I'm not allowed to read the works of Philip K Dick too close together. This self-imposed rule dates from the time I read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Martian Time-Slip, Ubik and A Scanner Darkly in the space of about a week, and subsquently struggled to convince my brain to operate in the manner to which I had previously been accustomed. It turns out to be quite difficult, maybe even impossible, for me to read much PKD without feeling as though I've taken a rather large quantity of rather bad drugs, or perhaps become a paranoid schizophrenic. Perhaps both!

Art is dangerous.¹

"Prana Ferox" is not the kind of destabilising influence that I'm forced to ration, but it does capture a certain something—and encourage said something to take root in the listener's mind.² The notes that would have been the first draft of this post, had they been coherent or structured enough to warrant the title of "draft", tried valiantly to describe the certain something using words in all caps inside square brackets: [ALL IN] [THROW CAUTION TO THE WINDS] [READY WILLING AND ABLE TO GO COMPLETELY OFF THE RAILS].

The excerpt from a self-hypnosis tape³ that leads off the track assures us that we will "wake up in the morning feeling gloriously alive, with the firm conviction that the problems that disturbed [us] in the past will now disappear, disappear, disappear into the midnight of our consciousness".⁴ The song's narrator would certainly like to believe it. We have arrived during the aftermath of an unspecified but apparently explosive event, and things between our narrator and the "you" he has left fuming upstairs are by no means okay, but he is downstairs checking on the makings of some bootleg whiskey, thinking maybe if he fixes his attention firmly enough on the future⁵ he won't have to deal with the past and its inconvenient consequences.

He is out of luck. Everything that has happened has happened, and it's all fuel for what will happen next. The violence (emotional or otherwise) of his experiences just makes them all the more propulsive. We don't get to see the big explosion, but we know it's coming. He is turning water into whiskey and life into rocket fuel.

My initial misinterpretation of the song's title created a mental association I have never been able to undo. The crude translation of "prana ferox" as "fierce breath"⁶ recalled a conversation from several years ago, in which a friend⁷ and I discussed the effects of sleep deprivation without the bravado and one-upmanship that usually features in conversations of that nature between nerds in their early twenties. He made a passing reference to the unshakeable conviction that comes to the exhausted-but-wired: you are burning things with your eyes.

Listening to "Prana Ferox" leaves me feeling a little bit like I am breathing fire.

1. I would say more on this topic, but then I would be stealing my future self's thunder; there is a by-request post on the subject of art coming up soon, by which I mean once I have stopped dithering about the one that will precede it.
2. At least, whenever the listener is me. Which, in my experience, it invariably is.
3. I assume that's what it is.
4. Incidentally, this snippet is as likely as anything else to be running through my mind when I wake up in the mornings.
5. Because, let's face it, this is not just about future booze. There's some metaphor going on here and it is not what you would call subtle.
6. Prana does mean breath, more or less, but also connotes concepts like life-force and energy
7. We are no longer friends. Facebook recently suggested to me that we should become friends. There are things that Facebook does not understand.

The most notable side effect of this condition was the amount of Mountain Goats that I listened to.

Leaving aside the year's two new Mountain Goats releases, which I'll get to in a moment, there were a handful of their albums that I really got into for the first time. In chronological order:²

Get Lonely (2006), which I may have heard described as "spending a long time at the bottom of a swamp". Not the sort of thing that has clicked with me in the past, but I discovered this year that sometimes all one can do with an overwhelming feeling that one is suffocating at the bottom of a swamp is wait it out with some music that feels the same way.

Full Force Galesburg (1997). Wow. Just wow. This is now on approximately equal footing with We Shall All Be Healed as my most dearly-beloved Mountain Goats album. It is very close to perfect.

The Coroner's Gambit (2000), which had slipped under my radar until I happened to listen through it in a year saturated with reminders to consider mortality. "Elijah", "Baboon" and "Alphonse Mambo" are high points, but the whole thing is somehow very different to its individual parts.

Finally, Zopilote Machine (1994), a late entrant propelled by my sudden discovery that it is not just a "Going to Georgia" vehicle after all, and Nothing For Juice (1996) which I was tricked into exploring by the Awesome Yet Unfinishable Mountain Goats Project and which turned out to be marvellous.

Actual New Music From 2009!

All that being said, there were four new releases this year that I can call my favourites. They are also the only four that I have paid any sustained amount of attention to, but never mind. In alphabetical order:

Eyedea & Abilities - By The Throat

Hip-hop and I have never really gotten along. I have a huge amount of respect for the skills involved, but it's pretty rare for me to find even a single song that I can connect with. Imagine my surprise when I heard the title track of this album, liked it a lot, went to listen to the whole thing, and liked that a lot as well! I lack the vocabulary to explain what I like about it, but with luck it will inspire me to learn.

The Mountain Goats & John Vanderslice - Moon Colony Bloodbath

I am not a fan of John Vanderslice. For a while I found this EP kind of alienating, and I blamed it on "the Vanderslice taint". Then I remembered that he produced the Mountain Goats' We Shall All Be Healed, which I love almost more than anything, and was forced to reconsider. Suddenly, I no longer liked only the John Darnielle-centric songs. Repeated listening really fleshed out³ the theme,⁴ and by the end of the year I had listened to those seven tracks a total of 276 times.

The Mountain Goats - The Life of the World to Come

The Life of the World to Come was my most anticipated album of the year.⁵ My first reaction was mixed: some tracks were disappointingly inconspicuous, one was eerily reminiscent of a Barenaked Ladies song, one made me cry uncontrollably the first time I listened to it and has continued to have a similar effect since, and a couple of others landed on me just as hard. I still don't have much of a sense of it as a cohesive whole (much like Heretic Pride or most of the pre-4AD albums), and I think that if I did not have such a strong sense of John Darnielle the person (rather than just John Darnielle the musician) I would be able to maintain a greater emotional distance from it; as it is I think Darnielle is a genius but listening to this album too much (or perhaps at all) constitutes very poor emotional hygiene.

