> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.hwaelmag.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Shovel Dance Collective :: Everything in Readiness - URL: https://www.hwaelmag.com/shovel-dance-collective-everything-in-readiness/ - Published: 2026-11-05T08:04:12.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-05T08:04:12.000Z - Description: Drone folk: trad songs, tape and free improvisation in a nine-piece. - Author: Hwael Mag - Tags: Album Reviews, 2026, Folk, Experimental ### Five epigraphs come before the songs. Diane di Prima’s invites you to get up and begin, because “someone will finish”. --- *Everything in Readiness* came out on tak:til, an imprint of Glitterbeat, on 23 October 2026, and is the third album by Shovel Dance Collective, nine musicians based in London. On their website Ernst Bloch, Pauline Oliveros, Henri Lefebvre, di Prima and the Epistle to the Romans accompany forty-five minutes of music. That looks like too many authorities at first, and slightly still does. Yet all of them speak of work that whoever begins it will not see finished: Lefebvre imagines a magnificent life waiting as a cake waits for its ingredients, and from Bloch comes the bracketed phrase in the fourth track’s title, “Mists are the best times for sowing”. That title explains the record better than the word “folk” does. The songs come from archives, collections and field recordings, and the group treat them as tools kept in good order until needed, with little deference to their form. Looking for “Jowl, Jowl and Listen Lads” through recordings, archive letters and an online forum, they found listeners who had mixed up verses from two different songs, and the muddle survives in the group’s version. “A Hundred Stretches Hence” was in *Musa Pedestris*, the collection of songs in thieves’ cant: the melody is theirs, and so is one verse. [Everything in Readiness by Shovel Dance Collective](https://shoveldancecollective.bandcamp.com/album/everything-in-readiness?ref=hwaelmag.com) The opening is a ten-minute triptych, and it sets the pattern for an album built in threes. “Jer the Rigger” struggles out of a drone of shruti box and banjo, then Oliver Hamilton’s fiddle drives “The Foxhunter’s Reel”, an unbroken, rhythmic cascade of quavers that finds the drone three quarters of the way through. “Tally Ho! Hark Away!” finally inverts the hunting cry, and the group say they have made it a lament for the fox. Electric guitars and the whole ensemble raise a wall of sound, and the baritone voice towers dramatically over it. The reversal is clear without being announced, and the record did not need the statement. “Who Killed Cock Robin?” spans two consecutive tracks. In the first, “A Summoning”, recorded live at Donaufestival, Mataio Austin Dean spends more than three minutes reciting a text of his own that prepares and comments on the nursery rhyme. In the second the rhyme itself arrives, and all that preparation turns out to be superfluous: the story stands on its own. A sparrow confesses to killing the robin, the animals of the countryside divide up the funeral duties, then “Gilbert’s Jig” closes the piece. The group call it their “pop song”, and they are right. They are at their best when they stop explaining their materials, as the fourth track, “Ní ar Chnoc nó ar Ísleacht”, already shows: a minute and twenty-five seconds of wordless whistle broken up by tape says more about sowing than all the epigraphs. The nine-minute medley that closes the record combines prison slang, a song about forced labour, cassettes, ambient noise and a lone voice in a church in Rouen. Underneath runs a material field of ambient folk and drone which, in their reading, leaves historical memory intact. The question the group pose on their website, “Who shall carry all things on their backs?”, gets no answer. The last epigraph is Romans 13:12, the night is far gone and the day is near, and the record stops short of that day. LISTENING NOTES / 01 01 02 03 04 "Jowl, Jowl and Listen Lads" A miners' song associated with the Durham singer Jack Elliott, full of diggers' jargon. Nick Granata sings, with Gwena Harman and Bridget Walker joining on vocals. The exact text is still disputed. "Bold Captain Avery" Eight and a half minutes on the pirate Henry Every, whose story the group read as a working-class utopia. Hamilton wrote the brass arrangement, and Fred Wordsworth plays flugelhorn and trumpet. "The Worms Crept Out (A Leuven Carillon)" Sixty-five seconds. The bells are Leuven's, played by Luc Rombouts: a tiny track on a huge instrument. "I Wish There Was No Prisons" In the repertoire of George Spicer, Roud 1708\. The narrator steals to eat, falls ill from prison labour, and kisses a baby in a pram while taking a potato from its twin. The refrain sums up the record's politics in a single line. ---