Stick In The Wheel (singer Nicola Kearey and guitarist/producer Ian Carter's) third mixtape release xplores lost civilisations, inertia, beats music, sludge, drone, glitch and city soundscapes, held together with ancient word-glue, repurposed to deliver vital, urgent messages for now.
Lead track "The Cuckoo" reimagines a pastoral folk song as a sub-heavy lament for a master criminal; "Wierds Broke It" is 90s grunge + autotune for a lost civilisation; "The Devil's Nag" takes a midi file of a 17 th century dance tune to make a 21 st century one.
Kearey's sung and spoken vocal improvisations glide through and over Carter's no-holds-barred underground production, at once rough and smooth, harangues citizens through a barrage of encrusted city noise. It offers up a soundtrack against the wildness of the city, and acts to drown out the worst of what humans are up to, destroying themselves. An intense, sometimes bleak, but somehow still uplifting experience.
Always at the forefront of pushing just how far musical traditions can be challenged and stretched, SITW's work has been hugely influential since they started in 2015. Their Noods Radio show is a place for ongoing dialogue about how transient, underground, and working- lass music cultures need to be archived and valued, not as commodities, but as communities. Prior to that, they're perhaps best remembered as part of early dubstep experimenters Various Production - and this latest set of sonic and textual works builds upon a tradition of their own making.