Windmill - Epcot Starfields

A vocalist who sounds like a weird hybrid of Tim DeLaughter and Kimya Dawson. Piano and strings by turns sparse and lush, warm vocal harmonies and cold synthesisers. Lyrics with a tendency towards the bizarre⁶. This album did not stand out when I first heard it, but I keep coming back to it again and again. It is a very pretty, if sometimes affected, album about a very small person in a very large universe.

New-to-me Music Not Actually From 2009!

Bright Eyes - I'm Wide Awake It's Morning

I had previously written Bright Eyes off as some kind of ridiculous, bleating, self-indulgent emo nonsense.⁷ Thanks to a recommendation from How To Be So Real, I checked this album out and was blown away. Sorry, Connor Oberst, I misjudged you.

The Hold Steady - Boys and Girls in America

Another previously-written-off band! What am I, some kind of reformed music snob or something? The Hold Steady's other albums still don't do anything for me, but Boys and Girls in America perfectly captures a reckless, full-throated, self-destructive kind of youth that I can romanticise from a distance without ever wanting to live through.

Manchester Orchestra - I'm Like A Virgin Losing A Child

One of Stefan's best recommendations to me ever (so it is in very good company). Standout tracks are "Where Have You Been?", "Sleeper 1972" and "Colly Strings". It's good to let go and just be emo sometimes.

Mission of Burma - Vs.

I sought out Mission of Burma, among other bands, after reading Our Band Could Be Your Life. This was the album that stuck. It's good to listen to really loudly. I think I need to make an effort to listen to music really loudly more often.

Moscow Olympics - Cut the World

This is a strange little EP from a Filipino (I think) dream-pop/new wave/post-punk group who somehow manage to remind me of New Order, Sonic Youth and the Pet Shop Boys simultaneously. I am not sure how "good" it is, but it broke my listening-to-new music drought for me. And I do really like it.

Oops

This is only a part of the post I had intended to write today. As it has grown somewhat large, and my self-imposed deadline for writing something approaches, I will leave writing about the unmusical aspects of 2009 until another day.

For those of you who have made it this far,⁸ I am pleased to present my soundtrack to 2009 in pseudo-mix-CD format:

Driving Through Ghosts, or, Don't Mistake Proximity For Fate.

1. By which I mean the bad half of the year.
2. The order belonging to my discoveries, not their releases. Obviously. Nitpickers.
3. Pun unintentional.
4. There is a top-secret organ harvesting colony on the moon. The two guys manning the station alternate six-month tours of duty with six-month periods in isolation back on earth, because interacting with other people could lead to the discovery of their terrible secret. Cannibalism arises.
5. Surprise!
6. "Carl Sagan, are we doomed? Can we save ourselves from ourselves? Photo hemispheres as they bruise. Save ourselves from ourselves and planetary doom.
7. I didn't realise until fairly recently that "Lover I Don't Have To Love", a song I loved in High School, was actually by Bright Eyes.
8. Or maybe you just know how to use your scrollwheel or Page Down key.

I ended up at the last session of FYI with Martin Pearson, which also featured Sandy McCutcheon, Kristine Olsen, Liz someoneorother¹ and Alastair Hulett. Before the talking started I got chatting to the people sitting either side of me; bizarrely, this was the first such occurrence all week. Perhaps I was setting the scene for a more sociable and outgoing year. We talked about playing music and made small talk and it was not even unpleasant.

FYI itself was quietly entertaining, a good way to ease into the morning. It was more enjoyable than the resurrected version of Good News Week that has been on television in recent years, but much less awesome than the Good News Weeks of old.² I particularly enjoyed the suggestion that someone should run "rationality awareness workshops" at the next Woodford, a welcome indication that I was not alone in feeling somewhat beseiged by woo at the festival. There were also bizarre underwear stories, and Alastair Hulett had a Scottish accent.

Then I went to see Rosie Burgess, and was immediately kicking myself for not going to every single one of her performances at the festival.

Completely unaffected, down-to-Earth, Australian modern-folk-ish music from an entirely adorable group. The violinist didn't seem terribly comfortable on stage, but a lack of showmanship did nothing to disguise the fact that she rocked.³ The drummer was all sunshine and snare, and Rosie was the charming hinge it all swung on.⁴ I think my eyes may actually have turned into tiny hearts when she played a harmonica solo. I was very sad to miss her recent show in Melbourne.

It turns out I posted the wrong photos of The Ellis Collective in my previous post, so I have none left to use now. Never mind, it would probably just provoke unjustified comments about beards.⁵ I had the odd feeling that I had heard their music before, not just the day before but going back long enough for me to have favourite songs and a general sense of familiarity. I would like to hear a lot more of The Ellis Collective. I love the well-ordered, uncluttered, subtly complex results of having so many musicians on stage without them getting in each other's way. They weren't even subject to the festival-long curse of terrible sound mixing at the Grande stage.

I just had a look at the Ellis Collective's Facebook page, and noted that they have added "Tasteful Bogan" to "Bloke Folk" in their list of descriptive phrases, and also that they have an album due out late this year.

The Wells struck me as a country-rock'n'roll-type band in the vein of The Wallflowers (at least, The Wallflowers when I was paying attention to them in the mid-nineties). Their performance didn't really click for me, although that may have been because everyone in the band was Too Hot and complaining quite vocally about wanting to get off the stage. Another blow was struck for the Skeptics of Woodford when a band member cried out "Is there a doctor in the audience? I need a real doctor!"

I laughed. Not all that many other people did.

Later in the day Dougie MacLean did the shortest soundcheck I have ever seen. He walked on, made a little bit of noise, asked for less guitar and vocals in his foldback, then walked off again. Like The Wells he was suffering in the heat, although he just made a brief reference to drowning in his own sweat and then got on with it. I think I will probably continue to have a weakness for Scottish folk music until I die. It's in my blood, or something.

In the absence of anything else to do (the program becoming increasingly gappy as everyone went home) I went on the Mystery Bus one more time. The band of the moment turned out to be The Wells, who were much more to my taste in an acoustic (and less overheated) setting. A song called "Got Love" was particularly nice.⁶

Between the Mystery Bus and my last scheduled performance-to-watch of the festival, I had the misfortune of sitting on a hill near something called Belswagger Morris. All my notebook had to say on the subject was:

Augh!
PIECES OF FLAIR

Were I given to such things in non-keyboard-mediated contexts it would have said D: as well. The morris dancers seemed to be entirely in earnest and their recorder was not in tune. I am all for people doing things they enjoy but being in the vicinity of such people doing this particular thing is not something that I enjoy.

