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Vashti Bunyan performing Rainbow River in her wagon, 1970
In 1968, Vashti set off from London with her partner Robert in a horse and wagon towards the Isle of Skye, wishing to leave the music industry of the city behind, and join a burgeoning folk revival happening on the Scottish island.
It took them two years to reach Skye, and it was there that Bunyan recorded her timeless classic album "Just Another Diamond Day"
@jrp I found the entire film, will post shortly.
@jrp I was raised on Joan Baez, Julie Felix, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Melanie (Safka).....by hippies in the Australian bush.
God I was still listening to Cat Stevens when I was in my early 20s.....
Hope Sandoval was a soundtrack to at least one relationship I had in the 90s and I still feel something when I hear Fade Into You.
I just can't stand most Country and Western....Townes Van Zandt and Johnny Cash excepted.
@jrp interesting. I preferred My Bloody Valentine to Mazzy Star. The idea of a "cultural void" in Germany surprises me. From our isolation in Australia my friends and I listened to so much German music and thought longingly of the Berlin that Nick Cave fled to in the 80s. I saw Einstürzende Neubauten in 1991, and they blew my mind and changed my life. Then there was the whole Ämon Duul, Neu, Popol Vuh, Tangerine Dream, Can, Faust, Klaus Schulze and Ash Ra Temple thing. I appreciate Kraftwerk but never listed a lot. Can and Faust are groups I admire a lot. I suppose you have seen the BBC documentary Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany?
Culture development here originates from bohemia. Synths and other new music tech were expensive, reserved to fool around with for the rich, their kids and the state funded peak of culture institutions and exclusive concert halls. Also they require an engineer's mentality, not a big crying heart. However, the new music could have become a mainstream of most people, however it didn't. While CAN changed style on any other album - and lost fans again, they've just won - most here stuck to cheapo Schlager music, and only dared to add the dumbest of techno (e.g. march music) & a punkish hooligan attitude to this over time.
Those bohemian youngsters discovering the real new music back then are still bohemian elders now, and still listening to the same music in their 70s & 80s, not untypical for all of mankind. And surely that resembles a type of culture now, although restricted to the few, who invented it and another few, who had the mind to discover it, when it came up.
People growing up (here) now have none of this on their musical plate. If they do get into music making at all, then they get to be lost solo producer acts in the box, dreaming of Spotify fame, mostly stereotyping imported music.
Also, there isn't much of a player culture here. People, who play, go study or join a School of Rock type of thing only to learn the basics of marketing mainly, then end up prolonging the stereotypes. People are all into defining things, while there isn't one final definition for any type of music.
For anyone else then there isn't a culture of public singing and playing together, other than in football stadiums and understaffed geriatric church choirs.
Folk, rock, jazz & further evolutions from this are entirely different in that regard. They resemble an ever-evolving player culture persisting in people's minds, hearts, and dancing legs since a 100 years or more, not a bohemian affair at all. Mixing styles again, and again, and finding and assimilating more news on the way. And everyone can do this together. I can find me a harmonica for 50 cents at the thrift store, that, even if I just breathe through it, will touch another one's heart in an instant. It seems hard to find such in German psychedelic rock and it's technologically influenced variants. CAN were amazing though, as a sensual trip :)
looking for Tago Mago among records