Sunday 20 June 2021, 7.30pm
Deligthed to host a belated launch show for Cambridge based guitarist, C Joynes and nine-strong folk band, Shovel Dance Collective to celebrate their split release on Jacken Elswyth's Betwixt & Between label.
“An inheritor to Davy Graham; a lone operator prone to unexpected collaborations, with a repertoire that crosses continents and timezones with consummate ease.” – THE WIRE on C Joynes
Over the last decade, C Joynes has ploughed a singular furrow through solo guitar, with a body of work incorporating English folk-tunes alongside North & West African music, and lifting proto-minimalist and improvised techniques from the European classical tradition. Shifting to solo electric guitar on his most recent releases, the ‘33 Chatsworth Rd’ EP on alt.vinyl (2015) and ‘Split Electric’ LP on Thread Recordings (2016), he’s currently exploiting the instrument’s potential for placing overdriven garage blues throw- downs alongside the brittle ringing tones of electric folk.
“As much Conlon Nancarrow and Ali Farka Toure as Blind Lemon Jefferson, the compositional mind at work here can take apparently disparate threads of modernism and ethnic tradition and treat them as though they were all archaic blues styles learnt from dusty 78s.” – BRUCE RUSSELL, THE WIRE
“An inheritor to Davy Graham; a lone operator prone to unexpected collaborations, with a repertoire that crosses continents and timezones with consummate ease, and dashed off with a phenomenal, yet lightly applied technique.” ROB YOUNG, THE WIRE
http://cjoynes.tumblr.com/
http://cjoynes.bandcamp.com/
After a variety of regular meet-ups, chance encounters and song-filled trips to Margate by old friends, new friends and friends of friends - the nine musicians of Shovel Dance Collective were formed. They are brought together by a communal passion for the folk traditions of England, Scotland, Ireland, and beyond. Not only preserving, they act to nurture and synthesise this source material with the members eclectic interest in other musical forms, by drawing sensibilities from drone, free improvisation, contemporary classical and metal. With a rich array of instrumentation at their disposal they dig up new ways of playing through research in primary sources and folkloric history. Woven deeply into the fabric of the collective is a sense of folk as the music of working people, a set of narratives that hold within them queer histories, proto-feminist narratives and the rich world of those who created and create the wealths of the world. They are simultaneously traditional and experimental, not seeing folk music as an archaeological artefact to be unearthed, but as a living and breathing communal activity that is inviting and generous to those it speaks to.
