ADDITIONAL PROVOCATIONS OF RATTLES (2024): The wide river of new Rattle releases.

As we have noted in previous Provocation/Provocations of Rattles columns, the Auckland label releases albums at such a rate it is often impossible to keep up.

This year has been a quiet one however, just one or two releases in the first six months, but suddenly a small slew have been released by Rattle, the local label we consider to be one of the most interesting, innovative and sometimes courageous labels in the country.

And so here, as in the past when there is a backlog, we simply offer snapshots of four recent releases.

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David Long: All Things Will Stay Silent

As we mentioned on his last release Ash and Bone, multi-instrumentalist David Long's career dates back to Wellington's Primitive Art Group in the early Eighties and along the way since he has appeared in many bands including Tin Syndrome and the Mutton Birds as well as having written soundtracks and done numerous production work.

In another cover by Karl Maughan which creates the sense of a companion album to Ash and Bone, All Things Will Stay Silent invites in classical players (harp, woodwind, horns) and well as other vocalists (Nell Thomas, Luke Buda) and a rhythm section.

The six pieces are diverse: the title track opens as a quiet meditation on guitar before an abrupt shift of direction at the midpoint with percussion, disconcerting voices and a denouement with horns; Balloons has a slightly uneasy quality to its airy pastoralism; the distance voices in I Couldn't Say imbue it with veiled romanticism which the foreground instrumentation denies; and the nine minute Trifecta again lets the woodwinds carry the elevated melody while Long engages in “random tinkering”.

Idiosyncratic yes but also utterly engaging and deftly unpredictable

I couldn't Say, by David Long

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Cameron Pearce: Progression

Trumpeter/flugel horn player Pearce says in the liner notes this project for a brass ensemble and soloists was influenced by composer Aaron Copeland, Kenny Wheeler (most familiar as a jazz trumpeter on ECM) and the lesser known trumpeter Ron Miles who has worked with guitarist Bill Frisell on a number of albums.

Diverse influences -- and others came in along the way -- which have informed an album of 10, mostly short, pieces which the small brass ensemble clearly enjoy playing (start with Horizon) as they challenge them to move from stately melancholy (Apricity and NOLA-by which could grace a memorial service) to the quirky rhythms and the almost minimalism of Intersect.

There are two lovely miniatures which close this out.

Horizon, by Cameron Pearce

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Bella Hristova and Michael Houstoun: Reveiller; Violin Sonatas

We are frankly out of out intellectual depth with an album like this so will demur, other than to note the composers featured are Ravel, Poulenc and Faure . . . and to say we are very, very glad to have heard it, especially Ravel's Sonata for Violin and Piano No 2.

Hristova and Houstoun have recorded together previously, on Beethoven's Violin Sonatas and those by Brahms. See here.  

Faure's Allegro Vivo, by Hristova and Houstoun

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Luu Hong Quang: Franz Liszt; Transcendental Etudes

Again with this we demur.

Other than to note the excellent presentation by Rattle which includes a booklet in which there is an excellent essay about Quang (“one of the most gifted pianists of his generation”), notes on each of the 12 pieces and an interview with the artist in which he discusses the challenges and rewards of the project and singles out his favourite etude, Chasse-neige.

Liszt's In A Minor, by Lou Hong Quang

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All these and other Rattle albums can be heard and bought at the Rattle Records' bandcamp site here.