#american primitive

[crystalclaire]

exerpt from “John Chapman” in American Primitive by Mary Oliver

[televangelist666]

𝐑𝐨𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐲 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐨𝐝𝐬 ♡

[skf-fineart]

Morris Hirshfield (1872-1946)

“Nude at the Window (Hot Night in July)”, 1941

Oil on canvas with collage, 54 1/4 x 30 3/4 inches

[gorimbaudandgojohnnygo]

You've got to dance like the world Is falling down around you Because it is Because it is And if you're lucky enough that Happiness has found you You better get to dancing As your way of saying thank you For the spiderweb of electrical wires And the patches of the grass that are still green And the wind that blows The dandelion seeds over everything And the old brick building they haven't torn down yet And the shade beneath the sycamore tree And the stolen momentary lapse of reason That convinced you to dance with me

[dustedmagazine]

Liam Grant — Prodigal Son (VHF Records)

How does one go about making music not usually understood as “punk” sound like punk? How best to apply the DIY ethos, the construction by destruction, of punk art to other genres? How can the guide-fires that have been lit by past iconoclasts of the underground illuminate explorations in different styles? Maine-based fingerstyle guitarist Liam Grant provides his answers to these questions in the form of his sophomore LP, Prodigal Son (out 2/21/2025 on VHF Records), a collection of anti-tradition-traditional-style music — American Primitive with a capital A and P through a dirtied lens — kindly and perhaps counter-intuitively dedicated to his parents.

The opening track, “Palmyra,” starts with a gong-like bang on the open strings of a Weissenborn lap dobro prior to dipping into a sunny, up-tempo Fahey-style postmodern country blues jam. A typical start for a post-Jack-Rose guitar soli record, except that it sounds like it was run through the same amp and pedals Doyle Wolfgang Von Frankenstein used while recording “Where Eagles Dare”, with the gain on the tape machine dimed à la Bowie recording Raw Power. The disconnect between the refinement of the playing and the fidelity of the recording is striking. It isn’t circumstantially lo-fi, nor is it an attempt to sound vintage like a dusty 78 rpm disc, going back to the source — it’s an intentional push into distortion, taking something pretty and covering it in mud.

This distressed audio technique works well with the blues style music, you can situate the gritty sound of the slide in some kind of smoky Roadhouse scenario — trade out the casual violence for folks talking over each other about obscure records from Western Massachusetts while the guitar wails. It takes on another dimension of abstraction when Grant switches out the slide for the twelve-string and gets in raga mode. The lightning-like knots of fingerpicking on the moody, roughly thirteen-minute eastern-infected journey “Salmon Tails Up The River” dissolve into flattened fields of blown-out tape fuzz, blending with the textured booms of the low end strings to create a speaker-straining mass of sound. Another lengthy twelve-string piece, “Insult to Injury,” opens the B-side with a meditative counterpoint to the sturm und drang of “Salmon Tails”,twinkling riffs cutting through the sonic haze like a gentle ship passing through ocean fog.

The last two songs on Prodigal Son show different ways of approaching folk, in a broad sense, in a punk way, first by paying tribute to an originator, second by an invocation of the DIY lifestyle. “A Moment at the Door” is a take on a composition by a master of boundary-clearing, broke-down blues guitar playing, Loren Mazzacane Connors. The overdriven recording here finds a comfortable middle ground where Grant ably recreates Connor’s minimalist electric guitar style on his six-string acoustic, magnetic hiss filling the stretches between notes. The album closer “Old Country Rock” is a loose and joyous live cut from the Grant/McGuire/Flaherty old-time trio. This is where the DIY lifestyle aspect of Grant’s project comes in. Last year this trio embarked on an extensive Southeastern US tour, booking it and conducting business in a way that would’ve been familiar to Black Flag in 1981, if you substituted phone calls for Instagram DMs. Twenty years ago, the original incarnation of Old Crow Medicine Show were constantly touring road-dogs bringing Beale Street jug band songs from the twenties and thirties to places no one had ever played them before. The *music* wasn’t punk, but they were – not because of how they sounded but because of how they did things. Patti Smith, asked likely for the millionth time what punk was, said “To me, punk rock is the freedom to create, freedom to be successful, freedom to not be successful, freedom to be who you are.” Punk has never been an aesthetic genre. It’s a way of being, and Liam Grant literally slides into it on the first track of Prodigal Son.

Joshua Moss

[dyingforbadmusic]

Gloomy 12-string guitar lonerism by Alexander Moeckl.

[elisabethdeep-blog]

When you innocently read a book of poetry and are assaulted with Feelings. I wish My brother had been captured by Indians.

[therivershit]

Sundays

[musiconspotify]

Old 97’s - American Primitive (2024) … raucous results …

[queerographies]

[Primitivo americano][Mary Oliver]

Primitivo americano è un libro dionisiaco, dell’abbandono all’eccesso della fame, della gola e del desiderio; ed è un libro dell’esultanza per l’immersione nella proliferazione disordinata e incontrollabile della natura, di cui la poeta si appropria a piene mani in un gesto liberatorio e sempre legittimo. Le poesie celebrano sensazioni fisiche primordiali come la percezione del pericolo del…

[crystalclaire]

excerpt from “In Blackwater Woods” in American Primitive by Mary Oliver

[vintagehomecollection]

Ladderback chairs in the dining alcove are supplemented by a primitive country bench. Since privacy isn't a factor to consider, the casement windows here and throughout the house are left uncurtained to let in as much light as possible.

The Good Housekeeping Complete Guide to Traditional American Decorating, 1982

[drondskaath]

Primitive Warfare | Extinction Protocol | 2024

American Black/Death/War Metal

[lukegauthier]

[eirene]

Faux primitive style paintings by Charles Wysocki

[the-cricket-chirps]

Pegeen Vail, Untitled, 1945