Rectangles and Circumstance album review – collaborative and gleefully eclectic collection

Caroline Shaw/Sō Percussion
(Nonesuch)
All five musicians share writing and performing duties on these 10 songs. The closing version of Schubert’s An die Musik is mesmerisingly beautiful

Composer and vocalist Caroline Shaw’s second album with the four multi-instrumentalists of Sō Percussion is a true collaboration, with writing and performing duties shared between all five musicians. There’s a gleefully eclectic range of sources and influences woven into the sequence of 10 songs, which ends with the group’s own take on Schubert’s An die Musik, in which the melody is slowed right down, individual harmonies highlighted, and extra layers of decoration added; led by Shaw’s haunting breathiness it’s mesmerisingly beautiful, and despite all the transformations, still strangely Schubertian.

All the numbers are built up in a similar way, layer upon layer, perhaps starting with a bass line or a rhythmic scheme, adding more instrumental colours and samples, and with the texts of the songs a mix of words mostly by female poets, including Christina Rosetti, Gertrude Stein and Emily Dickinson, and by the musicians themselves. There’s a distinctly minimalist flavour to some of the songs – Slow Motion starts out like a riff on Steve Reich’s Clapping Music, for instance, while Silently Invisibly unfolds over a metallic pulsing. But the melodic lines that Shaw adds above them belong to a very different musical world and, as in everything here, the results are never quite what you might expect.

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