Alastair Hulett and David Rovics brought up the rear as a kind of filthy-commie double header. By far the most overtly political music I had heard at the festival, which was not unwelcome. Some of Hulett's material felt a little dated and studded with empty rhetoric, and Rovics sounded a bit too much like Weird Al for me to concentrate properly; on the other hand, Hulett's amiable Scottishness and a song about Mrs someone's Army won me over, as did Rovics' moment of channelling John Darnielle and song about pirates. Also, they came from two of my favourite places in the world: Hulett from Glasgow and Rovics from Portland, Oregon.

And that was the Woodford Folk Festival. Unfortunately I was completely burned out on new music for six months afterwards, but it was packed with interesting discoveries and opportunities to take pictures of bands without getting in people's way and being obnoxious.⁷ A week away from reality and full of music is not to be sneezed at.

1. A double bass player whom I had seen in several bands over the course of the festival. No idea what her name was and too lazy to Google her.
2. I compare it to Good News Week simply because it had people talking about things and being funny, not because there was any actual link.
3. More violinists should play with wah pedals.
4. Charming hinge? It's just as well this is the last one of these Woodford posts I have to write.
5. Not looking at anyone in particular, Stefan.
6. Faint praise, but not intended to be damning.
7. I doubt I will ever want to take up shooting ordinary shows.It is just not the right way to go about things.

I want to avoid saying purely negative things about this band, but it is difficult. Things got off to a bad start when they came onstage with ridiculous, pretentious hipster outfits (and one of them had a laptop) and then the singer launched into an "inspirational" and pretentious introduction to the band or their recording process or something like that. I'm not sure. I wasn't really listening. The music turned out to be fairly generic pop-rock of the kind that makes me a happy ex-Triple J listener, and in no way vindicated their pretentious schtick. (Did I mention I found them pretentious?) When the second or third song was a mellow tune incorporating samples that sounded like painful mic feedback I gave up and went somewhere else.

The Ellis Collective, on the other hand, were one of my Woodford highlights.

Their website describes their sound as "bloke folk", which is accurate as well as rhyming. I appreciate it when artists sing in their native accent and, while a broad Australian accent can be grating in song, Matty Ellis' is not that kind. Instead, backed by strings and perfect vocal harmonies, it's a sound as immediately and endearingly Australian as the Lucksmiths'. That Lucksmiths comparison can be stretched further: while the Ellis Collective deal less in whimsy and more in melancholy, both bands excel at portraying small pieces of ordinary people's ordinary lives.

Refreshing and wonderful. I was only sorry I hadn't made time to see them earlier in the week as well.

I spent the rest of the afternoon watching the final of the band competition. All five bands had pulled together pretty great performances in the space of a few days, but the winners - the Woodford Weatherers - were probably the best band overall, most of the other groups being "star performer" + backup people."¹

In the evening I went to see a group called On the Stoop, but instead spent fifteen or twenty minutes watching them futz around trying to set things up and do a soundcheck. By the time I gave up and went away there was still no sign that a performance was likely to occur. As a result I caught the very, very end of Mic Conway's National Junk Band's set, and discovered that I should probably have been there for the whole thing. Some guy playing a singing saw, fire breathing and fire swallowing,²³ and a stage full of bizarre contraptions. Ah well.

The Kin were next up on the Grande stage, but fell somewhat flat. The audience tended to encourage the brothers' diva tendencies, and the magic of their previous performance was absent. Plus, the sound at the Grande was still terrible.

I had plans to head back for the tent for a brief nap, then wake up in time for the three minutes' silence at 23:30 and stay awake until midnight. I set an alarm but must have turned it off without even waking up properly, because I missed the lot.

1. The above pictures from the band competition are not of members of the winning band, they are just the pictures I like best.
2. I saw fire swallowing being taught on the Totally Rad Show a few months ago and now I really want to try it myself. Delicious, delicious fire.
3. Damn, I can't attach footnotes to footnotes using my current plugin. I was going to mention that TRS is past its prime but still often worth watching.

This is what the last morning of 2008 looked like. I couldn't tell you what it felt like, because I've left writing this post until more than six months later.

This is Ange Takats. According to her introduction she won the 2008 National Folk Festival award for vocal excellence. That sounded appropriate enough to me; her voice was lovely. Her songs didn't do so much for me, although I was charmed by her self-deprecating tales of googling ex-boyfriends and making inept life choices.

Next came Jack and the Giant Killers, a slightly funkier variant on the Triple-J-rock staple. Good energy on stage, a not unpleasant listening experience - and then some giants showed up. Stilt-walking normal-sized humans, to be more accurate.

Jack and the Giant Killers did not live up to their name.

I have no pictures of the next thing that happned, mostly because I was too busy having an excellent time. I went to a vocal workshop run by The Kin, who turned out to be giant hippies of the raised-from-birth variety. They talked about singing with reference to chakras without batting an eyelid. They also asked the participants to stick our hands down our pants in order to dig our fingers into our pubic bones, and appeared surprised at the awkward giggling that ensued.

In the end, though, they got a tent full of people to start with making funny noises and work up to singing loudly, melodically (in tune, even, and in two parts!) and confidently, and I enjoyed every moment. It made me think, not for the first time, about seeking out singing lessons, the aim being to gain a better physical understanding of how I make sounds and thus (I hope) some form of confidence.

I showed up to see Psycho Zydeco with a certain weariness, mainly because I thought they were another gypsy/balkan-influenced band that I would struggle to differentiate from all the others like them at Woodford. This was completely unjustified, of course, as zydeco music hails from the southern USA and leads to people wearing washboards and performing cowbell solos.

