BEGINNINGS

Rattle Records released its first album, Gitbox Rebellion’s Pesky Digits, in 1991. Tim Gummer, Keith Hill and Steve Garden shared a vision for a music label that would champion a diverse but carefully curated collection of contemporary instrumental recordings. We envisaged Rattle as an artist-focused advocate for those seeking to create new music unfettered by commercial pressures or constraints.

Inspired by European label ECM and New Zealand's own Flying Nun, we sought to establish a platform for music that wasn’t adequately supported by the labels of the day. Encouraged by the critical success of Pesky Digits and Songs For Heroes (From Scratch), we worked with a number of composers and performers for our next release, Different Tracks. This album would set the tone and general direction for the label and was the impetus for many projects to follow. The first of these was the seminal debut of Richard Nunns and Hirini Melbourne.

HIRINI MELBOURNE, RICHARD NUNNS AND TE TAONGA PUORO

Few would have predicted the impact and lasting influence of the groundbreaking Te Ku Te Whe, or the major role it would play in the revival of taonga puoro (the traditional instruments of Maori). Two weeks were set aside to record the album, but by lunch on day two Te Ku Te Whe was in the can. It remains Rattle’s biggest selling and most influential release.

Recorded only a few weeks before Hirini’s death, Te Hekenga-a-rangi wasn’t a follow up to Te Ku Te Whe so much as a broadening of its themes and concepts, this time with greater emphasis on the feminine dimension of taonga puoro. To this end, Aroha Yates-Smith joined Richard and Hirini to produce a work that is still one of Rattle’s most emotionally affecting albums.

In 2005, Rattle invited a number of New Zealand’s finest remix artists to interpret Te Ku Te Whe, in part to go some way towards realising Hirini’s hope that taonga puoro will be more widely integrated into the cultural landscape of Aotearoa. Awarded Best Maori Album at the 2007 NZ Music Awards, Te Whaiao is a successful fusion of ancient and contemporary voices.

Richard Nunns was one of Rattle’s most important collaborators, and with each new project, he situated taonga puoro in an increasingly broad range of contexts, from Gillian Whitehead’s Ipu to improvisational collaborations with Judy Bailey (Tuhonohono), the Chris Mason-Battley Group (Two Tides), Dave Lisik (Queen’s Diamond, Ancient Astronaut Theory, Journey/Hikoi), American pianist Marilyn Crispell and NZ saxophonist Jeff Henderson (This Appearing World), Whirimako Black (Te More), and finally Utterance made with David Long and Natalia Mann, the last recording he would make before laying down his vast array of taonga puoro due to the onset of Parkinson’s Disease, which he lost the battle to on June 7, 2021.

CHAMBER MUSIC

The inclusion of "Matre’s Dance" on Different Tracks initiated another important collaborative thread for Rattle. It not only led to the recording of Dan Poynton’s You Hit Him He Cry Out (Best Classical Album, 1997) and Michael Houstoun's Inland (Best Classical Album, 2007), but to a series of albums by one of New Zealand’s brightest stars, John Psathas.

John’s acclaimed debut, Rhythm Spike (Best Classical Album, 1999), was followed by View From Olympus (Best Classical Album, 2006). Consisting of three concerti for orchestra and soloists, this monumental project was the most ambitious classical recording ever undertaken in New Zealand. Featuring world-class performances from pianist Michael Houstoun, percussionist Pedro Carneiro, contemporary saxophonist Joshua Redman, drummer Lance Philip, and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marc Taddei, the album was an enormous critical, popular, and cultural success. Complete with an informative DVD by Keith Hill, it was on the classical charts for more than a year and held the number one spot for an unprecedented six consecutive months.

John has released or collaborated on a number of Rattle releases since, including Ukiyo (Best Classical Album finalist, 2010), Helix (Best Classical Album finalist, 2011), Flight on Light (with Manos Achalinotopoulos), The Harvest (with Adam Page and James Brown), The Gaia Theory (with Omar Carmenates), Mantis (with Reuben Bradley), White Lies (the soundtrack to a film directed by Dana Rotberg and staring Whirimako Black), and Dialogos with the Chris Mason-Battley Group.

