RATTLE ECHO: re-discovering the past
Steve Garden - ‘Mr Rattle’
“…not knowing where you’re going, improvising, trusting your instincts.”
Rattle has a souvenir T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Shut Up and Listen”. The label marks its 30th birthday next year and Steve Garden, inventor of the slogan, has been a constant driver of Rattle. Like his label, Garden is a quiet force in the New Zealand music industry who defies easy categorization. Now he is launching a new imprint, Rattle Echo, providing an opportunity to revisit and re-imagine sounds recorded in the past.
The Rattle story began in the 1980’s when Garden, a drummer, and guitarist Tim Gummer set up basement premises in downtown Auckland. A little washhouse became their control room and a storage area the recording studio. They pooled equipment, friends came over and “we recorded stuff and mucked around, jamming together”, Garden recalls. “We were just interested in the process.” He played drums but the work in the studio was an opportunity to learn about recording and mixing.
When guitarist and composer Ivan Zagni joined him they began a project that led to Trouble Spots. “And the attitude behind that recording and a lot of the work we did in the basement helped shape the thinking for a record label,” Garden says now. “The idea of not being bound by genre and making a virtue of not knowing where you’re going, improvising, trusting your instincts…”
Gummer was a member of the band Gitbox Rebellion, who were using the studio, as were the group From Scratch. In 1991 film-maker Keith Hill joined Garden and Gummer and the trio launched Rattle, envisioning it as “a free-spirited label like ECM in Europe that focused on instrumental art music.” Hill dipped into a small inheritance to finance the first releases, Gitbox Rebellion’s Pesky Digits in 1991 and From Scratch’s Songs for Heroes a year later. Rattle Records had arrived on the scene.
Different Tracks quickly followed in 1993, making clear Rattle’s genre-crossing intentions. Described as A sampler of contemporary music from Aotearoa New Zealand, it included tracks by Eve de Castro-Robinson, John Psathas, Peter Scholes, Phil Dadson and an even more diverse group of performers including From Scratch, David Guerin, Bruce McKinnon, Brendan Power and Nigel Gavin.
Garden refers to many “serendipitous moments” in the Rattle story. One was arriving early one morning at Airforce Studios in Auckland for recording and finding Maori composer Hirini Melbourne and taonga pūoro specialist Richard Nunns putting down a film soundtrack. That music quickly made its way on to Different Tracks. But for Garden, more significant was getting to know them and encountering the traditional Maori instruments that were little played in those days. It led to the release soon afterwards of the ground-breaking album Te Kū te Whē, one of Rattle’s most influential and best-selling albums which opened the door to two decades of Rattle releases with Nunns playing taonga pūoro with his many collaborators.
Rattle, like much of the music it releases, developed in unexpected ways. “When it started,” Garden says, “I never thought we’d release classical or new classical. Tim and I came from the experimental jazz improvisation world. My exposure to the classical end of things was pretty thin.” Ever the collaborator, he teamed up with composer and ex-NZSO musician Kenneth Young for the production of several classical albums including a massive 14-CD set of Beethoven’s complete Piano Sonatas played by Michael Houstoun, which won the Classical Tui at the NZ Music Awards in 2013. Rattle subsequently released Houstoun playing Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations and his complete Violin Sonatas with Michael Hill Competition Winner Bella Hristova. Many acclaimed albums of music by classically-trained composers are part of the Rattle list and Garden’s winning partnership with Young as producer continues today.
Improvisation has always been “a major driving force” for Garden and Rattle. As well as many jazz releases, the label has been “rattling the cage” for years with cross-over albums like Tuhonohono (The Weaving). Jazz pianist Judy Bailey and Nunns went into the studio with Garden in 2003 “without any pre-conceived notions, apart from Richard playing the traditional instruments into the piano and Judy shaping chords around that.” They improvised for four days and Garden took hours of recordings back to the editing suite and spent a year crafting the material into Tuhonohono, which he describes proudly as a “little gem”.
“It’s not just the music we produce, it’s the relationships we form,” says Garden. “We recorded Matre’s Dance for Different Tracks, we met John [Psathas] and that led Rhythm Spike. We met Michael Houstoun doing John’s View from Olympus and he suggested an album of New Zealand composers – within a year or two we’d released Inland.”
Artists who work with Garden often see him as a collaborative friend. De Castro-Robinson, whose genre-bending The Gristle of Knuckles won the Classical Tui in 2018, comments that “[Steve] shines his torch to illuminate sonic gems across an impressively wide spectrum. But his generous-spiritedness never interferes with his dedication to craft.”
What is the impetus for launching Rattle Echo now? “I can see the value in re-presenting recordings that were in danger of being lost and that haven’t been digitized,” Garden explains. “There’s a platform for not just re-mastering but re-purposing. Rattle Echo can present these works in a new way, remixed, reconsidered.” Trouble Spots with his old friend Zagni is one of the new releases. “Over the years I’ve just chipped away at re-thinking and re-working the original recordings. Ivan was blown away when he heard what I’d done.”
Free Radicals
Ross Harris and Jonathan Besser
The other three new Rattle Echo releases are Free Radicals, from the 1980’s live electronic duo of composers Ross Harris and Jonathan Besser, Cathedral, an improvised live concert from 1984, featuring Besser on St Paul's Cathedral pipe organ and Greg Fox on electric guitar, and Fragments for classical guitar, short compositions by New Zealand composers recorded by RNZ Concert’s engineers and producers in the early 1990’s. Like all Rattle releases, all four demonstrate high production values and elegant, beautifully designed sleeves. It’s important to Garden that the recordings are packaged in a way that honours the work.
“One of the things I really like about being ‘Mr. Rattle’, says Garden with a smile, “is that I can invest myself in someone’s project as a collaborator and do everything I can to make it happen. And even if there’s no budget, if it’s a good project I have the confidence that someone will put the money in. And 99 times out of 100, I find a way.”
The new Rattle Echo releases can be purchased here.
You can read my review of Fragments and an earlier review of The Gristle of Knuckles. Other reviews of Rattle albums on this site are The Song of the Whale, a review of Panthalassa and Houstoun Plays the Seducer, a review of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations.
For two of my articles about Free Radicals, written when the group was active, you can read the concert review Quite Doodling Fashion, and Free Radicals – a view from the 1990’s, both republished here in the spirit of Rattle Echo.
And for more information about Free Radicals and its history, listen to a recent interview with Ross Harris by Neil Johnstone on RadioActive.FM - Zero Hour.