Category: News

The Heather Dale Band have launched an IndieGoGo campaign – like a Kickstarter, but a different site that a lot of musicians like because reasons – to fund the Celtic Avalon project. It’s a stage show and DVD and youth education program based on the King Arthur legends. You can check it out here.

We’ve only seen a few post-con reports from Conflikt, but they’re all positive. Here they are:

• Tim Griffin, there via Interfilk.
• Allegra Sloman, who only has time for a few things, but says them.
• Vixy, of Vixy & Tony, over at her Livejournal blog.

If you know of any others, please let us know!

While much of Filkdom – particularly Cascadian filkdom – has been at Conflikt, Alec’s been recording with some friends at the famous Abbey Road Studios. They just posted a picture re-creating the famous crossing, but that might not be visible to everyone. Here’s the shot being taken, as seen from the webcam nearby:

Harold Stein informs us that Cat Faber released her second solo CD, Dr. Faber’s Medicine Show!, last weekend at Georgia filk convention GaFilk. It features 20 songs written over the past year and a half.

Harold will be bringing copies of the new album to Conflikt; they’ll be at the Friends of Filk table. He also has a small number of copies of The King’s Lute, Cat’s first release. Both albums are also available on Bandcamp:

http://catfaber.bandcamp.com/

[ETA 1/13/2016: This was a guest post by Glenn ‘technoshaman’ Stone. Attribution lost when we recovered the site! – Administrator Anna]

I’ve been a fan of filk, folk-rock, and generally indie bands in the Pacific Northwet for 14 year and change, basically two weeks shy of how long I’ve been here.  A heck of a lot of them, though, have a common… thread isn’t the right word.  Strings.  Five of them, usually… which is unusual because your garden-variety cello has four.

But then, Betsy Tinney is no ordinary cellist… and last night I finally got to see her do something – well, several somethings, actually – that I’d been wanting to see for the vast majority of those 14 years.

The first one was release an album… the second one was actually *sell out* a show she was headlining… and the third surprised me, pleasantly.  Betsy almost always has a look of intense concentration when she plays, unless she’s just finished a solo and the crowd is reacting… but last night she was smiling mid-number, for the joy of playing.

To say the show was epic is to damn with faint praise.

The lineup was the tip of the iceberg:  Not just Betsy and Raven, her five-string Luis and Clark carbon-fiber beauty,  but Tricky Pixie bandmates S.J. Tucker and Alexander James Adams, Vixy and Tony, Sunnie Larsen, Marcos Duran, Jeri Lynn Cornish, her daughter Kaede Tinney, and Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff.  (Jeff engineered the album, and snuck some guitar parts into the bargain. 🙂

(Sadly, I don’t have a setlist, and the review would turn epic if I did’em all, so I’ll hit the highlights….)

Betsy started off solo, without preamble, with a haunting instrumental rendition of “For The Love of All Who Gather”… the program varied, from Betsy playing solo with her looper to Tricky Pixie to Vixy and Tony (and Sunnie) to Jeff and Maya both with and without Vixy… two sets’ worth!  Notables included “Alligator” (Tricky Pixie), “Gentle Storm” (solo), and “Dryad’s Promise”, which featured Kaede on vocals (Betsy’s comment here was she’d gotten tired of the song, but when she had Kaede sing it, she knew it was right).  (It was right, all right.  Kaede netted herself a standing ovation… 🙂

And then things got just a little bit nuts.  Third set?!  Yeah.  She did that.

Somewhere in there there was a duo with Jeff covering Leonard Cohen’s ever-popular “Hallelujah”, with Jeff throwing pixie-dust guitar licks all over Raven’s melody… Tricky Pixie got things pumping with an old-school-esque fiddle trio (“Chickies in the House / Napoleon’s Rant / Duncan’s Dance”) and then the last three… if it had been an organ concert, you would’ve heard thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk as they pulled out ALL the stops… for the first time in a LONG time Alec pulled out March of Cambreadth, and they built it up slowly with just the instruments before launching into the traditional chant.  Then it was EVERYBODY up for the “last song”, “Liberty Elephant”… three djembes, two guitars, two fiddles, bones, brushes, and of course  Betsy playing the lead riff as Sooj led the crowd in call-and-response….

 

And of course we weren’t going anywhere without One More Song… something that, if you think about it, is found Doctor Who filk:  “Kashmir”, with Vixy filling in for Plant, Tony and Jeff ganging up for Page, and Kaede, Sooj, and Vixy taking Bohnam’s slot to Betsy’s JPJ, with backing help from Maya….

The house lights came up with the chant of “BETSY! BETSY!” still bouncing around the rafters.  I’ve never seen her smile that much.  Then again, it’s not often one’s debut album concert sells out to the doors…

The fourteen year wait?  Worth it.

The email list service has been restored. It took large parts of a new system (motherboard, processor, RAM) to do it, but it’s back. You may converse when ready.

Whelp, just as everything’s up and running and awesome, we have a windstorm that blows out power followed by a system failure. All web services are up, but email? Well… we’re working on it. Hopefully Sunday, possibly Monday.

Now we have a Twitter account – ho, ho, ho! It’ll be updated automatically with new posts. This is both announcement and the first test of the linking plug-in.

We also made a Facebook account too. Same story as the Twitter account.

The Emerald Forest Filk Society email list is moving to the Mighty Mighty Murkworks. This’ll probably be bumpy, at least for the archives, because we’re moving them to mailman format (thanks Anna!) and out of archaic Majordomo format (argh) and everything is exploding into a million pieces.

New messages should archive fine tho’, which will be good, because the old archiver quit last year and, well, yeah. YAY new archives!