Psycho Zydeco reminded me a little bit of the Blues Brothers, but not because of the style of music they played. They seemed a little older than most of the musicians playing loud music at Woodford,¹ and also a little bit out of place - no "gypsy influences", no 20-something guys with hair product and guitars, no wistfulness or political content. Despite a relatively small and lukewarm audience, they had a rollicking good time making music that would have made anyone less dance-oriented than me get up and dance.

This post threatened to sprawl oppressively and indefinitely across my Drafts folder, so I am turning the first part loose. Still to come: The Quills, The Ellis Collective, and more.

1. There were plenty of old folkies, but I'm not counting them.

On Tuesday morning we were greeted by the most scorching incarnation yet of the Blue Screen of Death. My goodness, it was hot in the tent. I rewarded myself for my clever escape by buying a delicious mushroom burger for breakfast.¹

Today's early-in-the-morning gap-filling artist was Grace Barber, from the Seychelles via Perth. Playing what she described as a combination of reggae and African island rhythms, she apologised for her hayfever-stricken voice (although I didn't notice anything amiss) and had a fake horn section (a Korg synth). I have no real literacy or even frame of reference when it comes to this kind of music,² but I liked this.

Brothers The Kin followed, as did their not-inconsiderable following; people were standing in the aisles before the set even started. I have to admit to being a little dubious - a couple of pretty boys with lots of teenage girls clamouring to see them? Chances were good that this would not be my kind of thing at all.

But then they started singing. At first I didn't even realise they were both singing (the joy of singing in unison with relatives), and their voices were very beautiful. Sometimes the performance was marred a little by the younger brother's tendency to be a diva, or the overshadowing of a melody line by vocal gymnastics, but their musicianship and showmanship made what would otherwise have been a neutral experience very enjoyable.

Particularly notable was the comparison of audience members to cows (clustered under the one available tree - it was a hot, hot day) and some impressive audience participation.

I find Kevin Mitchell's decision to perform as Bob Evans a little bizarre. His "solo" performance here, backed up as it was by several other musicians, came across not so much as "Kevin Mitchell performs country music solo", more as "Kevin Mitchell wants a grown-up band now". For all his rock-star antics and aviator sunglasses, this was pretty middle-of-the-road stuff.

Few of the new-to-me artists I saw at Woodford had been talked up as much as Doch. Perhaps it was unfortunate that they were the third or fourth group that I'd seen with a trumpet and Eastern European influences; perhaps the blame lies with the sound engineers at The Grande, who once again let muddy, bass-heavy sounds assault my ears, or perhaps I was just getting burnt out by days of Woodford and no longer properly receptive to new music. Everyone else absolutely loved this show, so I am confident in saying that the problem lay with me.

My favourite thing about this set was the pillar of rising gravel dust kicked up by the dancing people and illuminated by the beam of sunlight that came in through a gap in the top of the tent. My least favourite thing was the air-ukelele that the bandleader appeared to be playing with his trumpet.

Arriving (extremely) early for the next heat of the band competition, I was fortunate enough to catch the tail end of another Hey Rosetta! set. This time complete with violinist, they put on as great a show as before: the cellist's bow was worn ragged and at one point he ran around the stage waving a tambourine, the electric violin added a wonderful dimension to the sound, and my notes indicate that at one point I was moved to write down "hee hee skinny white boy arse dance".

Afterwards the members of Hey Rosetta! were signing copies of their CDs at the merch tent, and despite my general lack of interest in such things I took advantage of the opportunity to talk to them. There was quite a clump of fangirls centred around the singer, leaving the more interesting end of the band (mmm, bass and cello) vulnerable to my conversational attack. So I chatted a bit to Romesh and Josh (ooo, first name basis), found them to be friendly and interesting and somewhat shellshocked by the transition between Canadian winter and Queensland summer, and promised to try to send them audience members for their Melbourne show.

During this time I also noticed that the guitarist is Very Tall. Goodness gracious!

I don't have any notes from the band competition heat from that day, but I remember even now how impressed I was. The competition was a perfect illustration of why I value creativity within constraints so highly; give people something to bump up against and all of their energies are concentrated into a smaller space, so that (unless they get the sulks about the constraints and don't try) the result has a focus and quality that's often missing otherwise.

After wandering around aimlessly for a bit I claimed a spot on the hill to watch Dougie MacLean. Something of a Scottish folk legend, he had the sort of unassuming air that tends to win me over. Another victim of the extraordinary heat, he apologised for displaying his Scottish legs and suggested that it would be a "short" concert.³ I wasn't paying a great deal of attention during his set, but nice folk songs and a Scottish accent meant he couldn't go too far wrong in my book.

Ducking into the Empire tent, I saw the last part of The Grimstones, a charming, dark little fairytale about a family of monsters and freaks. The marionettes reminded me quite strongly of Tim Burton fare like and , and the musical accompaniment did nothing to dispel that impression. I liked that they had two narrators, one speaking and one signing; unfortunately, the nature of the venue meant that it was quite difficult to see what was happening on stage most of the time.

Next came the performance I was actually at the Empire to see: with Miss K. Sadly, this turned out to be a nasty, homophobic piece of cabaret trash instead of the boundary-pushing queer cabaret I had somehow been led to expect. I left very quickly indeed.

As a result, I had some extra time on my hands and didn't feel the need to collapse into sleep just yet, so I trekked up to the Amphitheatre (my one and only visit for the festival), where Augie March would be playing later. As luck would have it, this meant that I saw The Boat People finishing up, playing the one song of theirs I knew: "Awkward Orchid Orchard".⁴ A lovely little song, and a nice little band, the kind of thing that makes me wish Triple J didn't play so much junk nowadays so that I could keep listening and hearing good stuff.

Ah, Augie March. Since I have paid no attention to them at all, but some of the songs from that album put down particularly strong roots in a tumultuous period in my life. Seeing Augie March live tends to mean a pleasant mass of unfamiliar but listenable sound seeded with wonderful nostalgia bombs.

I lay on the hill and let the bombs fall where they would.

1. OM NOM NOM.
2. I have been reflecting recently that all of the music I like is exceedingly white. I usually stand still at concerts, too.
3. Cue groans from the audience
4. That song also happens to have one of my favourite music videos of recent times.

