In the late 60s and early 70s the inherent weirdness of folk met
switched-on psychedelic rock and gave birth to new, strange forms of
acoustic-based avant-garde music. Artists on both sides of the Atlantic,
including The Incredible String Band, Vashti Bunyan, Pearls Before Swine
and Comus, combined sweet melancholy and modal melody with
shape-shifting experimentation to create sounds of unsettling oddness
that sometimes go under the name acid or psych folk. A few of these
artists--notably the String Band, who actually made it to
Woodstock--achieved mainstream success, while others remained resolutely
entrenched underground. But by the mid-70s even the bigger artists found
sales dwindling, and this peculiar hybrid musical genre fell profoundly
out of favour. For 30 years it languished in obscurity, apparently
beyond the reaches of cultural reassessment, until, in the mid-2000s a
new generation of artists collectively tagged 'New Weird America' and
spearheaded by Devendra Banhart, Espers and Joanna Newsom rediscovered
acid and psych folk, revered it and from it, created something new.
Thanks partly to this new movement, many original acid and psych folk
artists have re-emerged. Seasons They Change tells the story of the
birth, death and resurrection of acid and psych folk. It explores the
careers of the original wave of artists and their contemporary
equivalents.