The 'democratisation' of the recording process has changed the field rather, although in the realms of free-improvisation and experimental musics that much was well in hand back in the seventies, long before the sublime 'Spiral Scratch' set a very essential ball rolling (ba-dum-ba-dum!). Such a shame the DIY ethos never really caught on in the folk world though, which is just the place where one might have expected it to, but the cultural conservatism of Folkies would appear to exist in inverse proportion to the radical politics to which they invariably subscribe - and that isn't necessarily a bad thing either.   

These days, of course, the picture is very different: take a look at Woven Wheat Whispers & John Barleycorn Reborn to see the amount of relatively new & otherwise obscure folk artists for whom the DIY ethos is the prevalent factor in their work. Here the line between 'recording' & 'performance' becomes so thin as to be almost meaningless, & innovation is a constant & startling factor of the music; here, more importantly, the ethos of Folk marries that of Musique Concrete, and not before bloody time either. Certainly most of the stuff I do couldn't be done without recording machines of one sort or another, be it handy hand-held field-recording devices such as the Zoom H4, or digital 8-track home studios, or my PC which runs such software as Soundforge, Cubase & Ableton Live from which one might conjure forth entire soundscapes in real-time without having to go to indignities of actually touching a conventional musical instrument - very handy, especially when the neighbours are in upstairs & the creative muse insists on consummation.

For the same price as a few days in a professional studio, one might kit out a perfectly functioning home studio which allows the freedom to explore & indulge to ones heart's content, giving one a greater understanding of the relationship between performance & recording than has hitherto been possible. One of the war cries of the 'new folk' is 'A lap-top is just as valid a traditional instrument as a concertina' - and as the lines blur between music and the possibilities of music (at least the possibilities that such readily available technology might allow in an otherwise purely traditional context) one senses a very definite spirit of renewal afoot derived entirely from a re-contextualising of the very nature of what might be considered as being 'folk' whilst re-invigorating everything about the music we might hold most dear - and then some!