By Monday, I had become almost blasé about the routine of waking up freezing at around 3am, then waking up again dehydrated and gasping some time around 6. I think this was also the morning I attempted to buy breakfast from the delicious-smelling ilovemushrooms stall prior to seeing my first band for the day, but got too confused about the ordering protocol and whether they were even serving people yet. Ah well, at least there were a few days left for repeat attempts.

Said first band of the day was Sunas, a pleasantly unassuming acoustic-Celtic-folk band whose four members indulged in a certain amount of banter onstage, most of it for their own entertainment rather than that of the audience. I enjoyed the tunes, although the performance felt more like a scattering of tunes across a lot of awkward remarks and silences - perhaps that can be put down to the early hour, or the beginning of the heat-induced wilting of everyone involved. Despite my apparent ambivalence, not at all a bad way to start the morning.

Unfortunately, I can't be as kind about my next stop, the "Learn to play tin whistle" workshop. Not only did the workshop-giving guy (David somebody?) treat the workshop as the second or third in a series despite the absolute beginners who were showing up,¹ he seemed to expect people with no musical experience at all to be able to learn tunes by ear on a brand new instrument, and persisted in saying things like "you need more intensity in the breath" without explaining what that meant or how to do it when people were struggling to hit notes in the second octave. Honestly, although I had never played a tin whistle before I am convinced that I could have run a better workshop teaching beginners to play it.

Next, Roz Pappalardo and the Wayward Gentlemen livened things up with some energetic country-rock. I hadn't intended to see this band, but they filled a gap in my schedule and ended up being much more enjoyable than I had expected. Pappalardo was an unaffected performer (with an unabashed love for her electric guitar!) and the Wayward Gentlemen were much more well-behaved than their moniker might lead one to suggest.

Dev'lish Mary were a very bluegrassy sort of ensemble (their myspace offers the word "hilljilly", which I reproduce here without comment), four female singers with fiddles, banjos and a double bass. Technically very good, adept performers, but not my scene (although their cover of AC/DC's "You Shook Me All Night Long" in the style of an Appalachian waltz provoked a certain amount of giggling).

In the heat of the afternoon (and the absence of anything more exciting on my schedule) I took a gamble and went to watch the first heat of the Great Band Competition. The idea behind this was that anybody could put their name into a hat at the start of the festival, then get 24 hours to prepare a song with three strangers and peform it at the first heat. I had chanced to see some of the name-drawing the day before, and there were certainly some odd combinations; most of the adults who ended up in bands with younger people looked a bit dubious about it all, too.

As it turned out, all of the young kids² were really good, from the thirteen-year-old soprano who brought tears to the eyes of a few audience members (and not just his doting stage parents) to the kid about as tall as his electric guitar. The quality of the performances in general was also very good, all things considered; the majority of the bands had one dominant member, usually with a pre-written song, who everybody else played along with, but there was also a band who played a cover of "You Are My Sunshine", and one named X-Y-Z-Boom (for the generations its members came from) who produced a bizarre sort of family hoedown.

After a delicious dinner I went and sat on a hill to listen to Murphy's Pigs, whose name in my head is always spoken with Dylan Moran's voice. They had a ridiculous number of musicians on stage - I want to say there were ten of them, but I don't think I counted - with instruments including bagpipes, accordion and bodhran (along with the obvious drums, fiddle, whistle, guitar, etc.). They played various traditional Irish and Scottish pieces, as well as a lovely lovely Billy Connolly song, and the jolly guitarist-singer who looked like someone's dad merrily announced songs in Irish and Scottish accents willy-nilly. Lots of fun, and I was sorry when the set ended.³

Next up, and conveniently at the same stage, came Kangaroo Moon. Kangaroo Moon were one of the acts in the festival programme that I felt compelled to see, even after I had failed to find any enticing examples of their work online. Apparently this was a grand reunion of sorts, band members having scattered over the last twenty years and some of them now based in London, and as the band had played at the very first of these festivals it was something of a momentous occasion. Some old-timers sitting near me on the hill mentioned early on that they seemed to have mellowed with age; certainly, they started out with some low-key, almost ambient sounds, ideal to relax to while watching a thunderstorm approaching across the hills.

Several flashes of sheet lightning every minute were persuasive enough to inspire movement off the hillside and under cover, despite the lack of rain or audible thunder. Kangaroo Moon were playing up a storm; as the pace picked up and they began to meld Celtic fiddle reels with droning didgeridoo and people started getting up to dance, the rain started pouring down. In the end the "dancefloor" was packed, plastic chairs being quickly stacked out of the way to make more room, and there was probably sixty years' age difference between the oldest and youngest people jumping about. Even the two brief power failures and the bogginess underfoot had no real impact on the festivities.

I have to say that seeing Kangaroo Moon gave me my first glimmer of understanding when it comes to those multi-day dance/electronic/doof music things that people go to out in the bush. I still can't imagine wanting to go to one, but I think I get why other people do now. Kangaroo Moon were, I think, what so many other (younger? more naive?) bands want to be: a melting pot of stylistic influences, but coherent and unique instead of derivative and uncomfortable. They mixed tradition and technology, folk and psychedelia, electronic and acoustic sensibilities, and were unlike anything I'd ever heard before.

Once Kangaroo Moon finished up I had to decide whether to brave the elements for the last three bands on my schedule, or flee back to the tent. I didn't have any way to keep dry, so as either choice would mean getting wet and I'd slept through an Evenish set earlier in the festival I splashed my way around in the dark for a while and ended up back at the Duck and Shovel.

Evenish were very nice,⁴ a trio (guitar/fiddle/whistle+flute+bodhran) playing Celtic folk-style music. The guitarist (who also plays a mean fiddle, as we discovered) and the fiddle player were engaged to be married, and Evenish played tunes that they had written for each other as well as various other original compositions. Seeing them play on stage I was struck by - well, not a vision exactly, but something like one, of the sort of quiet existence they would lead together in the middle of nowhere, making music and never having to raise their voices. The whistle player mentioned that the band had been rehearsing via YouTube because of their geographical separation, and I'm impressed that he hasn't succumbed to some kind of third-wheel paranoia; there did seem to be a certain amount of awkwardness onstage, but nothing that their nice music couldn't ease.

