Congratulations to So Percussion and Caroline Shaw, who have released their third album together on Nonesuch. 'Rectangles and Circumstance' is an album of ten songs co-written and performed by Sō and Shaw, following their Grammy-winning Narrow Sea and Let the Soil Play Its Part.
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.”
The album has already received critical acclaim:
"This fascinating project draws on music and poetry that produces intriguing, inventive timbres. The combination of this deep thinking ensemble and Shaw's compositions paints the words in an inspiring way. An infections musical collaboration which leaves you wanting to listen again." - BBC Music Magazine ****
"‘Rectangles and Circumstance effectively continues where Let the Soil left off but is in general more focused and direct. Rectangles and Circumstance is also a more personal album, but these private testimonies are witnessed through shared experience rather than self-reflection. Such private thoughts are nevertheless transcended on the album’s final track, ‘To Music’ – a striking rearrangement of Schubert’s ‘An die Musik’ – stretched out, slowed down, reshaped and reconfigured. What’s left behind, as Sō percussionist Sliwinski puts it, is a ‘ghost of a structure’, like a sunken cathedral emerging out of the murky depths of an ancient underwater city.’ – Gramophone
"Hypnotically beautiful" - Andrew McGregor, BBC Radio 3
"This is magical...both an explosion of the original and a becalming, a stretching out, an oozing of Schubert's original song [An die Musik] and textures into something wondrous and bewitching" - Tom Service, BBC Radio 3
"Composer and vocalist Caroline Shaw's second album with the four multi-instrumentalists of Sō Percussion is a truly collaborative and gleefully eclectic collection, which ends with the group’s mesmerisingly beautiful take on Schubert's An die Musik" - The Guardian ****
"Caroline Shaw moves vocally like a bird from tree to tree on Rectangles and Circumstance, switching freely between roles, genres and media. Her compositions strive for a unique sound world that has not been heard before, but that has always existed at the same time. As a result, Rectangles and Circumstance sometimes sounds very familiar. Between the imaginative and multifaceted rhythm, harmony and vocal experiments, you can hear fragments of well-known and lesser-known pop songs, evergreens, folk songs and even hymnical church music, such as in the closing track To Music, after Franz Schubert’s An Die Musik." - CCRyder.nl
The collaboration received additional coverage in world media, including the Financial Times, BBC Radio 4's Front Row, BBC Radio 3, BBC 6Music, Klara Radio (Belgium), and Reporters Online (Netherlands).
The group tour Europe in November-December 2024, bringing the album to live audiences in Belgium, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and three dates in the UK.