Rattle enjoys a mutually creative and productive relationship with Auckland-based piano trio NZTrio and New Zealand’s foremost concert pianist, Michael Houstoun. The trio have released a number of albums since their Rattle debut in 2007, bright tide moving between (Best Classical Album finalist, 2008), including Flourishes (Best Classical finalist, 2010), Lightbox (2015), Sway (Best Classical Album, 2017), Vicissitudes (Best Jazz finalist, 2017), and Merge (2021), as well as contributing excellent performances to Psathas’s Helix and Jack Body’s Passing By (2015). Michael Houstoun’s debut on Rattle in 2007 was his stunning Album of the Year release, Inland, the first in a series of award-winning albums that include Lilburn (Album of the Year, 2013) his monumental 14-CD masterwork, The Complete Beethoven Piano Sonatas (Album of the Year, 2015), 24 Tone Clocks (Album of the Year finalist for Jenny McLeod in 2016). Diabelli Variations, Trois (a beautiful recording of French classics that was an Album of the Year finalist in 2018), and the Complete Beethoven Violin Sonatas with the superb Bella Hristova (Album of the Year finalist in 2019).

In September 2011, Jonathan Besser followed his 2006 Rattle debut, Turn, with the mesmerising Campursari, an album that takes its title from an Indonesian musical term used to denote the musical combination of gamelan with Western instruments. While Jonathan often worked with gamelan, this was the first time he had written specifically for the instruments rather than just using them in improvisational settings. Commenting on Dave Lisik's The Curse of the Queen's Diamond in 2011, William Dart said it was “the perfect vindication of Rattle’s philosophy [of eschewing] musical barriers'. The same can be said about Campursari, an enigmatic but wholly approachable album that will cast a tranquil and meditative spell upon willing listeners.

Another excellent addition to the Rattle catalogue in 2011 was Who's Most Lost? by Arcades (Dugal McKinnon and David Prior). Trained as composers and having played in bands, David and Dugal are inquisitive sonic omnivores who often cross the border between music and sound art. The album is an artfully composed and produced set of songs inspired by David and Dugal's ongoing infatuation with pop music, each track reflecting the duo's subversive pop sensibility. Singled out by William Dart as one of the standouts of the year, Who's Most Lost? is an exceptional work by any standard and one that re-positions the label’s goalposts in a fresh and welcome way.

IMPROVISED MUSIC

In 2009 we introduced an improvised music imprint with the release of Irony by Auckland jazz ensemble, FSH Trio. Our aim was to curate an eclectic catalogue of performance-based recordings of strong New Zealand improvised music. Roger Manins was next with his exceptional Trio (2011), which was followed by Reuben Bradley's award-winning Resonator (Best Jazz Album, 2011). Dave Lisik presented a string of fine recordings that included Walkabout (2013) with the Sydney-based Jazzgroove Mothership Orchestra, who would later release the superb Fiddes vs Tinkler on Rattle in 2016, Machaut Man and a Superman Hat (2014) featuring Donny McCaslin, and Ancient Astronaut Theory (2011), a fascinating collaboration with Richard Nunns.

Other highlights include Seven (Best Jazz finalist, 2012) by Tim Hopkins, Panacea (Best Jazz Album, 2016) by Phil Broadhurst, Dog (Best Jazz Album, 2014) by Dog, Nerve (Best Jazz finalist, 2014) by The Jac, Dark Light (Best Jazz finalist, 2014) and East West Moon (Best Jazz Album, 2017) by Jonathan Crayford, and four exceptional albums by pianist/composer, Tania Giannouli, starting with Forest Stories (2012) with Portuguese wind player, Paulo Chagas, Transcendence (2015) voted one of the top ten Greek jazz releases of the year, the globally-acclaimed Rewa (2018) with taonga puoro exponent, Rob Thorne, and In Fading Light (2020), another critical highlight featuring trumpet player Andreas Polyzogopoulos and oud player Kyriakos Tapakis.

