Shovel Dance Collective, Bridget Christie + more

Bridget Christie

Bridget Christie is a multi-award winning British stand-up comedian, actor, writer and producer. She has written and performed thirteen critically acclaimed stand-up shows, four BBC Radio Four series, one book, a Netflix special and has appeared in numerous TV and radio shows. Her career-defining feminist-themed show A Bic for Her won the Edinburgh Comedy Award for Best Show, a South Bank Sky Arts Award and in 2022 was hailed as one of the defining comedy shows of the decade by The Times newspaper. Her Brexit-themed Because You Demanded It was named as The Guardian's No 1 comedy show of 2016. Awards for her radio work include a Rose D'Or International Broadcasting Award and a BBC Audio Drama Award. TV-wise, Bridget stars in BAFTA nominated Taskmaster Series 13, BBC One hit Ghosts and in Channel 4's new comedy drama The Change, which she also created, wrote and executive produced.

Shovel Dance Collective

Shovel Dance Collective are a group of nine musicians united by a passion for the beauty, force, and political charge of the traditional musics of Britain, Ireland and beyond. They are committed to Folk music not as an archaeological artifact to be unearthed, but as a living communal activity - inviting and generous to those it speaks to. They arrange the source material into a kind of musique boue (mud music), simultaneously traditional and experimental they engage a deep, cross-temporal synthesis of free improvisation, tape manipulation and field recordings. Their music appears as a patchwork as pieces are stitched together, rearranged and recontextualised. The yarn is threaded with their sense of aesthetic innovation, and with a deep sense of the ways in which traditional music holds the voices of the oppressed and those who, by their labour, create the wealth of the world.

Milkweed

What do we know of Milkweed? On the face of it their musical concerns are transatlantic - they follow the rich creative line that runs between British traditional music and the songs and tunes of the eastern United States. In reality their scope is global, and rooted in deep time, with influences from prehistory bleeding into a troubled and troubling anthropocene. As a result their music doesn’t sit easily anywhere, but ricochets between bewitching Appalachian folk music and disconcerting hauntological experimentation.

Spitzer Space Telescope

Take note of Spitzer Space Telescope’s arrival on English shores. The folk singer has a knack of being in the right place at the right time – he’ll soon be the musician on everyone’s lips. Having spent the last decade travelling across America and Europe, instigating vital collectives, delving deep into existing traditions but unafraid to shake them up, now he settles upon an erupting English scene, armed with the charisma, the intensity, the experience, the power, the presence – and of course the straight-up songwriting chops, to push it to the next level. His is the kind of folk music that hits straight to the heart, that grabs you at the collar, that pushes you back against the wall. It makes sense, given that he’s taken the brash, soul-rattling singing of The Clancy Brothers as his model ever since encountering them as a teenager in an isolated Midwestern town.

Resonant Bodies

Resonant Bodies is an improvising duo consisting of Zebedee Budworth (hammered dulcimer + electronics) and Rob Bentall (nyckelharpa and electronics). They aim to explore the spectacular sonorities of the ancient instruments they play, and how they interact with each other. They aim to marry these old technologies with new ones, processing the rich resonant instrumental timbres through electronic effects. The duo seeks to reimagine folk tunes through an improvised musical dialogue, allowing the rich sonority they piece together to lead their creative output.

For more information on access at EartH, please see our FAQs here: https://bit.ly/44dzl75 or contact us at [email protected]

EartH is a social enterprise committed to supporting new musicians, with music studios in the venue that are completely free for young artists in Hackney to use. Find out more here (https://earthackney.co.uk/about/studio-36/).

Host or Publisher Weird Walk