"Anything can be deemed ceremonial but not anything is ceremonial; it is not the thing, but the significance of the thing.?"

This sums it up in a nutshell. I don't see that there is any more ceremony in the production of a CDR of folk music than there is in the ripping of, say, a data CD of Excel files.

"The sort of music they do is besides the point"

You now appear to be changing tack a little: so it's not just folk CDRs that are "feral" then? This was one of the reasons I felt obliged to contribute to this thread: I don't see why making FOLK CDRs is any more "feral" than making CDRs of any other kind of music.

Take one of your "feral" CDRs. You appear to be suggesting that, were you to discover that in fact you were mistaken - that the disc in question had in fact been Replicated rather than Duplicated - this would then mean that this was NOT "feral" any more.

In other words, "feral" simply becomes synomyous with "home made". In exactly the same way a home movie is, or a pie is. That's why it's hyperbolic. It's like saying you're "curating" a gig to make yourself sound important. Or calling something an "epic" cos it's longish.

Feral's a great word; it almost sounds like the growl of a wolf. Doesn't ring true to apply it to bourgeois cottage-industry commercial endeavours. That's a hyperbole typical of hippydrivel Romanticism, which always likes to pretend, in a rather unpleasant cliquey-elitey kind of way, that when its mates sell stuff it's somehow qualitatively different from when other people sell stuff.

You're not in a tree-house; you're in the same smelly kitchen as the rest of us.