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The eclectic nature of neofolk (and this blog) means that there is a broad spread of folk music that the genre can pull from, but there are a few common features.  Paganism, history, community, resistance, and the struggle to maintain a counter-culture all collapse together like a neutron star with Panopticon, a genre defining Americana black metal band that has become a staple of Old God playlists.  Based out of Appalachia, the uniqueness of their sound is a the methodical rhythm of storytelling, which founds their albums in a tradition of oral history that traces back past the coal mining migration to the mountains or the economic collapse and mass exodus from West Virginia.

It was tough to choose a band that is primarily known for its deep screeching metal sound to feature on this site so early, but that is not the Panopticon we are going to focus on.  While they tower high in the world of epic metal, that is only one half of an incredibly diverse musical array that drives heavily into the world of european neofolk revival, Appalachian folk music, vibrant bluegrass, and tech-imbued ambience.  Albums like The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness 2 (the twin side to a crushing metal first entry) forgoes the sound of the prior entirely to jump into a folk traditions of culture that formed up around working class coal miners who developed an internal community life that riffed on folk spiritual and survival lessons from the old country.  Autumn Eternal is mixed company, slow acoustic sets, marked particularly by slow strings, ar interspersed with the sound that we are so accustomed to hearing. The shifting sound, which has gone from full bore hillbilly country to acoustic silence of neofolk to blackgaze, is something to really marvel at when we are talking about a single person stretching over fifteen albums.

While it is clear from their lyrics, almost spoken didactically at times, that they see folk traditions and spirituality as a claim of strong community bonds against a commercializing world, this is centered deep in the class politics that are rightly the province of West Virginia.  Starting with a focus on mass incarceration and the surveillance state evolving in late capitalism, Panopticon has a strong prison abolitionist strain. Kentucky and West Virginia’s labor history, particularly the “redneck” coal strikes that charged the region with the kind of militant anger that only comes the kind of brutal exploitation that coal barons have staked their reputation on.  The album Kentucky deals with this heavily, introducing the labor folk songs of the area that many would expect from the Industrial Workers of the World’s “Little Red Songbook” or Utah Phillips last release.  There is a deeply felt sense of loss in the way the album deals with settler colonization of the Americas, but still finds heroic stories in how it recounts the trials of Sacco and Vanzeti, the Haymarket martyrs, and ground laid by anarchist figures like Emma Goldman (The final track on their self-titled debut is called Emma’s Song).

Panopticon’s main figure, Austin Lunn, is open about his anarchist politics, the way that regionalism plays into his worldview, and how it is connected to struggle.  This on the theme of identity that plays so heavily in neofolk, but takes it decisively back from the far-right, who tries to essentialize it with race and gender. Instead, it is working class community, the beauty of the mountain, and the bonds formed in rural backgrounds that formed that sense of self.  There is a bluegrass pick in it, the sound of a dripping still, an uncle’s voice of advice. Those roots are the multicultural mix of working people, those who survive only because of the skin of each other, and Lunn is proud of this. Part of Lunn’s refusal to do too much press or numerous interviews with metal magazines is the antagonistic response to open anti-racist politics, which some see as divisive or “witch hunting.”

Panopticon has made a point of playing at metal festivals that eschew apolitical fence-sitting for open politics, like the Dutch festival Roadburn.  He is continuing this trend in the upcoming Northwest Terror Fest happening in Seattle from May 29th to June 1st.  On Wednesday evening Lunn will be playing an acoustic set, perfect for anyone interested strictly in the neofolk side of Panopticon.  The festival itself (which we will be covering in the future) will be filled with anti fascist metal and grind new-standards like Dawn Ray’d, Cloud Rat, and Closet Witch.

We are adding only a few of Panopticon’s neofolk tracks to our playlist, as well as embedding their Appalachian folk and euro-neofolk albums below, but feel free to check out their entire Bandcamp library.

 https://open.spotify.com/embed/user/blackcatfilmsltd/playlist/74snxst77irk3jahKNMupq

There is a story we tell about the past.  Where the mundane was imbued with the sacred, where the forest still held magic, where the world was larger while our community was small.

Neofolk is the modern revival of folk music traditions interwoven with metal, ambient, gothic, and other “fringe” music, usually focusing on pre-Christian pagan spirituality, de-sacrailization, and a look to the past.  The bands that have dominated the genre, who have the largest tours and quotes in music magazines, entered this genre because they wanted a romantic art form that told the story of Europe’s past. This was to revive a nationalist identity, just as it was in 19th Century romanticism, to imbue white people with a sense of mythology about Europe’s past and the need for a rebirth.  

This concept is largely known as “metapolitics,” the process by which thinking and philosophy is changed in a culture to make it more malleable for political change.  Since their defeat in World War II, many fascists have turned to the world of metapolitics in art, in philosophy, and music, as a way of influencing the culture so that far-right politics have a fighting chance.  This is a strange twist on Marxist revolutionary Antonio Gramsci’s theses about cultural struggle: when you change the perspective you can change the political outcomes.

