Skip to content
Caro is thinking out loud

Lots of people are doing electronic folk music

As one of my bands has been doing more playing for balfolk using synthesisers lately, I’ve been starting to explore other artists who do similar things. A small, incomplete list of artists I’ve found and enjoyed:

  • Mike Vass and Mairearad Green just kickstarted a new album. It has pipes and synths and is brilliant
  • Green Lads do Irish-ish stuff, it’s great fun
  • Novar do balfolk with just a hint of electronics
  • Apolkalypse is totally pre-recorded music intended for ceilidh dancing. It ran at IVFDF a few years ago
  • The Drystones do some interesting things. They got arts council funding to bring folk to young people
  • Event Horizon is whistle/pipes, guitar and fiddle with electronics, addressing physics themes. Dead website, but they have a bandcamp page where you can buy their music.
  • Ramblxr by Elias Alexander calls itself “Celtic EDM”, and has pipes. Here’s a music video of them doing livelooping, singing and playing a banging tune.

technocontra

A whole bunch of people in the US are playing electronic music (rarely actually techno though) for contra dancing. Jeff Kaufman has gathered a bunch of material about it. Apparently this has been going on for a long time. There’s even a whole (now defunct) blog about doing contra to music that isn’t traditional.

Perpetual e-Motion have been doing live-looping of acoustic instruments for a while. Here’s an interview with them, where they talk about using live looping to add depth and variety to the sound of just 2 musicians, and appealing to a broad range of dancers

I originally found technocontra via Julie Vallimont’s contra band Buddy System (still my favourite contra band). Julie does a whole bunch of other music, and I ended up with an album from Firecloud1.

There’s a whole spectrum of approaches from live looping to DJ, live instruments over sequenced beats. Jeff Kaufman categorises some people here. Apparently he also has a band - they have an album which I’m really enjoying!

In the UK, there’s pretty much one outfit doing technocontra - Bearded Dragons. They go mostly the live instrument over sequenced beats/synths approach, with a fiddle and a wall of modular synths and an unreasonable amount of Moogs.

Footnotes

  1. As is typical of folk music, there’s no remaining website for them, just a bunch of dead links, but I did manage to find their album on Amazon ↩