Yet another change of pace came with The Gin Club's set. Another of the not-really-a-folk-band-at-all bands that I assume are on the program to add some relevance for the young folks.⁵ The first band of the festival to get me wondering what it is that defines that particularly "Australian indie rock band"⁶ sound - the sound of bands that get played on Triple J radio, who grew up listening to You Am I. I'm convinced that there's a particular energy and style that makes that variety of Australian band identifiable as soon as the guitar chords start.

The Gin Club were pretty listenable, and obviously have a substantial fan base in Queensland; being a Brisbane band made up of competent young fellows, this is not entirely surprising. Unfortunately, I didn't find anything about their set especially illuminating or invigorating, and the constant swapping of instruments between band members became very annoying. Much as I appreciate musicians who have more than one string to their bow,⁷ I really think that it's overly disruptive to have everybody in the band switching around after almost every song. I don't think it's necessary to prove to the audience that everyone can play guitar, bass and drums as well as singing; more consistency would result in a more coherent performance.

By this stage of the evening I was close to nodding off in my white plastic chair, but decided to stick around for the Transbalkan Express as I wouldn't have a chance to see them later in the festival. Long before they started there were all sorts of exciting noises emanating from the backstage area, but soon enough came a distraction as the band filed on for the sound check. I don't know how many people there were in the band, but I don't think twenty would be too wild a guess. After what seemed like an eternity they started to play, and people in traditional costumes burst out of the backstage area, pulling civilians with them, and started an enormous circle dance.

Although the Transbalkan Express were very good, I may have been too tired to appreciate them properly, being constantly distracted by the incompetent bumblings of people trying to dance in a circle and the miniature melodrama being played out between a girl from the audience and one of the dancers. Lesson for the day: it is possible to see too many bands in a day.

1. The festival programme did not suggest that these were anything but stand-alone workshops
2. The youngest competitors were in their early-to-mid teens. This means that I have become Old, because I thought that they were much younger.
3. Looking back, this is actually the first band of the day that I can say this about. That's a bit sad.
4. I hate it when there's no other adjective I can use, but there it is.
5. No pun intended.
6. And I don't mean "indie rock" in the sense that, in the words of Andrew Bird, is "more about haircuts and fashion than about music". Get off my lawn!
7. Intended, this time.

The Troubador is an endearing little venue up some stairs in the Valley, long and thin and with a stage so small there are guitar stands mounted on the wall. There are comfy-ish seats along the sides as well, which is handy for when the music does not warrant standing up.

The Support: At Sea

We arrived part of the way through At Sea's set, and I got briefly distracted by having to bellow at the ever-affable Romesh and Josh about my Melbourne friends and hear them get ephant's name wrong. Even after I started paying attention to the band I was not especially interested. There was a brief period of amusement when I realised that the configuration of Dead Letter Chorus as described to me by Stefan was the same: three tall guys wearing black plus a girl. Then I realised that At Sea had a drummer as well, so they must be At Sea and not Dead Letter Chorus.

At Sea were ... okay, I guess. They reminded me a little bit of Teeth and Tongue, but I think this was for the entirely superficial reason that both have a female singer in a dress and a band made up of boys. At Sea's singer did not play an instrument, just strutted and sang poutily, failing entirely to overcome my prejudice against singers in rock bands who don't do anything but sing.² I was powerfully reminded of all the classified ads that read something like "Heavy rock band seeks female singer." On the other hand, the band's only stylistic consistency seemed to come from the singer, who sounded a bit like 1990s Gwen Stefani propped up in front of a different band. Overall grade: a resounding "meh".

During the set I was mainly entertained by watching band members flit back and forth between backstage and the merch table, and playing "guess who's in a band and who's just going to the toilets". Oh, and by the fact that one member of At Sea looked like a taller Ben Lee with fluffy sideburns.

The Main Event: Hey Rosetta!

All six members of Hey Rosetta! on the little Troubador stage made for a tight squeeze, the more so because one of them had a cello. The Very Tall Guitarist looked even taller in such a small space, and there was an incident of approximately as much cuteness as three kittens: the bassist and the (significantly taller) violinist sharing a mic to sing backing vocals. I am fairly sure my inner voice went "ee hee hee!" and didn't stop until they stopped doing it.

The show itself was, unsurprisingly, excellent. Being so spatially concentrated only intensified Hey Rosetta!'s sound, and I was able to hear and appreciate more of the music's subtleties in an enclosed space than had been possible outdoors at Woodford. I was really impressed by the exceptional skill and musicianship on display, of every member individually but also of the band as a whole. In some bands everyone concentrates hard on playing together and nobody gets into any kind of musically transcendent headspace; in others, invididual members go off on their own individual journeys and the music doesn't hang together unless the poor drummer manages to pound the skins insistently enough. Hey Rosetta! play like maniacs, yet with such sensitivity and precision that you could be forgiven for thinking you are listening to some kind of extraordinary one-man-person-band.

Some things that I particularly liked:

• The wonderful ensemble playing frees up the drummer to add rhythmic texture to an already rich sound, instead of being stuck keeping time.
• Having two string instruments rather than one exponentially increases the awesomeness of a band. There's something about a (horn/string) section that trumps a single instrument every time, and I love the way these two bounced off each other.
• Mandolin!
• Having seen Hey Rosetta! a few times and listened to their album and EP, I recognised the openings of some favourite songs, which made me think that I was getting to know the band - so much more satisfying than musical one night stands, as Stefan so deftly metaphored.³

Hey Rosetta! won over what seemed at first to be a dubious-to-indifferent crowd - I was standing more or less at the front of a scattering of people at the beginning of the set, with an unobstructed view, but by the end of the set I was shifting about to see past the drunk tall people who had drifted in front of me. Hooray for Hey Rosetta!

Unfortunately, it was past the bedtime of a certain doctor,⁴ so Dead Letter Chorus remain an unknown quantity. I hear they are quite good, but having heard that about the Arctic Monkeys and Vampire Weekend in the past I will reserve judgement.

finis

1. How am I supposed to accurately punctuate that? Stupid bands with exclamation marks in their names.
2. This is not to say that they are never awesome - Matt Berninger "only" sings, after all, and The National are my equal favourite band of all time. But a singer who doesn't contribute anything else to the sound needs to be good.
3. 'To metaphor' is a verb now. You heard it here first.
4. Not a real doctor.

