A sound so new it has no name

It's always a fragrant little moment for rock criticism, that brief spell in which it is perfectly clear that something is happening but no one quite knows what to call it yet. A scene, a sound, awaits its baptizer. To whom will the honor go? And will they get it right? Will it end up being called "stoner rock" when it should have been called "bong metal"?

Take, for example, the steadily intensifying folk-noise coming out of Chicago, San Francisco, and other, less identifiable, points on the map. Its performers -- artists such as White Magic, CocoRosie, and Vetiver -- are by and large in their mid-20s, they have conspicuously rejected most contemporary music, they listen to Donovan, Pentangle, Syd Barrett, and John Fahey, and they sound like nothing on earth.

Devendra Banhart, 23, the scene's reigning prince, sings in the accent of an upper-caste elf. Joanna Newsom, 22, plays a pedal harp and seems, in her laser-bright lyrics and the wizened childishness of her voice, to be channeling the antic spirit of Emily Dickinson, or perhaps the English poet Stevie Smith. And Josephine Foster, who plays the Zeitgeist on Sunday along with her band the Supposed, is a self-described "opera school dropout" whose downbeat folk stylings build without effort or affectation into shrieking, valve-blowing arias.

So -- neo-folk? Acid folk? New Weird Folk? Quirk folk? Implicit in all these labels is the eccentricity of the sound. These folkies are rooted in a tradition, but they are also devoutly esoteric, committed to smallness, intimacy, idiosyncrasy. Banhart's quaint, aestheticized delivery is ubiquitously compared with the vocal stylings of Tyrannosaurus Rex-era Marc Bolan, while Foster's immense range and chilly purity of tone are said to recall Shirley Collins, the "first lady of English folk," whose ensemble included early instruments such as the sackbut and the crumhorn.

"I only heard her music for the first time last year," Foster says. "So I can't really say she's an influence. I mean, I love her, but. . . A much bigger influence on me would be Jefferson Airplane -- that really full-bodied, full-blooded sound, with a lot of meaning and beauty in there."

Does she feel part of a scene, a movement of any sort? "Well, a lot of the artists you're talking about have a more stripped-down approach than the one I'm using," she says, "but I do see a musical community there."

Born in 1974 in Steamboat, Colo., the daughter of a motel manager and a pilot, Foster had a melodious childhood -- "I composed on a little xylophone, I was in choirs" -- and ended up at Northwestern University in Illinois, learning how to sing opera.

"It gave me a good taste of the world of opera, which is pretty enveloping. The rigor of the training didn't leave much room for me to work on my own music, so I had to leave it behind. But learning to sing in that style, it's an exciting sensation, something very physical."

Jay Babcock, editor of the free underground magazine Arthur and champion of the new folkies (the Devendra Banhart-curated "Golden Apples of the Sun" CD, a compilation of 20 artists released by Arthur's in-house imprint Bastet, remains the scene's definitive statement), is in awe of Foster.

"She's a Grace Slick for the 21st century -- and that's all grace, no slick," he says. "An amazing combination of God-given ability and formal skill. You can hear Jefferson Airplane in her music, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Joan Baez. . . . She's also the one, out of that whole scene, that has embraced the electric guitar, while at the same time being the most classical of them all."

These days we tend to be rather suspicious of formal expertise. We prize the slapdash and the intuitive, and to describe musicians as "classically trained" is not much more than to concede that they can actually play their instrument, but Foster is the real thing. She composes on the piano, the ukulele, the mandolin, and the 36-string harp, as well as the guitar, and seems happier talking about madrigals than rock songs. She listens to the 16th-century lute music of John Dowland and the Baroque compositions of Henry Purcell. She uses the word "modality." But her new album with the Supposed, "All the Leaves Are Gone," is explosively electric. Foster fronts a full, amped-up, and extremely inventive band, and her voice billows and soars through a 12-song sequence that was originally conceived as a rock opera.

"I was writing these songs on my ukulele, and to me they were sounding like the Who, and I had a plot and characters -- I guess I kind of aborted it at some point. It became more a question of just getting the record done. But you can still feel it in the songs -- stylistically they're a little declamatory, like opera."

A neo-quirk-folk-rock opera? Foster -- although she is louder than any of her contemporaries -- represents the quintessence of the new folkies. Their wellsprings are in the ancient and arcane, but they are breaking new ground. Their music can be recondite, but it admits no limits. There is a word for this, it fits perfectly, and it was coined by Gerard Manley Hopkins in a poem about his favorite composer, Purcell: "arch-especial."