Submissions for the Contata 8 songbook are officially open! Got a song you want to contribute? Click here to find out where/how to submit it.
Also: this year at Contata we plan to have at least one jam session. Want to suggest a song to play? Watch this space for updates.
Please signal-boost this in your other fannish communities, or wherever else you think appropriate.
not filk
Virtual Folksing
Tomorrow January 22nd–time tba but probably mid-to-late afternoon Central? My voice is a little scratchy so I need to give it time to warm up.
Tell your friends!
If you haven’t been involved in this in the past, what’ll happen is that @scribefindegil will post a link to a livestream when it goes online, and you can tune in a listen, sing along, and request songs. She knows a ton of filk and folk and has an amazing voice, so I highly recommend it!
What I don’t see much of is kids in college or just out of college doing it. Maybe they’ve moved on to anime.
Frank Hayes, interviewed about filk music by Alanna Nash
This is hilarious to me (despite being one of the sad truths of Filk These Days), because on one hand I think the (to my mind, at this point artificial) divide between science fiction and anime actually has distanced older fans from younger ones, and on the other hand it recalls the joke that never gets old, pointing at any given thing and saying “is that anime”
This is hilarious to me (despite being one of the sad truths of Filk These Days), because on one hand I think the (to my mind, at this point artificial) divide between science fiction and anime actually has distanced older fans from younger ones, and on the other hand it recalls the joke that never gets old, pointing at any given thing and saying “is that anime”
Folk Music in a Digital Age: The Importance of Face-to-Face Community Values in Filk Music
“At its best, the filk room is a special locus in space and time, created for and by the community, and is a safe, encouraging place for individual and group play, support and, most of all, co-creation and collaboration. At its core is a heightened group experience, created by active participation and immersive intensity with the goal of giving all participants a feeling of creative satisfaction and belonging…
In the filk room, and in other folk performance forms, co-created group experience arises from the manipulation and eradication of the performer/audience boundary.”
Long-time filker, professor, and ethnomusicologist, Sally Childs-Helton, recently published an excellent article about the nature of filk performance, with an examination of the differences between Millennials and older generations in fandom and what the future of filk might look like because of this. I highly recommend checking it out if you’re interested in The State of Filk or fandom history in general.
If you download the article from this link, it gives the author some digital brownie points, so definitely do that if you can!
And if you don’t have the time or inclination to read academic articles on fandom (why not??? I guess some people are like that), I’ll leave you with a quote from the end of the article, from an interview with someone who had worked as a professional folk musician for years but was attending her first filk session, because I think it’s inspiring:
“You’re sitting around, swapping songs, and everyone gets a chance to play. I’ve
been going to folk music conventions for years, but you people are actually doing folk music.”
Thank you for making this! We (the two of us who 'run' this blog) grew up filking and honestly finding others who love it makes us so happy! Thank you!
I’m VERY glad, and because you have said this I am now going to get off my ass and queue some more things.
(honestly people saying nice things 100% keeps this blog running, since filk is such a small community I can’t rely on notes to see if people care, they gotta tell me – and EVERY time I am SO happy, it is so NICE gosh I love people)
So I’m kinda new to the filk community…I’ve been listening to Seanan McGuire’s works for a year and a half now, and I just started listening to Vixy and Tony. I’ve heard some Talis Kimberly and Heather Dale, but that’s about it. Do you have any recommendations for other filk artists, similar to Seanan McGuire and Vixy and Tony? And do you know where I would go to find more filk music? Thank you!!!
I am SO sorry I left this message sitting here for…over a month because I am lazy and bad at blogging. Honestly the reason I let this whole blog go fallow for months at a time is I sometimes have trouble answering the question of where to find new filk myself D:
…but I do at least have some advice. One of the most popular online platforms for filk is Bandcamp, though unfortunately the “filk” tag there seems to be split between actual filk and people using the word either as a nonsense sound or as not English. Poke around in the filk tag, or the “geek” and “nerd” tags for a while and you’ll at least find something. There’s some on Soundcloud, too, but the organization is, if anything, worse.
