rattle: sequence

Rattle's Sequence is released by Upset The Rhythm. Rattle is an ongoing musical project concerned with experiments in rhythm, meter and tension. Katharine Eira Brown and Theresa Wrigley make up the duo from Nottingham, who with just drums and occasional vocals weave an expanse of percussive vortices. Their songs swirl and envelop with all the physicality and drama of another world pulling together around its own shifting center of gravity. The drum beats phase and sidestep, they trade accents and overlap, providing a suitably alive terrain for the vocals to explore similar tendencies of pattern. Rattle's debut album  was released in 2016 through Upset The Rhythm / I Own You and was greeted with much critical praise, this often singled out their hypnotic minimalism and ecstatic regard for the dance floor. Sequence was written in much the same way as their debut, with the duo facing each other over their shared palette of drums, allowing songs to develop naturally and suggest their own direction. However, Brown and Wrigley were more confident of what they wanted to achieve with this follow up, having already proven the concept watertight through their debut and subsequent concerts. They knew they could wrestle songs out of the silence with such a setup, so afforded themselves greater time to explore extended, long-form composition. Sequence is composed of four tracks, each clocking in around 10 minutes or over and focused squarely on a deeper resonance with the creative act, illustrative of how ideas build from scratch, of how music can grow out of repetition. Recorded at JT Soar in Nottingham with Phil Booth and Mark Spivey (Rattle's live sound engineer), the album developed out of these points, with Rattle honing their sound. Everything was stripped back to just the drums and Brown's voice. Percussion flourishes were deemed unnecessary, overdubbed layers of vocals were kept to a minimum. As a result, this quartet of songs are more meditative and aware than previous efforts, with the duo's attentions spent tapping into each track's potential, mapping out expeditions in tempo and making much of the journey over destination this is complemented further through the production of Mark Spivey, capturing Rattle's huge live sound on tape for this album with its incurred dub-delay trippiness, taming and melding. Sequence is a liminal album, thoughtfully crafted with themes of transition and realization at its heart.