Unfortunately, there was nothing I especially wanted to see until 2pm, my "maybes" didn't even start until eleven, and it was only just after nine. I eventually floated over to the Folklorica tent to see what was going on, and surprised myself by very much enjoying some Indian classical music. I usually find that style of music irritating to listen to, at least if I'm listening to a recording,¹ but some low-key sitar and tabla was just the thing for the beginning of a hot, busy day. It's possible that this was my one and only moment of Indian-classical-music-appreciation, but who knows - it could even happen again.

For the lack of anything better to do, I went to the Bazaar tent (my festival favourite!) to sit and watch the band before the band I was vaguely interested in seeing. It turned out to be Jimi Hocking, who was hugely entertaining (and also played some pretty good music).

As well as being a self-described "skinny white guy playing the blues" (very well, I might add), he regaled the audience with tales of Memphis and Melbourne and was funnier than most of the "comedians" I saw at Woodford. As well as pointing out that he is actually a nice guy despite being an ex-Screaming Jet, he defended himself pre-emptively against allegations of water-drinking:

I don't want you to think I'm some kind of vegetarian, water-drinking, yoga-doing blues guy, because I'm the exact opposite. This is actually some kind of clear alcohol ... what would that be? Vodka? This is vodka.

Some of his folkier songs fell a bit flat for me, but this was still a lucky find.

After Jimi Hocking came James Grehan, one of the "maybes" that I'd noted in the interests of finding out what more artists sound like. A stark contrast from the garrulous and exuberant Jimi Hocking, Grehan was - and I don't mean this in a perjorative sense - a total wimp.² He seemed to be the mousy, self-effacing sort of performer (which I usually find a bit strange), but played a nice enough sort of blues-ish folk-ish rock-ish music. Oddly, the best description that has occurred to me is that he and his band were like a subdued, personal rather than political, John Butler Trio. Doubtless this is because of the bizarre and enormous gaps in my musical knowledge. Oh well.

Next up was Katie Noonan, who turned out to be one of the greatest disappointments of the festival. Fond memories of seeing her being awesome in George several years ago led me to get to the Concert tent early and secure a seat (and I still almost missed out), but although she still has the voice of an angel (or perhaps a mermaid) I did not enjoy her performance at all. In fact, I left after three or four songs. The entire setlist appeared to consist of pretentious jazzy Beatles covers. Now, I am not against pretentiousness, jazz, the Beatles, or cover versions, taken singly and/or done well. I also don't think that covers need to be faithful recreations of the original - in fact, the vast majority of the best covers are not. However, I do think that it should be possible to discern the roots of the song in the cover. Therefore: if you are going to cover iconic songs in a completely unrecognisable way, introducing them beforehand is just going to disappoint an audience³ who expects to be able to recognise something. Maybe if Noonan had back-announced the songs instead it would have been slightly less irritating, but the unfortunate truth was that the cover versions were not musically interesting in their own right either. You won't catch me at a Katie Noonan show any time soon.

After that disappointment it was lovely to be able to catch David Hyams and the Miles To Go Band again. Their soundcheck was, as usual, a protracted process; it could be said that they are slow and picky, but I think that's entirely justified given the number of musicians on stage and the lovely sounds they produce when everything is set up nicely. On this particular day I realised that they tap into my childhood love for the tape we had at home with The Cobbers on one side and The Corries on the other.⁴

On the way to my next stop I passed a couple of interesting-sounding things without really stopping to take proper notice: something involving xylophones and drums and jumping about, and Dubmarine at the Murri tent. One of my favourite things about Woodford was the way I could just wander along somewhere and see what was happening, and much of the time it would be something interesting.⁵

The next stop was Jigzag, who turned out to be three string players (female) and one guitar player (male) who played music that I would expect to hear at a bush dance in a scout hall somewhere. Despite what you might think, they were not horrible. Not my kind of thing, really, but not horrible. However, the guitarist looked as though he should really be holding an electric guitar in a classic rock cover band somewhere:

Or maybe that's just me. As is often the case with music in genres I am not especially fond of, I preferred the purely instrumental songs; although Jigzag had some nice vocal things going on, objectively speaking, I wasn't terribly interested. Oh, and apparently their merchandise includes aprons and "frilly knickers". Perhaps I am just not part of their target audience.

After Jigzag there is something of a blank, in my memory as well as my notebook. I assume that I wandered about and at some stage ate something. I also noted my glee at the designations of five portable toilet blocks near the Grande tent: two as "male", two as "female", and one as "ladies". Then, gritting my teeth and girding my loins (as it were), I went to brave Lior with Attached Strings at the Grande.

Let it be recorded that I only did so because I really wanted to see the next band, and the Grande at night tended to be jam-packed (to such an extent that people would be several deep outside the boundary of the tent, and then spread up the adjoining hillside). Oh my goodness, I have no idea why Lior was at a folk festival, even a folk festival that does not fear non-folk genres. I have no idea why people love this kind of thing, although I am painfully aware that they do. I suppose I can understand why people like Lior: a good-looking boy with a nice-sounding voice, a few latin rhythms and some melodic flourishes will go a long way, especially if you are a thirteen-year-old girl or a grandmother. But there can be no logical explanation for the outpouring of adulation that I witnessed at the Grande. None.

I find it especially hilarious, given my earlier complaints, that Lior brought Katie Noonan onstage to do a duet. Oh dear me. At least it was over eventually, and they both went away.

