Sō Percussion and Caroline Shaw have announced their third album together, entitled 'Rectangles and Circumstance', to be released on Nonesuch on the 14th June 2024.
Adam Sliwinski says in the new album’s liner notes, “After a few years of touring Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part together, with a pandemic in between, we came to record our second album, Rectangles and Circumstance, as a road-tested band who knew each other’s strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies intimately.” He continues, “Most of the songs started with instrumental pieces or fragments of pieces from Jason or Eric.
“As both a songwriter and a classical composer, Caroline is accustomed to writing lyrics as well as setting them. Going over texts with her is like working on music: I collect a handful of poems and send them over to her, waiting to see if anything catches her interest, then I modify my search based on her feedback,” Sliwinski says. “For this album, Caroline, Eric, and I sourced a group of nineteenth-century poems that shaped its expressive mode [and] ended up using verses by Christina Rosetti, Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and William Blake … The lyrics on this album by members of the band contain wordplay that explores the same profound feelings explored by Blake and Dickinson.”
This disc follows the success of their previous collaborations, the Grammy Award-winning 'Narrow Sea' and 'Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part'. Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part has been heard at the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, Norfolk and Norwich Festival, Our Festival Finland, Thuringer Bachwoche, Palau de la Musica Barcelona, Berlin Konzerthaus, Hanzas Perons in Latvia, and in a sold out Barbican Milton Court show. Narrow Sea received international attention for the imaginative collaboration, rich and complex rhythms and textures, and inspired exploration of the American folk tradition. Among other accolades, BBC Music Magazine included it in their list of best classical albums released in 2021 so far, describing it as “exquisite”, “imaginative and expressive”.
Read more about the release of 'Rectangles and Circumstance' here. A video for the title track can be found here.
