Thursday 7 October 2021, 7.30pm
caroline began in early 2017, evolving out of weekly improvisation sessions. Band members brought together their shared influences, including Midwestern emo, Appalachian folk, minimalist classical and various forms of electronic music, slowly expanding their on-stage membership as the songs developed. Rough Trade released their debut single “Dark blue” in March 2020, and the eight-piece were nominated as Ones To Watch at the 2020 AIM Awards, and narrowly beaten by Arlo Parks.
“Skydiving onto the library roof” represents a new development in caroline’s songwriting process. Built on what the band refer to as a “broken loop” with no fixed pulse or rhythm, the song represents the start of their ongoing explorations into non-gridded time signatures and improvisation. “We’ve always been interested in patterns and repetition and that definitely features in a big way, although rather than there being a minimalistic, mechanical precision to the repetition, each one is unique,” they explain of the track. “The essence of the song - the broken loop - came early in the process and everything else seemed to naturally evolve out of it, as if the other parts were already contained within the broken loop and just needed to be unpacked.”
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.
