Tradition Now: Shovel Dance Collective

Shovel Dance Collective are a group of nine musicians united by a passion for the beauty, force, and political charge of the traditional musics of Britain, Ireland and beyond. They are committed to folk music not as an archaeological artifact to be unearthed, but as a living communal activity - inviting and generous to those it speaks to. They arrange the source material into a kind of musique boue (mud music), simultaneously traditional and experimental they engage a deep, cross-temporal synthesis of free improvisation, tape manipulation and field recordings. Their music appears as a patchwork as pieces are stitched together, rearranged and recontextualised. The yarn is threaded with their sense of aesthetic innovation, and with a deep sense of the ways in which traditional music holds the voices of the oppressed and those who, by their labour, create the wealth of the world.

Presented by NCH