Following up on Narrow Sea with Dawn Upshaw and Gilbert Kalish, a setting of text from the Sacred Harp which won the Grammy for best contemporary classical composition, and Let The Soil Play Its Simple Part which scoured the poet Anne Carson, the shape note composer Albert Brumley and the disco harmonies of ABBA and The Pointer Sisters for shared roots and stems, for their next album Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion pored over the pages of late eighteenth century, nineteenth century and early modernist poetry before selecting lyrics by William Blake, Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti and Gertrude Stein.
Shaw interpolates phrases from their poems with her own words on the trickling and fidgety ‘Sing On’, which requests no sad songs as it makes its way through rollicking drums and an enveloping baroque thicket. Then a new arrangement of ‘And So’ – which was originally composed for the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale and the mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter before appearing on the Caroline Shaw and Attacca Quartet collaboration Evergreen – features flowerpots, the Fender Rhodes, vibes, organ, steel drums and other percussion beneath Shaw’s opulent yet still burgeoning vocals.
Meanwhile at the midpoint of Rectangles and Circumstance the old Scottish traditional ‘The Parting Glass’ – apparently the most popular parting song in all of Scotland before Robert Burns wrote ‘Auld Lang Syne’ – gets an airing through rubbed crystal and an inverted chord progression from Johann Sebastian Bach’s chorale ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’. And the Eric Cha-Beach-penned ‘Who Turns Out the Light’, described as an expression of ‘the loving but exhausted thought patterns of a parent trying to coax and calm a young child’, possesses a spacious and starry, slow-padding and anticipatory quality, like Björk somewhere between the music boxes and glitch electronics of tracks like ‘Aurora’ and ‘Sun In My Mouth’ from Vespertine and the kismet of ‘Desired Constellation’, a steadfast Medulla highlight.
‘Slow Motion’ credits Ringdown as the featured artist, Shaw’s duo with the vocalist Danni Lee which is winsomely characterised as ‘like calling your first love on a rotary telephone, percussively tearing out the hammers from a 1924 vintage upright, and flinging each of them into space while you wait for every heartache you’ve ever felt to return’. ‘Like A Drum’ quotes the percussive creak and plunge of Emily Dickinson’s memorable poem ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’ while the ensemble murmur on the cusp of a winning refrain over twinkling chimes and loping beats on ‘To Music’, as Rectangles and Circumstance closes with an ode to the form in the mode of a tender and dallying lullaby.
