The nine members of Shovel Dance Collective are united by a passion for the beauty, force  and political charge of traditional music. Together their practice has emerged as a  patchwork of fragments, traditional material sewn together and embroidered with their  own ever deepening group improvisations, explorations of field recordings, and concrète  style tape manipulation. 

Their arrangements emphasise the inviting, hopeful and human qualities of folk, and they  channel the joy and sadness held in these collaboratively-shaped words and melodies.  Balancing dense orchestration with intense fragility, the patchwork is threaded with a deep  sense of the way in which traditional music carries the voices of all those who have gone  before, the oppressed and those who, through their labour, create the wealth of the world.