If it hadn't been for Frightened Rabbit, I might have had a much harder time deciding whether or not to go to Woodford. Not that it would have been a bad idea, mind you, but the prospect of seeing the band responsible for one of my favourite albums of 2008 made the decision very, very easy. Incidentally, this guitarist looks awfully like someone else:

Sadly, the recurring problem of muddy sound and bass-buried melodies at the Grande did Frightened Rabbit no favours, yet I can't blame the lacklustre performance entirely on the sound engineer. Playing loud all the time is certainly an option available to rock bands, but I think you need more chutzpah and stronger material than Frightened Rabbit possess to really pull it off - and most bands that seem to play loud all the time do actually have some understanding of the concept of contrast. Maybe I just feel ripped off because the delicate balancing act between crunch and whisper that so endeared The Midnight Organ Fight to me is not at all in evidence when Frightened Rabbit play live, and because a lack of either confidence or ability outside the studio makes Scott Hutchison's vocals a pathetic shadow of the recorded version.⁶ Maybe I'm being overly harsh, and maybe jetlag and heat and other unknown things were factors that should be taken into consideration, but at the moment I'm waiting to see if their next album proves The Midnight Organ Fight to be some kind of fluke. Phooey!

I still enjoyed some of the songs, but my desire for them to be as good as they are on the album was too strong to leave me anything but disappointed. And then I called it a night.

1. Unless The Beatles are appropriating it. I know, I know.
2. I'm going to be really embarrassed if he ever reads this, now, aren't I.
3. The audience I refer to is, of course, me. Most of the crowd ate it up. Bah humbug.
4. In fact, this probably goes for pretty much all the folk-influenced Anglo-Celtic music that I ever hear.
5. Or at least something listenable.
6. My reflexive dislike of the thing that singers do where they change the melody they sing may play some part here, but to be fair I can learn to like it as long as they don't suck all melodic beauty out of the song in doing so. This was more a matter of "oh, I think my range is only a fifth of an octave, I'd better not sing the songs the way I wrote them."

That picture was taken at 7:30 in the morning, which means it had been too hot to be alive in the tent even earlier than that. See the shade that's covering some of the tents? Yeah, we didn't have that. It was HOT.

Just inside the festival gate there was a wall painted beautifully with mazes and logic puzzles and things. I took some pictures, meaning to come back and have a proper look later, but somehow I never did.

There was a Poets' Breakfast, where the only vegetarian breakfast food had non-optional eggs (which drjon heroically saved me from having to eat) and the poets were fairly tedious. There was one fellow who did what was basically a stand-up comedy routine, which I enjoyed lots, but as for the rest ... well, I'm glad I discovered on the first day that I didn't need to bother going to the Poets' Breakfasts for the rest of the festival.

Next, I trotted off to the Folklorica stage for the dubiousy-named "Invocation Rituals" set. It was actually really good, despite my misgivings: Tenzin Choegyal chanted and sang and played a flute, as well as attempting some fairly ambitious audience participation, which was lovely, and then Sam Okoth (accompanied by a percussionist whose name I've forgotten who was from England, "just a little north of Africa") came on in his fetching getup:

and put on an excellent performance. I really enjoyed his music, although I wasn't sure if they were all traditional Kenyan songs, just generically "African",¹ or original compositions. He also made some interesting observations, both insightful ("going home" to get some of what you need doesn't have to be about a physical place) and funny (in Kenya, rich people dance slowly because they have no need to move fast - so the sluggish Woodford audience must be made up of very rich people).

There was a third item in the Invocation Rituals set, but I left early to catch Miguel performing at a different stage.

A very competent eight-piece jazz band, Miguel were ill-served by the early hour and the venue. I think they would be much better suited to a back-alley club after dark than an overgrown circus tent in the glare of the morning. The sound engineering at the Grande stage was disappointing,² and the band played everything very, very straight, but a few people still got up and danced. I preferred their latin-style songs to the cooler, laid-back jazz, but that may just have been because I was mentally gearing up for a week of festival and wanted something high-energy to feed on. Fortunately, some of that was coming up next.

Waiting For Guinness were fun like a barrel of monkeys. Another one of those bands that people attempt to describe by sticking together different genres, their website suggests "garage cabaret", "gypsy punk", and "gangster jazz" as possibilities. Less feral than the Barons of Tang and orders of magnitude more entertaining than Miguel, Waiting for Guinness made a lot of noise and got people dancing in the gravel and dust, including little kids and people without shoes on (ouch). They also attracted the festivalgoer whom I dubbed Dancing Guy, because I saw him again and again and he was always dancing.

Next up was one of my festival favourites - perhaps even my absolute favourite - in David Hyams and the Miles To Go Band, at the endearingly-named Duck and Shovel venue. Seven band members on stage (one of whom was playing with the band for the very first time), including a cellist, a fiddler and a guy with a whistle (yay!) played a lovely acoustic, celtic-influenced yet very Australian sort of folk music. No pictures, because the ones I took are too dark and grainy even by my low Woodford standards. After seeing this band, though, I immediately re-examined my festival schedule to see how many more times I could see them. (One and a half - hooray!)

After David Hyams, Twisted Oak took to the stage, but I fled the venue after hearing their soundcheck. Not that they weren't musically accomplished, but a bunch of antipodean teenagers playing traditional bluegrass, one of them with a banjo, was really not something I wanted to listen to. While I found much to appreciate in unfamiliar musical genres at Woodford, much of the charm lay in the perceived authenticity of the performers, and Twisted Oak had none of that for me. I wandered over to the Chai tent, where Mr Percival was playing, but despite a certain similarity to Mal Webb (whose performances I already enjoy) and what seemed to be an engaging performance, I was completely exhausted³ and trudged off to become unconscious in the tent.

Said unconsciousness lasted much longer than I had planned. I didn't have to decide whether the Opening Ceremony would be too cheesy to go to, because I was asleep. I also missed Evenish, Mic Conway's National Junk Band, and That 1 Guy. I did eventually wake up and make my way back to the festival, sat through technical difficulties and some indifferent short films (QPIX's Best of the Best, apparently), then went and crashed for the night. Spoiler warning: Fortunately, this was pretty much the only time I was too tired to see and enjoy things all week.

1. I am significantly uncomfortable with the lumping of just about all African culture into one basket by and for stupid whiteys; I suppose a similar thing happens with most other cultures that didn't start out European, as well. Blech.
2. A trend that would continue throughout the festival and really spoil the experience of seeing some of the bands.
3. Leftovers from Christmas Day, I think. Being at the festival was generally energising rather than exhausting.