Shovel Dance Collective are a group of nine musicians brought together by a communal passion for the folk music of the British Isles, Ireland and beyond.
They nurture and synthesise this material with sensibilities drawn from drone, free improvisation, contemporary classical and metal, weaving this through with a deep sense of the ways in which traditional music holds queer histories, proto-feminist narratives and the voices of those who by their labour create the wealth of the world. The group favours instruments that conjure a deeper and stranger antiquity; hammered dulcimer, bowed cittern, mountain banjo, pump organ. They are simultaneously traditional and experimental, seeing folk music not as an archaeological artefact to be unearthed, but as a living communal activity, inviting and generous to those it speaks to.
“the way they operate is rich in important ideas – about queering folk music, about upsetting false narratives, about exposing lazy notions of British folk as essentially white, about finding new or lost meanings in old music”
– Narc Magazine
https://shoveldancecollective.bandcamp.com/
