It’s been a while since we heard from Nottingham duo Rattle, long enough to idly wonder if we ever would. Certainly, with the reactivation last year of Katharine Eira Brown’s other long dormant band Kogumaza it might have looked like that was that. A joy then to find that they’ve been working low key, honing the pieces that appear on this gorgeous new album. Not only is their singular magic intact but Encircle has undoubtedly benefitted from its patient gestation. Rattle possess a unique relationship to time. For a band centred on percussion they are extraordinarily unhurried, virtually languid.
There’s always been something uncanny about them. Watching them play you can see everything happening in front of your eyes and yet it still seems that telepathy or even sorcery must be involved in conjuring the music’s dreamy hypnotic power. And now they have a song called ‘Ritual’. It’s an idea that a lot of underground artists are drawn to, or we might use as short hand to describe anything driven by intensifying rhythms and chanting. Essentially Rattle is all rhythm and chant and yet it is totally unlike that shaking hoodoo mania thing, completely different to all the spooky drones and incense types.
On the other hand ‘Ritual’ was inspired by a visit to the ruins of Boleskin House at Loch Ness. Once home to celebrity occultist, alleged spy and sex pest Aleister Crowley and later owned by Jimmy Page, who I’ve never seen accused of espionage, so maybe not so different. Rattle’s response seems more invested in landscape and atmosphere than anything supernatural, their transcendent flight unburdened by arcane baggage. Boleskin has repeatedly burned down but ‘All Burning’ apparently has some connection to the great fire of London instead.
The final track is called ‘Argot’ and its vocalisations are mostly just sound. Words are not really their focus, not that they make no sense but they are elliptical and open ended. An echolalia where shape and sound is more important than content, repeating until they float and smear and meaning empties out. The bright abstraction of the cover (once again by Martha Glazzard), is a better guide, a geometric grid that becomes blocks of vivid colour, its luminous formalism is closer to how Rattle actually works than some kind of voodoo trance. It’s not free form, it’s not jazz, it’s meticulous. Building from repeating patterns that slowly dissolve and mutate it unrolls organically following its own internal logic. The remarkable trick they continue to pull off is that it never falls into anything overly familiar or predictable and yet it always feels completely natural. It’s great to have them back.
