Caroline Shaw’s association with percussion quartet Sō Percussion goes back to their graduate school days at Yale University some 20 years ago. Shaw wrote the quirky percussion piece Taxidermy for the group in 2012, which was subsequently included on Nonesuch’s ‘Narrow Sea’ mini album. Sō and Shaw teamed up again in 2021 for ‘Let the Soil Play its Simple Part’, with creative input shared between all five musicians.

‘Let the Soil’ was a highly eclectic album of songs that foraged ideas from a variety of poetic, literary and musical sources. It also included a deliciously deadpan and skilfully subversive arrangement of Abba’s ‘Lay all your love on me’. ‘Rectangles and Circumstance’ effectively continues where ‘Let the Soil’ left off but is in general more focused and direct. This sense of purposefulness is captured on the punchy experimental pop of the opening title-track, followed by ‘Sing On’, Eric Cha-Beach’s pulse-based percussive patterns offset by Shaw’s lilting, layered and occasionally synthesised vocals.

The album takes a more contemplative turn with ‘Silently Invisibly’ and ‘And So’, the former circling around a solemn chorale-like chord sequence, while the latter’s forlorn, folk-like melody is clothed in glassy harmonies in the verses and disquieting harmonies on piano during the choruses. The folk influence is brought closer to the surface in a wistful arrangement of the traditional Scottish tune ‘The Parting Glass’, each verse heard against accumulating layered ambient lines and shimmering ostinato patterns.

‘Rectangles and Circumstance’ is also a more personal album, but these private testimonies are witnessed through shared experience rather than self-reflection, as heard on ‘Who Turns Out the Light’ – the two melodic lines in Shaw’s duet cradled in close proximity, capturing an exhausted parent trying to coax a young child to sleep.

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 Adam Sliwinski puts it in his booklet notes, is a ‘ghost of a structure’, like a sunken cathedral emerging out of the murky depths of an ancient underwater city.