A Folkswitch Video Library

Sheetfaced at Christmas

It was Christmas of 2016, we were feeling festive, of a sort.

Offerings To Hecate

Before The War

Postcards From the Exiled

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Highbrow lyrics tossed into a cauldron of acid rock and dark folk potions

THE POETS WERE THE ROCK STARS OF THEIR AGE. It was a time when people actually recognized the value of the written line. But reading is hard, and poetry fell by the wayside, only to be resurrected in popular song. Even that was short lived. Lyrics stopped having meaning. People still wrote intelligent lyrics, they just stopped being mainstream for the most part. WHAT THOUGHTS REMAIN TO BE THOUGHT? What lines remain unwritten? We're certainly not the first to set poetry to music. But we decided why not do the fuck out of it? You can hear every song for free whenever you want, either here on the site, through YouTube or Bandcamp. We don't do this for the money or to get laid. We do this because this is what we do. We make music. It's not that we don't have anything to ... Read More about Highbrow lyrics tossed into a cauldron of acid rock and dark folk potions

phantasmagoria

ON JUNE 16th, 1816, Lord Byron opened a book titled Phantasmagoriana, which he and his house guests took turns reading from. From that night came Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and John Polidori’s The Vampyre, considered the first English vampire novel, and the precursor to Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Drawing from that idea, herein lies poems from Shakespeare, Yeats, Spenser, Kipling, Ben Johnson and others, set to music. Musical influences range from British folk and Irish traditional, to Black Sabbath, King Crimson and Jethro Tull.

From the fairies who ride wild in the moonlight, to the danse macabre, it’s a look back at a time when people weren’t so certain, weren’t so brave as to believe that what we see with our eyes is all there is. And told in the words of some of the greatest lyricists of their day.

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echo

A Pagan Hymnal

Paganism is quite often a nature religion, following the natural cycle. The seasons that not only divide the year, but life as well. A suite of songs from the romantic poets, based on these quarters of the calendar, a bit of Wordsworth, a plethora of Rossetti, a brace of Shakespeare and others poets, romantic and otherwise.

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exiles

Folk Tales of Heartache and Woe

A trip down the gutters of the folk tradition. Recorded in a haze of despair and expensive alcohol, fueled by heartbreak, some of the more obscure folk songs out there. And so we present a potpourri of songs and stories, from the tragic to the morbid, disturbingly funny to the heartfelt … all the human emotions tied up in a singly bizarre, folkish package.

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Sheetfaced at Christmas

Offerings To Hecate

Before The War

Postcards From the Exiled

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