so Percussion

Nonesuch Records releases an album of songs written and performed by Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion, Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part. The musicians, who have known each other since their student days, were presented with three days of gratis studio time and decided to experiment with ideas they had begun putting to tape during the sessions for their January 2021 Nonesuch release Narrow Sea. With Shaw on vocals and Sō—Eric Cha-Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski, and Jason Treuting—filling out this new band, they developed songs in the studio, with lyrics inspired by their own wide-ranging interests: James Joyce, the Sacred Harp hymn book, a poem by Anne Carson, the Bible’s Book of Ruth, the American roots tune “I’ll Fly Away,” and the pop perfection of ABBA, among others. The album is co-produced by Shaw, Sō Percussion, and the Grammy Award–winning engineer Jonathan Low (The National, Taylor Swift).

The career of Buke & Gase, the duo of Arone Dyer and Aron Sanchez, has one of the more idiosyncratic arcs of any band of the past two decades. Formed in 2008, they became a cult obsession shortly after the release of their first demo EP, with the left-field indie rock of that release and their first LP Riposte earning the attention of luminaries like The National and Lou Reed, and praise from the likes of Pitchfork and Radiolab (which featured the group on three episodes) and NPR (where they played one of the very first Tiny Desk Concerts).

Nonesuch Records releases its second album from Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Caroline Shaw, Narrow Sea, on January 22, 2021. The title piece was written for Sō Percussion, Dawn Upshaw, and Gilbert Kalish in 2017; they perform it on this recording as well. Narrow Sea comprises five parts, each a new setting of a text from The Sacred Harp nineteenth century collection of shape-note hymns. A composition Shaw wrote for Sō Percussion in 2012, Taxidermy, also is on the album.

This collection of the late Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi marks the recorded debut of many of his smaller works. Ranging from 1954-1966, Scelsi's elongated tonal studies are given a rapt performance here by a nameless Dutch ensemble that carries off the task without flaw or unnecessary adornment (a constant temptation, it seems, with Scelsi's work). Included here are three fragments of I Riti, the ritual march from the composer's Funeral for Achilles.