As regular readers will know I’m rather partial to a maximalist line-up – give me flugelhorn! Break out the hammered dulcimer! Crank up the hurdy gurdy! But sometimes a more restrained approach is advisable when handed the keys to the music room. Indeed, some of the most interesting music comes from artists placing confines around themselves, almost forcing themselves into a corner where the only option is to innovate.
Amongst the finest purveyors of instrumental moderation are Nottingham drum and drum duo Rattle, and their third album, Encircle – recently released on the aptly named Upset The Rhythm imprint – is a perfect distillation of this spartan approach. Featuring just four tracks, yet clocking in at just shy of forty minutes, and comprised of two drumkits, 80 words and an array of ethereal vocalisations, it’s an astonishing demonstration of creating art from the most fundamental building blocks – a beat and a human voice.
Over the course of the album we experience moments of military precision – beats marching us forward in perfect synchronicity then crashing into free-flowing experimentalism; primal, almost trance like moments verging on spiritual transcendence and space, so much space, which in our ever more cluttered digital lives is as restorative as any deep forest wellbeing weekend retreat.
I can say with pretty much complete certainty that you won’t hear anything quite like Encircle this year, and unlike many records of which I could say the same, you’ll very likely enjoy and feel enriched from listening to this one.
We asked Katharine Eira Brown and Theresa Wrigley of Rattle to guide us through the record.
1. RITUAL
Ritual is built around a simple snare drum pattern, with Tez playing an overlapping snare pattern which creates a slightly elliptical feel. It is all about the snares! I think of it as sort of a waltz.
The location in my head when writing this song was Boleskine house, which I visited / sneaked into with another band I play, Kogumaza when we were on our way back from mastering our third album in the Outer Hebrides.
The house was in ruins following a / or several fires and had been recently inhabited. It was a misty, April Showers Day and the view from the terrace was loch ness with rising mist, which snaked up into the cemetery in front of the house.
It was incredibly eerie and easy to imagine Crowley conducting his rituals and unleashing something from another dimension!
I think of it as being a very earthy song – lots of low-lying mist on the ground swirling around and the drums patterns coming together to create magic / summon something!
Most of the vocals are wordless – the only words are: A part of, who you are, in the sand.
2. YOUR MOVE
Your Move is a step up from Ritual and we wanted it to feel like the tape has suddenly started to whirl and spin faster and things have sprung up into a higher gear. So, you want to get up and start moving.
Again, the lyrics are very sparse with lots of wordless vocals. This song took a long time working out “lengths of times” and “changes” and would be a very hard song to play without eye contact.
The first half of the song feels watery- the images in my head were in reflected in water – in still pools, drip – dropping and fast-flowing.
Then the second half of this song is stuck in an endless slow-moving cycle. The triplet bit in-between is a flitting between, we wanted it to feel like a CD getting stuck.
The lyrics are:
Let it fill you. Your move. still as the pool, mirroring you. Disintegrate into your move.
You know the route it’s in your blood. How it flows, how it knows. Atlas of Arteries
And you will feel at ease, completely. The stampede is moving in slow motion.
3. ALL BURNING
This is the firey song. We recorded it layer by layer, gradually building up with Tez adding lots and lots of snares as the song builds up, and the vocal harmonies increasing as the song goes on. The image in my head for this one was of the great fire of London. It is a bit of a panic / emergency / call to action song – it feels very dystopian and now alarmingly prescient and close to the bone. The lyrics once again are very sparse:
Doctor, Doctor hold your doctor, hold your daughter, hold your horses. Man alive! In over your head, with no meaning and no context.
4. ARGOT
This one is the air-y one! It is almost sort of trying to be rhythm-less at the start, to be a bit disobedient of rhythm, trying to find a natural, un-policed but somehow tangible rhythm.
It is really built around the point when the bass drum comes in and Tez snaps into high hat action, and it locks into a sort of soft -mechanic groove.
This song is mainly sung with wordless vocals. I really like the rhythm, sound and melody of the wordless vocals, too much to force them into the shape of words that might fit the sound but might have a completely jarring or inappropriate meaning.
I prefer to sing wordlessly often because it feels a bit more expressive and universal.
The only word in it is Uncertainty. A positive song!! ” The only thing you can be certain of is uncertainty ” etc.
We recorded this album in Wales in a studio not too far from where I now live, with Mark Jasper, who we had known for many years, playing gigs with his band Witching Waves, and Mark and I played music together in a band many moons ago too. The live room in the studio was SUCH an exciting sounding space to drum in – the kind of room you could drum in all day – or make any kind of music in all day, and it was great to work with Mark to make the sounds in this song feel expansive with lots of space. It was important that within the recorded sound was the experience of hearing / feeling the sound in that room, whilst also making everything sound unlimited by the room’s physical boundaries. It was the kind of studio that makes you very excited about the possibilities of recording sound. So don’t be surprised if our next album is one cymbal, one floor tom and twelve different sticks / beaters!
Encircle is out now on Upset The Rhythm – order now on vinyl, cd or digital download
Rattle: Facebook / Instagram / Bandcamp
Introduction by Paul Maps
Photo by Julie R. Kane
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