Shovel Dance Collective
The Water is the Shovel of the Shore
Memorials of Distinction / Double Dare
2 December 2022
The Shovel Dance Collective’s The Water is the Shovel of the Shore is one of the most forward-thinking and original collections of traditional material you’re likely to hear this year, or any year.
To say that a river has a voice may be true, but it is also a glib and over-simplified notion. The River Thames has its own music, certainly, but that music is composed of countless voices. Some are harmonic, some dissonant. Some are quick and violent, and others speak over ages longer than many human lifespans. Some are man-made, while others are organic or geological. The plash of a moorhen’s feet is one thread of the river’s music, but so too is the insect hum of a police boat and the babble of schoolchildren crossing Tower Bridge. A river, with its sinuous length, has a constant movement that paradoxically can be seen as a stillness, particularly in the heart of a city. Nowhere are these contrasts – old and new, wild and urban, calm and changeable – more apparent than on the Thames in London.
It is this idea of a shifting, fluid timelessness that the new album by the Shovel Dance Collective does so well to document. The nine-piece group describe their practice as existing somewhere between folk music, music concrete and acoustic ecology, and on The Water is the Shovel of the Shore, they use this liminal approach to genre to navigate themes both contemporary and historical. The album is split into four parts, each roughly fifteen minutes long, the first of which opens with heavy, disquieting drones, which are soon cut through by Alex Mckenzie’s low whistle. Then a field recording of the waters at Greenland Dock eases us into a group rendition of The Weary Whaling Grounds, which slowly rises in volume as if the singers are slowly approaching us. This, in turn, is interrupted by the sounds of the modern city. These opening minutes tell us a lot about the band’s way of working – they are never afraid of layering the recording techniques of contemporary experimental music on to genuinely ancient-sounding versions of traditional songs, and they are never content to tread a rut for too long: surprise and juxtaposition are important tools in their trade.
Halfway through the first piece, Jacken Elswyth’s banjo cuts a nimble swathe through the external noise, only to be drowned out again by the flap of sails and the clank of masts. A snippet of The Herring’s Head, apparently recorded in a booming, dripping tunnel, is both bracing and mildly terrifying, while the scrape of violins that follows is like traditional music filtered through a lens of highly experimental free jazz. It’s uncompromising and extremely effective.
The second part starts with a genuinely emotional moment, In Charlestown There Dwelled a Lass, sung with passion and intense dramatic flair by Nick Granata with Fidelma Hanrahan on harp. The sounds of lapping water lead us into a fiddle and flute duet (Oliver Hamilton with Mckenzie) and a few verses of Lovely on the Water sung by Mataio Austin Dean.
…these strange and immersive pieces are actually changing the way you listen, and that’s truly groundbreaking.
A casual listener might be forgiven for thinking that the found sounds and field recordings are mere interludes or handy framing devices for the traditional songs, but this is an album that deserves more than casual listening. The watery sounds are part of the fabric of the whole thing, and the sense of place they help to create is striking, so much so that it is sometimes unnerving. After a while, you begin to forget the old distinctions between music and mere sound: these strange and immersive pieces are actually changing the way you listen, and that’s truly groundbreaking.
A little way through part three, Elswyth’s banjo fades into a recording of a clergyman blessing the Thames in a tone both alien and strangely comforting, and then there are the sounds of fences and cranes. The city is presented as a kind of lost or haunted landscape where things like religion and industry are ever-present but oddly detached. It’s almost like a dystopian future vision of London only there is something decidedly current about it too. This is music that speaks tangentially but movingly of loss: the loss of traditional ways of life, of old connections with landscapes, and perhaps the loss of livelihoods and jobs.
Lowlands, which kicks off the fourth and final part, is a beautiful duet immediately followed by The Cruel Grave, which, along with a spookily detached version of traveller song The Grey Cock, provides a lesson in bleak atmospherics. Perhaps the album’s biggest surprise comes with the inclusion of the Guyanese folk song Ova Canje Water. It ensures the album ends on a positive and unmistakably humane note.
The Water is the Shovel of the Shore is, in many ways, an album about energy, especially energy embodied in water and in the people who live by the water. It celebrates the vitality of certain specific and varied ways of life without ever romanticising tradition for tradition’s sake. And because of that, it is also a political album in a quietly fierce way. As the accompanying essay by the band makes clear, it touches on the slave-trade origins of shanties, the use and abuse of the river for profit, on the way water sustains human life and carries humans to their deaths. In short, it is a hugely ambitious and intelligent project, astonishing in its cohesiveness given that its creators style themselves as a collective rather than a band, and it’s one of the most forward-thinking and original collections of traditional material you’re likely to hear this year, or any year.
Shovel Dance Collective Dates
Sat, 10 Dec, 7:30 pm – Shovel Dance Collective + Angeline Morrison & Amardeep Singh Dhillon
St John On Bethnal Green
February 2023 Tour
11/2 Salford – The White Hotel
12/2 Sheffield – Abbeydale Picture House
13/2 Hebden Bridge – The Trades Club
14/2 Glasgow – The Glad Cafe
16/2 Bristol – Strange Brew
17/2 Oxford – Florence Park Community Centre
More information: https://linktr.ee/Shovel_Dance_Collective
