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He also started the Antifolk Festival in reaction to the New York Folk Festival. After moving around to a couple of places in the East Village, Lach set up shop in the Sidewalk Café and organized Anti-hootenannies or Antihoots, a weekly open-mic night, which grew to be the biggest open mic night in the city, often attracting more than seventy performers at sign-up and lasting into the wee hours of the morning. If I’m not folk, he said, I’ll be antifolk. Though played on the acoustic guitar, he was told his music was not folk and did not belong at their hootenannies. This year marks the 20th anniversary of Antifolk at the Sidewalk Café and the Summer Antifolk Festival is happening right now (August 6-16.) The term “Antifolk” came around in the ‘80s when a songwriter named Lach was kicked out of West Village folk establishments for playing songs too rough and punky.
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In Berlin, these Germans facilitated an Antifolk satellite community, organizing a monthly concert series called Four Track on Stage, hosting musicians from the New York scene and local songwriters who were inspired by the community. Writer Martin Büsser had recently published a book called Antifolk: von Beck bis Adam Green (from Beck to Adam Green) and high culture publications, music magazines, and academics were praising the scene’s amateur aesthetic for creating a safe space for musical experimentation. With firm roots in New York’s Lower East Side, the scene breathes the neighborhood’s history: part punk rock, part Yiddish theater.īut meanwhile, back in Germany, Antifolk artist Adam Green was on the cover of German Rolling Stone. There are stand-up comedians, comic book artists, and poets too. Antifolk remained a mostly unknown group of songwriters, recording and distributing handmade CDs and cassettes and performing regularly to each other at Sidewalk and a couple other venues in New York. In the US, Antifolk was an occasional blip on the radar, negatively reviewed by the tastemakers at Pitchfork and sometimes mentioned in passing as the scene where superstar Regina Spektor got her start, and possibly Beck, too. And they became musicians too, joining the Antifolk artists on stage, recording their own songs on cassette tapes, and performing at Sidewalk as well.
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Seeing as the musicians were open and friendly, or seeing as the musicians did not quite know how to have fans, the Germans immediately befriended them. “It felt like we were the only members of the audience,” said Sebastian Hoffmann, a student from Southern Germany, who was twenty-one years old at the time and starting to book shows of his own in Berlin. The Germans were surprised to find these musicians playing only to handfuls of people, all of them other musicians. In the summer of 2005, four Germans living in Berlin came to New York on a musical pilgrimage to find Antifolk, a DIY community of musicians connected by shows and open-mics in the backroom of the Sidewalk Cafe in the East Village, where the restaurant/bar’s patrons often don’t know they are dining at what a sign hanging over the red curtain in the backroom proclaims as the “Home of Antifolk.”