The Lorekeeper (TAE)
You’re deeply connected to tradition, but you’re open to hearing it breathe in new sound worlds.
You’re drawn to music that feels culturally rooted and communal, even when it uses amplification, electronics, or modern textures.
Folk, for you, is a living practice which is both ancient and alive.
Elements of 'The Lorekeeper'
Tradition: You're drawn to songs and tunes from traditions from around the world. They could be ballads, dance tunes, music for ritual or protest. Music that has been passed down through the oral tradition with deep roots.
Authenticity: You love it when a musician's performance sounds direct, unguarded, unpolished and emotionally immediate. Especially the thrill of hearing something that feels as if it has travelled straight from feeling to sound: a cracked voice, a rough edge, a breath left in the recording, the sense that nobody has polished the life out of it.
Electronic: Before electronics, every sound you heard on a record was produced by an instrument of strings, wind, wood, brass or from the human body itself. But with the advent of digital music and computers, suddenly sound could be manipulated and abstracted into new forms and soundworlds.
When you close your eyes while listening to music, you love being carried into these new soundworlds where your imagination has free reign and the artist has a full gamut of expression unthered to what is physically possible on an instrument.
(Read more about how we built the Typology here)
Your listening wings are
- TCE - The Alchemist - for those who love traditional music and want to hear how people might use their compositional tools to express it
- TAA - The Tradition Bearer - for those who enjoy the spectrum of unadorned acoustic voice and instrument as well as those enhanced by electronics
- NAE - The Visionary - for those curious as to what new sounds and themes are being created with a direct, authentic expression with electronics
'The Lorekeeper' Listening List
Ruth keeps the fires of the old ballads alive, but like a great alchemist reforms them with drones, eletronics and staunch unionism. Ruth is an Australian folklorist and oral historian when she's not that stage and understands how to deeply connect with a story.
Her latest album Heronbones takes the old songs even further into a darkfolk journey of tradition, electronica, memory & myth
'The Lorekeeper' Listening Challenges
- Listen to the Archive
- Trace the Lineage of a Song
- Listen to a tradition of music that is new to you