Towards the end of last year, London-based duo Stick in the Wheel delivered their latest in their mixtape series Tonebeds For Poetry. In his review of the album Thomas Blake set the scene by contrasting the release to 2020’s Hold Fast, on which “they married forgotten dialects to thoroughly modern recording techniques, sang about recent internet memes and brought a DIY punk ethos to 10th-century religious history.” With Tonebeds For Poetry their net was cast wider:
“They recognise that the vernacular of the city and of contemporary urban musical forms is as valid a tradition as any of the more widely accepted varieties of folk music….And the content backs up the form: a shimmer of Ian Carter’s guitar and Nicola Kearey’s autotune-enhanced, part-spoken vocals position the opener Long The Day somewhere between Flotus-era Lambchop and the hypnagogic avant-pop of Dean Blunt. The Cuckoo – a well-known traditional song – is given a trippy, dubby makeover, while The Seafarer is bleak poetry set over minimal beats.”
These avid urban explorers are now taking Tonebeds on the road…so now’s your chance to witness it all live – lost civilisations, inertia, beats music, sludge, drone, glitch and the sounds of the city, held together with ancient word-glue, repurposed to deliver vital, urgent messages for now.
Dates include a night at London’s legendary 100 Club on 27th April and Gateshead Sage 2 on 6th May, see dates below.
Stick in the Wheel Tour Dates
27/03 Cambridge Junction 2
21/04 Leicester Musician
23/04 Morecambe More Music
27/04 London 100 Club
28/04 Portsmouth Wedgwood Rooms
29/04 Bristol Strange Brew
06/05 Gateshead Sage 2
11/06 Hebden Bridge Folk Festival Trades Hall
12/06 York Crescent
Ticket links: https://www.stickinthewheel.com/tour
Noods Radio Show: From Here…
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.
Listen again here: https://noodsradio.com/residents/from-here-w-stick-in-the-wheel