Last year saw the release of Stick in the Wheel‘s searingly honest and politically charged Hold Fast, on which the duo fused the ancient and the modern in an almost alchemical way. In his review of the album, Thomas Blake concluded that you “can hear one of the many possible futures of folk music beginning to play out. And yet what is perhaps more important is the fact that you can also hear a possible future of society, and it is a future based on hope and the tolerance of difference…it is an urgent and quite brilliant album.”
Next month, on 17 September, they release their new mixtape album, Tonebeds for Poetry via their own From Here Records label. The album promises to be no less urgent, exploring lost civilisations, inertia, beats music, sludge, drone, glitch and the sounds of the city, held together with ancient word-glue, repurposed to deliver vital messages for now.
Stick in the Wheel’s curiosity concerns the city and the struggle of its layered communities that co-exist on top of each other, years upon years, the weird structures hidden in plain sight.
Lead track “The Cuckoo” re-casts a pastoral folk song as a sub-heavy lament for a master criminal; “Wierds Broke It” is 90s grunge + autotune for a lost civilisation; “The Devil’s Nag” uses a midi file of a 17th-century dance tune to make a 21st-century one.
Nicola Kearey’s sung and spoken vocal improvisations glide through and over Ian Carter’s no-holds-barred underground production, at once rough and smooth, harangues citizens through a barrage of encrusted city noise. It offers up a soundtrack against the wildness of the city, and acts to drown out the worst of what humans are up to, destroying themselves. An intense, sometimes bleak, but somehow still uplifting experience.
Always at the forefront of pushing just how far musical traditions can be challenged and stretched, SITW’s work has been hugely influential since they started in 2015. Their Noods Radio show is a place for ongoing dialogue about how transient, underground, and working-class music cultures need to be archived and valued, not as commodities, but as communities. And their work as From Here Records label curators has reinvigorated the scene around them. Prior to that, they’re perhaps best remembered as part of early dubstep experimenters Various Production – and this latest set of sonic and textual works builds upon a tradition of their own making.
Pre-order link: https://stickinthewheel.lnk.to/TonebedsForPoetry
Stick in the Wheel Tour
27.08.21 Kelmarsh Shambino Festival
03.09.21 Brighton PierFolk Festival
05.09.21 Birmingham Moseley Folk Festival
23.09.21 Tunbridge Wells Forum
24.09.21 Bristol Jam Jar
25.09.21 Portsmouth Wedgewood Rooms
26.09.21 Twickenham High Tide Festival
27.10.21 Leicester Musician
28.10.21 London Kings Place
29.10.21 Manchester Night & Day
Tickets: https://www.stickinthewheel.com/tour