— was recently explored by Mike Scott, the endearingly enigmatic Scottish singer-songwriter who, with his solo career and his fronting of the Waterboys, has for the last three decades mined the common ground between timeless folk tradition and primal punk spirit.
In these descent traditions, the primal man who results is usually the progenitor of a particular people.
He set some of his best films — including "The Quiet Man," from 1952, newly available in a luminous restoration from Olive Films — in distant lands and dramatized the clash of modern ways with enduring traditions, spotlighting a primal stage of contention, that of a couple in love confronting the extended family.
There, the primal rhythms and ancient spirits of tradition fuse with a deep rural darkness and the magnetic pull of the redwoods to ensnare the women in a hypnotic bond of desire and a terrifying artistic nightmare.
Without a wink or apology, the soldiers slide from everyday conversation into Scottish ballads and folk dances that suggest a primal connection with distant generations and traditions.
Though Hindustani music predates jazz by centuries, stemming to the Mughal courts of medieval north India, Iyer believes links between musical traditions operate on a primal level.
If one of the distinctive contributions of the American political tradition was a pluralistic conception of governance, its primal source was the pluralistic character of the founding generation itself.
Theirs is a long tradition, steeped in Cartesian logic, of trying to convert primal, pheromone-charged experience into numbingly abstract discourse.
Lanre Bakare Mike Kerr and Ben Thatcher come from the great tradition of rock duos who can dredge up the rawest primal racket out of just two instruments.
Nancy Eisenfeld creates the sensation of a waterfall in large amorphous paper collages painted in a drippy and splattered manner, but, in the tradition of Abstract Expressionism, the real subject is the artist's primal energy.