There’s a bunch on YouTube as well – mostly older releases (lots of Leslie Fish) and live recordings from cons, which are always worth looking at, even if the sound quality is usually lousy.
A handful of filkers have personal websites, but usually the only way to find out about those is for someone to tell you, unfortunately.
And the best way to find people who can tell you is to go somewhere where the filk is LIVE! I highly recommend any filk convention, but unless you get lucky that’ll involve a bit of travelling – there’s a list of them here. There are also plenty of cons-at-which-filk-happens. Stay away from newer cons, and anything specializing in comics or anime. You want the (usually small) sci-fi and fantasy conventions that have been around since at least the 80′s (or Dragoncon, which has everything). Check out the official musical guests (most cons, old and new, have music of some kind) – and see if you can find any info about after-hours room parties. That’s when the good shit happens.
There are a decent number of people who host regular filk circles in their homes, but again, they can be infuriatingly well-hidden. I know there are regular events in southern California and Minnesota, so they’ve got to happen other places. If you find one, don’t worry about not knowing anyone there; they’re all a bunch of old nerds who will be delighted and a little baffled to see new people.
Good places to keep an eye on for filk news and new music are the Facebook pages “Filker” and “F is for Filker”. They’re closed groups just to cut down on spam, but just send the admins a message saying you’re interested in getting involved with the community and they’ll be happy to let you in. If you make a post in either of those asking “are there any filk things happening soon near [x-place]” I’m sure you’ll get something!
RIGHT, NOW TIME FOR RECOMMENDATIONS!
Based on your interests, I think you should definitely start by checking out old Heather Alexander recordings, especially of Mercedes Lackey songs – start with the “Magic, Moondust, and Melancholy” album; it’s all on YouTube.
SJ Tucker is probably also up your alley, as might be Cheshire Moon and Leslie Hudson
Beth Kinderman is one of my personal favorites who I don’t think is nearly well-known enough
That should keep you busy for a while, but I invite anyone to add more recommendations and/or advice!! Because honestly I need it too.
Hey people! Last week, you may have been aware, @scribefindegil did a sort of virtual singalong, livestreaming herself singing folksongs with the idea that people could either listen or look up the lyrics and sing along wherever they were. Because it’s really hard to get a bunch of people in one room together to sing anything, and it’s much easier to get people to be on the internet.
Well now it’s MY TURN. Tomorrow starting at 4 PM Pacific Standard Time (an hour later than Araxie did it, because I’ve got things to do) and going as long as people are interested, I will have my guitar and be there for you to request songs from, hopefully with a half-decent microphone, but I make no promises.
Why? Because I like singing, and it’s better with people, and the world is pretty fucked up right now, and singing is good and pure. I’ll post a link to the stream when it’s ready, so stay tuned.VIRTUAL FOLKSING FOR TODAY (NOVEMBER 18TH) IS ONLINE NOW (4:30 PM UNTIL WHENEVER) AT THIS LINK
I’m going to try a virtual folksing tomorrow (Friday the 11th) at 5pm Central. Hope that’s early enough that the UK people can catch some of it. We’ll go until either my voice or my fingers give out.
If you want to request things that aren’t in Rise Up Singing or Rise Again (or filk standards) you can let me know in advance and I’ll see if I can find chords.
I will be there! You should be there.
Okay, I have an idea. How many people (looking at you Carleton friends and filk friends) would be interested in a virtual folk/filksing?
We can set up a regular time, have someone with a guitar host (maybe alternate between me and @dog-of-ulthar), and then that person leads while other people can make requests and sing along wherever they are. We wouldn’t all be able to hear each other but we’d know the other people are there.
@axonsandsynapses, who is now a mod on this blog, has gone through our entire archive twice today, once to improve my (frankly abysmal) tagging system, and once to repair every single youtube link, because apparently today tumblr declared war on us specifically
she is a hero and a scholar and you should all go say nice things to her