David Thomas Broughton

Avant-folk is a strand of folk music that applies avant-garde, experimental, and modernist techniques to traditional song forms, instrumental vocabularies, and storytelling. It retains acoustic timbres and folk modalities while embracing unusual tunings, extended techniques, drones, free improvisation, tape collage, and nonstandard song structures. The result is music that sounds rooted and ancient yet exploratory and boundary-pushing, often intimate in texture but radical in form.

Yorkshire folk is the regional strand of English folk rooted in the landscapes, dialects, industries, and community singing traditions of Yorkshire in northern England. It blends older ballads and work songs—about mining, fishing, farming, and the textile trade—with dance tunes and seasonal ritual songs, and is instantly marked by place‑names, local characters, and the county’s distinctive speech and humor. Musically, it spans unaccompanied close‑harmony singing (often with powerful, communal choruses) and intimate song‑carrier accompaniment on fiddle, guitar, melodeon, concertina, and whistle. Modal melodies (Dorian and Mixolydian are common), strophic ballad forms, refrain structures for group participation, and dance rhythms (jigs, hornpipes, polkas, and waltzes) are typical. The modern scene draws on pub‑carol traditions, session culture, and folk‑club lineages that flourished during the post‑war folk revival, while continuing to write new songs that sound at home on the moors or in a South Yorkshire taproom.

Experimental folk blends the storytelling, acoustic instrumentation, and modal harmonies of traditional folk with exploratory techniques drawn from the avant‑garde, psychedelia, and electroacoustic practice. It privileges texture, timbre, and atmosphere as much as song form: drones, field recordings, tape hiss, non‑standard tunings, and extended techniques sit alongside fingerpicked guitars, dulcimers, harps, and hand percussion. Structures are often loose or through‑composed, rhythms may drift or fracture, and harmony can alternate between simple pentatonic/modal materials and stark dissonance. Lyrically, the style leans toward myth, landscape, folklore, and dream logic—frequently intimate and diaristic, yet surreal. Production ranges from lo‑fi, room‑microphoned immediacy to collage‑like studio assemblage, emphasizing a sense of place and the raw grain of sound.