My recommendations 2006:Roots & Crowns by Califone

Califone: Roots & Crowns
Thrill Jockey 10/10/2006

Available on Emusic

Recently I watched a documentary about Woody Guthrie on the local PBS affiliate. I was surprised to learn that Guthrie and John Cage were close friends and mutual admirers. Though I was astonished at the time, their association makes more sense having contemplated the commonalities between folk and avant-garde forms in music. Both, ideally, begin with that which is near in space and immediate in experience. Having begun to understand this parallel, Roots & Crowns seems like an organic and natural consequence of the paths folk (called Americana now by the music press) and experimental noise have taken in the past five years. Rather than representing the synthesis of two opposing paradigms, Califone propose a grand theory of unification, suggesting that they have always been one and the same.