The modern mixtape emerged as a hip-hop expediency to avoid sample clearance. Stick in the Wheel – former ravers turned innovative folk artists – have cheerily embraced the almost-album form, putting out the collaborative This and the Memory of This mixtape in 2018 soon after the much-lauded Follow Them True (2018), their last full band outing. This year, core Stick duo Nicola Kearey and Ian Carter offered up yet another collected compilation, the many-limbed English Folk Field Recordings Vol 2.
This latest series of “explorations” with medieval roots, Against the Loathsome Beyond, maxes out their innovative impulse. Here, then, are more chilly ancient tunes, re-imagined as drone-rock (Down In Yon Forest) or baroque early synth pastorales (Drive the Cold Winter Away), or as electronic sound art (a remix of Cambridge avant-guitarist C Joynes’s Sang Kancil). Most fist-pumping of all is the instrumental centrepiece Moskeener (British Yiddish for pawnbroker, apparently), a raga that could have gone on far longer. Kearey speaks two tracks, given extra witchy poke by more resonant thrumming. Given that no single version is ever definitive in folk, “anything goes” remains a valid modus operandi.
