In 2019, Ian Carter and Nicola Kearey of Stick in the Wheel approached EFDSS with a residency proposal looking at the notions of culture, tradition, collecting, cross-pollination and fragmentation of music. They went on to complete the project with the support of EFDSS, Cockayne Foundation, ACE, and Lubaina Himid.
Nicola and Ian invited Olugbenga Adelekan (Metronomy, Africa Express), Jon1st (DMC DJ Champion, Fly High Society) and Nabihah Iqbal (Ninja Tune, NTS) to experiment and collaborate with them. Today they have announced that they have finally been able to shape their findings into a collection of six very different tracks that explore new perspectives on what traditional music is, and can be.
Stick in the Wheel are among the forefront of artists exploring the notion of folk music, modern culture and tradition, something we have touched on in previous album reviews. For their 2021 release, Tonebeds for Poetry, Thomas Blake opened his album review:
Stick In The Wheel do things differently. That might sound like a trite statement, but it is entirely appropriate in the case of the London-based duo. On 2020’s brilliant Hold Fast, 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.
Tonebeds For Poetry casts the net even wider if that’s possible. Here the form, as well as the content, is unexpected: the album is presented as a mixtape. In this way, they toy with the idea of musical lineages. It’s not so much a renunciation of pigeonholes as a celebration of otherness. 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.
For Perspectives on Tradition, they reveal that they: invited contemporary musicians to explore what traditional music and culture meant to them, through the folk music library/audio archive at Cecil Sharp House. DMC scratch champion Jon1st explored samples and fragments of music and folklore from his home city of Leicester, BBC6Music DJ and musician Nabihah Iqbal looked into the Dorset folk songs contemporary to Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Metronomy’s Olugbenga focused on Nigerian folktales and Kenyan field recordings.
SITW: “Our aim for this project was to open the doors of this archive to new people, to uncover treasures in order to make new connections. Our initial residency was an invitation to explore, rather than produce a finished product. Also, making connections between the artists as well as to the archive.”
The result is a collection of music looking at the notion of fragments, archives, what the function of traditional music is in 2022 and how we can be meaningful with it. Whether that’s the traditions of scratching and sampling, or how we can relate to others across borders and cultures, or attempting to make sense of the prism of an archive.
Perspectives on Tradition is released on 27th May and you can hear the first track today: Nabihah Iqbal x SITW – The Milkmaid below:
Pre-Order the album via Bandcamp which includes Digital, CD and Cassette as well as a booklet with artist interviews and reasonings about this project.
More here: https://stickinthewheel.bandcamp.com/album/perspectives-on-tradition
Stick In The Wheel will present ‘Perspectives on Tradition’ on Wed 1st June 2022 at Cecil Sharp House, London – details here.
They also have the following upcoming live dates
06/05 GATESHEAD Sage 2
11/06 HEBDEN BRIDGE Folk& Roots Festival, Trades Club
12/06 YORK Crescent
https://www.stickinthewheel.com/