Rectangles and Circumstance Caroline Shaw & Sō Percussion

• 1 Rectangles and Circumstance 02:55
• 2 Sing On 03:48
• 3 Silently Invisibly 04:08
• 4 And So 05:27
• 5 The Parting Glass 05:44
• 6 Slow Motion (feat. Ringdown) 04:01
• 7 Who Turns Out The Light 05:24
• 8 Like A Drum 03:58
• 9 This 02:45
• 10 To Music 05:56
• Total Runtime 44:06

Info for Rectangles and Circumstance

Rectangles and Circumstance is an album of ten songs co-written and performed by Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion. The album follows their Grammy-winning Nonesuch debut, Narrow Sea, and their first record as a band, 2021’s Let the Soil Play Its Part, with Shaw on vocals backed by Sō—Eric Cha-Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski, and Jason Treuting. Grammy Award–winning engineer Jonathan Low (The National, Taylor Swift) co-produced with them on both Let the Soil… and Rectangles and Circumstances.

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.”

Caroline Shaw, voice
Sō Percussion

Please Note: We offer this album in its native sampling rate of 48 kHz, 24-bit. The provided 96 kHz version was up-sampled and offers no audible value!

Caroline Shaw
is a musician who moves among roles, genres, and mediums, trying to imagine a world of sound that has never been heard before but has always existed. She works often in collaboration with others, as producer, composer, violinist, and vocalist. Shaw is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in Music, an honorary doctorate from Yale, four Grammys, and a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. She has written and produced for iconic artists and ensembles across the musical spectrum, including Rosalía, Renée Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma, Tiler Peck, Nas, Kanye West, the LA Phil, the NY Phil, and others. Recent tv/film/stage scoring projects include “Leonardo Da Vinci” (Ken Burns/PBS), “Julie Keeps Quiet (Leonardo Van Dijl), “Fleishman is in Trouble” (FX/Hulu), “The Sky Is Everywhere” (Josephine Decker/A24), vocal work with Rosalía (MOTOMAMI), “The Crucible” (Lyndsey Turner/National Theatre), “Partita” (Justin Peck/NYC Ballet), “Moby Dick” (Wu Tsang), and “LIFE” (Gandini Juggling/Merce Cunningham Trust). Current touring projects include shows with Sō Percussion, Ringdown, Attacca Quartet, Roomful of Teeth, Graveyards & Gardens, Gabriel Kahane, and Kamus Quartet. Her favorite color is yellow, and her favorite smell is rosemary.

This album contains no booklet.