motel void

Shovel Dance Collective are a group of nine musicians united by a passion for the traditional music of the British Isles, Ireland and beyond. They are committed to folk music not as an artifact to be unearthed, but as a communal activity – inviting to those it speaks to.

MOTEL VOID: You’re based in London, UK. How would you describe the current folk music scene there? Is it still vibrant? Do you have any favorite venues or artists?

SHOVEL DANCE COLLECTIVE: Yes, the folk scene is vibrant with young and old interested in performing folk music and with audiences seeming to be interested. Folk bands are showing up in indie venues and experimental music venues, maybe as musicians’ wide-ranging influences are coming through in their arrangements of the music. There also seems to be a slightly wider audience of general music fans who will check out more folk-leaning music at the moment. Venues like Moth Club in Hackney and The Ivy House in Peckham have lots going on, including bands like us, the incredible Milkweed, Aga Ugma and Naima Bock, but also legendary artists like Andy Irvine and Martin Carthy. You can also still find singarounds and Irish trad sessions weekly in pubs, as there have been for decades.

MOTEL VOID: Your upcoming new album “The Shovel Dance” blends studio fidelity with your live energy. How did you approach the recording process to capture the immediacy that defines your live performances?

SHOVEL DANCE COLLECTIVE: Magic Mike O’ Malley and some clever Shovels! We went into this one with the aim of capturing some of the live arrangements that we’ve been playing since the group coalesced, and over a fairly intense four days recorded the nucleus for each track as live as we could at Press Play studios in Bermondsey. From there, the tracks grew quite gradually, with missing parts completed and additional elements added in – deeper church organ drones, the scrape of hurdy gurdy (courtesy of Goblin Band’s Rowan Gatherer), a single subtle cymbal crash added in one of the tunes. So there’s immediacy there in that it’s built around all of us playing together in a room, but we’ve taken the opportunity to slightly enrich that core in order to emulate some of the affective punch of actual live performance. It was amazing to get each draft mix along and hear the tracks swelling as they were worked on.

MOTEL VOID: Your music references traditional English, Irish, and Scottish music dating back to the 1600s and beyond. How do you select the traditional songs you reinterpret, and what draws you to particular themes or stories?

SHOVEL DANCE COLLECTIVE: When it comes to tunes, we are drawn to beautiful melodies and swing between the euphoric and the austere, or some combination. They come from what we know and like or are working on ourselves and we bring these to the group. We bring in sounds, textures and ideas from contemporary music in our arrangements of traditional material.

Through songs, we explore stories of resistance, subversion, working class lives, migration, death, proto-feminism and queer histories. We draw on stories of those whose very existence is called into question, even still, saying, look: all of this is part of our continuing collective humanity and complicated, entangled history.

MOTEL VOID: As a leaderless collective, how do you navigate the creative process and decision-making within the band, especially when it comes to arranging and recording your multi-layered compositions?

SHOVEL DANCE COLLECTIVE: Usually someone will bring a song or a tune they like or have been working on independently. We will talk about it or just try learning it and improvising with it and see what initially comes out. We try pairings of pieces which may immediately work or not work at all, in which case we move things around or put pieces on hold until we figure out how to work with them or find a good match. We can disagree sometimes, but usually when something is working we all feel it.

Every time someone joins a weekly practice, they will add something or have an opinion, and will try to fit into that and make their own part to complement what’s already going on or change it. Because we don’t have loads of time all together, as individuals we can’t be precious about pieces. If there is a strong feeling of doubt about a piece from any of us, we will drop it, but we try to be supportive of the ideas and arrangements others have worked on, and try to work with the material and the context and meaning of the song. Luckily, we are generally on the same wavelength, and if something sounds promising we are usually giddy with excitement about the whole thing.

We all have different knowledge and backgrounds so can add contextual information about a piece or song that the others might not have been aware of. I’m Irish and grew up playing Irish trad so I can bring that sensibility and understanding of the idiom to the group. Others are really into English folk song and tunes, or Irish trad too, or noise music or free improv, folk song archives or metal or drone, so all of this is feeding into our playing.

Recording is something that changes depending on the concept of the piece. We have incorporated field recordings, recorded in a nice studio, in old venues, in churches, on windy hills – it varies. At the moment we are planning how to record new pieces, mixing slivers of studio time and fancier equipment with more DIY recording sessions and combining the results. A lot of time is spent on achieving a sound that evokes the essence of liveness and togetherness, and the visceral impact of live performance.

MOTEL VOID: Do you have plans to go on tour after releasing your new album?

SHOVEL DANCE COLLECTIVE: Yes, please join us.

14th September 2024 – Alter Festival, Denmark
20th September 2024 – Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival, Norway

19th October 2024 – The Tin, Coventry

20th November 2024 – Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival
21st November 2024 – Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh
22nd November 2024 – St. Mary Magdalene Church, Clitheroe
23rd November 2024 – Where Else?, Margate
24th November 2024 – The Con Club, Lewes

5th, 6th, 7th December 2024 – Cafe OTO Residency, London

More to be announced for 2025.