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.

They have performed sold out shows across the UK, with headline concerts at venues such as Cafe OTO, Kings Place and Cecil Sharp House. The collective have appeared at many major festivals: Glastonbury, Roskilde, SXSW, Rewire, Green Man, End of the Road, Sidmouth Folk Festival, Supernormal and Supersonic festivals among others. Publications such as The Wire, Loud and Quiet, NME, Financial Times and The Times have heralded their live performances across the years. Their albums ‘The Shovel Dance’ and ‘The Water is the Shovel of the Shore’ have been championed by The Wire, MOJO, Uncut, KLOF, Songlines et al. and both were named albums of the year by The Quietus.

Their second album ‘The Shovel Dance’ was released in October 2024 by American Dreams Records.

 

The music of the Shovel Dance Collective is about the hardship, the beauty and the dignity of the simple life. Some of these songs are more than 400 years old – the nine-strong ensemble digs deep into the history of English, Scottish, and Irish folk music. And yet, the collective’s interpretations bring to light the modernity of these traditional dances and songs. They seek out the buried stories of workers, farmers, and peasants, tell tales of the worms that dwell in corpses, but also sing songs of salvation and strength. There is no centre and no leader in this collective; for the Shovel Dance folks, collective self-organisation is a lesson from the past and a political utopia.

Visuals: Dasha Zvezdin