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 and avant-garde traditions.
Joynes has released 10 albums to date, including ‘Poor Boy On The Wire’ (2021), his first solo album dedicated wholly to the electric guitar; ‘The Borametz Tree’ (2019), recorded with long-term fellow travellers Dead Rat Orchestra; and ‘The Wild Wild Berry’, a collaboration with singer Stephanie Hladowski (fROOTS Editors Choice Album Of The Year 2012, MOJO Top 5 Folk Albums 2012). He has recorded a number of sessions for BBC Radio 3. He has also played extensively across the UK, Europe and the USA, sharing bills with a broad range of performers including Shirley Collins, Martin Carthy, Marc Ribot, Richard Dawson, Alasdair Roberts, Jack Rose, Josephine Foster, Sir Richard Bishop, Six Organs Of Admittance and 75 Dollar Bill.
Shifting away from the electric guitar of his most recent solo activities, he’s currently exploring the uses of an amplified archtop guitar, exploiting the instrument’s potential for placing intricate parlour music alongside overdriven garage blues throw-downs and the brittle ringing tones of free improvisation.
“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
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.
