Back in the early 2000’s, when I was a self-identified enfant terrible of the UK folk scene, I’d have stereos playing simultaneously in different rooms in my flat. Albert Ayler would be blaring in one room and Jeanie Robertson in another, and I’d wander between them in an attempt to reconcile the two musics. Because both elicited the same feeling of ancient ecstasy, I thought that smashing them together would generate an overtone which would open a portal to the shadow-reality of my private passions. A place where the human archetypes of traditional song drank flaming mojitos with Sun Ra and La Monte Young to the sound of endlessly peeling bells.
I never got to that place. But it sounds as if the Shovel Dance Collective have. The press release for their third album – Everything in Readiness – cites influences that range from Evan Parker (free jazz firebrand and Brexiteer) to Seamus Ennis (musicologist and uillean pipe virtuoso). And that’s exactly my cup of meat.
That’s all fine in practice, but what about the theory?
Well, opening track, Jer the Rigger, feels like the keystone overtone of my daydreams as shruti box, bowed strings and banjos vibrate like the tuning fork of the earth, before opening out to a Scottish jig where internally rhyming cadences and leaping rhythms are made ecstatic by an ensemble arrangement led by Joshua Barfoot’s hammered dulcimer. No sooner has this monolith risen from the earth than it capsizes into the frenetic Foxhunter’s Reel, with Oliver Hamilton channelling Henry Flynt at his most rapturous, as traditional themes are repeated and pulverised with new meanings bleeding out of their margins.
Ní ar Chnocnóar Ísleacht (Mists Are the Best Times for Sowing) offers a tart amuse-bouche as penny whistle is vivisected by field recordings, static interference and other musique concrète ephemera in a manner that’s reminiscent of Ewan McColl’s Radio Ballads series. Nick Granata lends his bone-rattling voice to Jowl – a mining song cautioning against the treacherous conditions of the pit – soundtracked by the pneumatic thud of drums and Tom Hardwick-Allen’s swordfish trombone. This is segued to Jacken Elswyth’s mesmeric banjo, with melody lines spun with the guile and dexterity of Arachne’s tapestry as distant bells and bird song drift in and out of consciousness.
Mataio Austin Dean narrates a poem over swarming strings on A Summoning (Kind Morning in our Fists), as apocalyptic visions of “skies of boundless skin” and “the children of pain wield columns of blood” are invoked against levitating drones and fractured banjos. There are shades of Alastair Galbraith’s lo-fi masterpiece Cry here alongside other free-folk outsider units like No Neck Blues Band and Vibracathedral Orchestra.
The album’s centrepiece is a full-throated version of the moribund nursery rhyme Who Killed Cock Robin?, with the band amplifying the story’s inherent strangeness in an arrangement that begins with pizzicato strings and ends in a prolonged, cataclysmic crescendo. This spills into another Hamilton-led violin reel, which is as bellicose and delicate as any David Munrow pavan.
With Everything in Readiness, Shovel Dance Collective have combined vision and virtuosity, intuitive gristle and scholastic rigour to create the best folk album of the year. This is folk music in its most potent form. By allowing itself to be hybridised and mongrelised by other influences – the celestial monochord of Pauline Oliveros, the hillbilly blues of Henry Flynt – they are getting closer to what’s most vital and true about the form. Each genetic mutation to our native music allows it to grow stronger and stranger. Their egalitarian approach to ensemble improvisation and their musical omnivorousness have generated an overtone which has opened a portal to my most private passions. Forward all my mail there.
Everything in Readiness (October 23rd, 2026) Tak:Til Records