it's a surprise they've been left alone so long. All drawn from between 1968-1980, this is music of the post-folk, acid-psych era, and also the shifting sands of late-period capitalism, when suddenly the future didn't feel as good as it used to. Down and Out proves an instructive title - everyone's sad, and no-one gets paid, everyone fights and all there is to do is quit. I understand some of these artists either found other notable career paths or led a lifetime in music, though the songs and sentiments speak mostly of uncertainty, doubt or longing. It's tough to make it past the opening two tracks - on first listen, Brenda Wooton's vocal performance on Stars had me scraping my jaw up off the floor, and Bob Hughes might be the most heartbroken soul i've heard from in sometime. You could imagine both shoehorning their way onto Sky Girl, that other high watermark private press compilation. Indeed, these songs sound born of that same feeling that charged Nora Guthrie or Scott Seskind, an endorsement if you ever needed one. If you can make it past that opening one-two, the moments keep coming, Richard Forestier's Soupirs a surprisingly avant reframing of folk-simplicity, and Bill Clint's 11 minute Sometimes Angels Don't Need Friends a John Denver meets Tim Buckley slide into epiphanic misery (with possibly real tears as its climax). Grand work from NTS. No surprise there, really. -https://worldofechomusic.com/
Various – Down & Out
Label: NTS – NTSC2V
Format: 2 x Vinyl, LP, 45 RPM, Compilation
Visit: https://n-t-s.bandcamp.com/
Country: UK
Released: Sep 17, 2022
Style: Folk
Sourc: Digital
1. Brenda Wootton & John The Fish — Stars (UK 1968) 2:29
2. Bob Hughes — High & Dry (UK 1976) 4:09
3. Harry Waller — Merely Gone (USA 1969) 1:53
4. Jim Leedy — Move Inside My Head (USA 1971) 4:52
5. Franz Scheurer & Murray Hinder — Farewell (Australia 1978) 3:10
6. Jack Lucking — Death (USA 1972) 2:38
7. David Budin — I’ll Be Gone (USA 1967) 4:10
8. Skip Prokop — Blue Boy (USA 1977) 0:57
9. Peter Berkow & Friends — Sometimes My Life (USA 1975) 11:07
10. Bill Clint — Sometimes Angels Don’t Need Friends (Canada 1975) 3:54
11. Dana Westover — From A Tower Window (USA 1972) 4:19
12. Richard Kneeland — Present Your Errors (USA 1976) 4:34
13. Richard Forestier — Soupirs (France 1980) 5:08
14. Hooknorton — High & Dry (UK 1977) 5:25
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