Acid, freak, wyrd folk and related

 

Thanks for the link. When you mentioned Disco,  Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" was the first song that came to mind, and purely by coincidence, I noticed you mentioned Giorgio Moroder in the first line of your thread.

 

Last year, David Garland released a 4-hour electroacoustic chamber folk mammoth Verdancy. It strikes me as sort of a folk version of Jim O'Rourke's Eureka. It can be a bit sweet at times, but there's not a moment on the record that isn't crafted with care, and the moments that venture into more experimental territory are exhilerating. I'm mainly posting "Periodicity" for length's sake, but the best tracks are the lengthier ones which make use of his "modified guitar" in which "electronics... provoke the vibration of wire and wood," producing resonant tones and feedback which give his performances a droning ambient feel. 

Of course, you have Natural Snow Buildings and TwinSisterMoon (a member of NSB) who create a special kind of lo-fi drone avant-folk. I prefer TwinSisterMoon's solo work, so I will post this song from The Hollowed Mountain: 

Then there's Spires That in The Sunset Rise, who get even stranger than NSB, evoking some of the "witchiness" 

You also have Greg Malcolm and his album Some Other Time, full of highly experimental semi-improvisatory drone folk:

I mentioned Mount Eerie in the other thread. Phil Elverum has flirted with and gone all the way with, at times, avant-folk and pysch folk both as Mount Eerie and in his former band The Microphones. The album Mount Eerie by the Microphones (confusing, I know) is a good example. He kind of sits between Sufjan Stevens and David Tibet (even having Tibet's darkness and atmosphere at the beginning of this decade with Wind's Poem, Ocean's Roar, and Clear Moon).

Robbie Basho is known most as John Fahey's Hindustani-influenced American Primitivist compadre, but imo he fits in like a glove here. Also, his guitar work is to die for. 

James Blakeshaw, of course, deserves a mention, being heavily influenced by Basho and also being on Current 93 records.

And to end with another traditional-not-traditional rec, you have Kíla, a Celtic folk band from Ireland who uses more progressive structures and draws from other traditional folk musics aside from Celtic and is one of the few folk bands I've heard rival Comus in intensity. The title track of Luna Park is one of my favorite tracks period.