Bands like Sol Invictus, Death in June, Changes, and Fire + Ice were tied to far-right nationalist movements, including parties like the National Front or skinhead gangs like the American Front, and saw the music as a way of creating a deep nostalgia and sense of longing for white Europeans.  By fetishizing a false narrative about the past they can then pair the modern world, with its liberalism and multiculturalism, as the inverse of the history they are fetishizing. The romantic qualities they are offering in their music seem only possible through the revolutionary nationalism they are peddling.  These bands grew and set the tone for the burgeoning neofolk scene, so much so that the scene’s narrow view of European heritage and nationalism became the lens through which all bands were judged. The genre was then was allowed to simmer with this ideology without intervention because the hold that fascists had on the music was so strong.

The far-right did not invent neofolk, it does not own it, and it should not be given to them.

The left is a romantic tradition that looks both forwards and backwards, dreaming of what the world could be and picking up traditions and histories that tell that story (both real and imagined).  This is why, as Margaret Killjoy has pointed out, genres like black metal and neofolk appeals so much to anarchists, whose sense of passion and prefiguration draws on a well of romanticism.  Neofolk attempts to modernize the pre-modern, the stories, music, cultural significance of societies past, and while European revival music has dominated coverage, neofolk is a worldwide phenomenon that draws from traditions from South Asia to indigenous North America to West Africa to Northern China.

There is another neofolk, one that rejects fascist stories about white identity and imperialism, one that is fueled by decolonization, a connection to the earth and Old Gods, to the spirit that fought feudalism, capitalism, industrialism, and the ravages of white supremacy.  We refuse to let fascists define our music, and instead are committing this work to start a new “scene” that is inclusive, diverse, and founded on resistance. This is openly and unabashedly antifascist neofolk, a music scene that not only refuses nationalism, but makes itself an enemy of white supremacy.

Sort of like Michael Muhammad Knight did with Taqwacore, imagining a music scene that did not exist to that people would be inspired to create it, we are humbly trying to give this a name and declare its existence.  This is, to a degree, a falsehood, since antifascist neofolk has existed as long as the genre has, especially where the music was created as a work of postcolonial cultural struggle.  But what we hope to accomplish here is to be intentional about creating an antifascist space that brings together the bands and create an clear cultural space that people can identify with. Instead of the assumptions that exist about neofolk, we are the people who we want neofolk to be in the future.  By defining antifascist neofolk as a possibility we create a standard to apply to the genre, a line to force musicians to cross, and a question to pose. When the far-right defines the genre they define the values, morals, and what is considered acceptable. Now we can define those boundaries.

Neofolk is one of the best examples of what Rose City Antifa refers to as “contested space.”  Anti-Racist Action was formed in the 1980s around contested spaces like working class neighborhoods and music venues, specifically inside the punk scene that had both left and far-right wings.  Music scenes like skinhead Oi! was a struggle for who was going to define the genre and have access to the musical spaces and the people. ARA refused to cede that ground to white power skinheads, and forced them out of their recruiting spaces.  Fascists need music as a recruitment tool since it drives at the heart before the head is ready, and we refuse to allow them that. Instead, just as people have done successfully for the past few years in black metal, we are creating a counter-culture of our own and seeing neofolk as a place to struggle against white supremacy rather than a radioactive wasteland.

This blog will remain relatively simple without a lot of frills, almost no design, and we will update the visuals slowly over time.  The point will be to highlight new bands, building an “antifascist neofolk canon,” and to speak of both the positive organizing in neofolk spaces and the ongoing problems in the scene.  The posts will be primarily focused on explicitly antifascist neofolk bands, but we will include the occasional band from adjoined genres like black metal, ambient, industrial, and anti-folk.  We will also highlight a few bands who, while not be explicitly political, have separated themselves from the far-right.  Most neofolk bands do not have primarily political lyrics, so instead we look at themes, public statements, behaviors and activism, and other things that allow them to stand out, including artists who have left neofolk bands that turned towards the far-right.  This will include a special focus on bands that derive their sounds from outside of Europe and North America, and include musicians of color who are often erased from the story of neofolk.  

This will be paired with a playlist we encourage people to follow, which will start small and will grow as blog posts are added.  We will also create a resource list for other things that are topical, such as antifascist black metal lists, information about fascist entryism into the music scene, antiracist organizing tools, great record labels, and news.  Expect a lot of album announcements, show reviews, band lists, interviews, and hopefully a lot more.

While this is a singular effort, we want your help!  Please contact us with suggestions for bands, share widely, and start a conversation.  If you are with a label that supports this, we would be happy to check out new music and prop up bands that line up with the values here.  We also would love contributions and submissions, but note that there is not money behind this and it is instead a labor of love (at least right now).  We will create a donation option, but other than that we just want to focus on the music for the time being. We want, more than anything, to be the place people go when looking for great new music, and to redefine what this scene can be.  Posts will be slow starting, but expect a lot more to come.