MOVING ON

Tim Gummer and Keith Hill bowed out of Rattle in late 2009 and early 2011, respectively, each to pursue their own creative endeavours (Tim as a graphic designer and Keith as a writer and filmmaker). Steve Garden continues to take Rattle forward, drawing from the best of an ever-widening pool of emerging and established talent. His goal is to broaden the international reach of the label while continuing to develop its profile and influence at home.

New imprints such as RATTLE ECHO (which focuses on representing or, on occasion, reimagining works from New Zealand’s art music past), the SEVENTH HOUSE MUSIC series, a platform for predominantly improvised music “discovered in the process of being formed”. In recent years, Rattle has worked with singer-songwriters, making it abundantly clear that the label has no intention of slowing down in its fourth decade. With almost a third of the label’s output either winning or being nominated for music industry awards, it’s fair to say that Rattle is doing something right.

STREAMING

More than a decade ago, Rattle was visited by a senior executive of a major music rights service to ensure Rattle makes its entire catalogue available on all major streaming platforms. One of the great advantages to streaming, we were told, was as a counter to music piracy: the illegal appropriation of the intellectual property of composers, performers, and music publishing and distribution agencies. He also quoted the classic "streaming mantra" that if you're not visible on these platforms, you effectively don't exist.

Consequently, Rattle has gone from manufacturing a first run of 500-1000 CDs and seeing steady growth in download revenue to 50-100 CDs today and a paltry handful of downloads. Revenue from streaming barely covers the cost of one cup of coffee every six months. So when it comes to "piracy", the impact of the illegal bad boys was nothing compared to the devastation wrought by the "legal piracy" of streaming services such as Spotify, to the extent that we now virtually "don't exist".

GETTING INTO BED WITH THE BIG BOYS

Small independent labels like Rattle can only do so much. To do more, we need support. After an extremely busy 2011 when we released twenty-four albums, many of which were the result of Victoria University of Wellington's (VUW) PBRF funding rounds coming to a close and the need for these projects to be published, VUW approached Rattle in 2012 with a proposal: they buy the label and put me on the payroll to continue maintaining the direction of Rattle with, as they put it, "full editorial autonomy". In April 2013, Rattle was shoehorned into Victoria University Press (VUP) under the guiding managerial influence of Fergus Barrowman.

With a mandate to pursue approximately ten album projects a year, Rattle entered into what would prove to be a thirty-three-month relationship with VUW, during which time we released thirty-three highly acclaimed albums, among which there were numerous award-winning and four to five-star releases, including Michael Houstoun's 14-album set of the complete Beethoven piano sonatas, a monumental undertaking that is one of the finest musical achievements in the history of New Zealand art.

This wealth of high-quality cultural content was a PR gift to VUW, particularly the objectives of VUW's New Zealand School of Music. It offered an extraordinary promotional opportunity for VUW to engage with music lovers as well as music professionals, academics, and students across the globe, all for a considerably modest outlay. Alas, VUP had no budget for Rattle, and VUW had no intention of extending key services to the label, such as liaising with VUW's legal and promotional wings. No. We were left to manage pretty much as we always have, as an under-resourced one-man band.

In October 2015, they informed me that VUW had determined to divest itself of Rattle and that all connections with the label must be severed by mid-December of that year. This "divestment" (a word that appals me) was as inexplicable as the offer to support the label in 2012. Why they made the offer and why they reneged on it, I will never know.

Consequently, 2016 was a very tough year for Rattle. The label had nothing in the bank and was left with the task of completing and releasing four albums that had been approved by VUW and undertaken in 2015. With no resources to honour the commitment to those artists, Rattle nevertheless saw the projects through and released the recordings as promised. The experience taught me many things, not least the unreliability of self-serving corporate structures, but it also bolstered my determination to honour commitments and work even more diligently to ensure that New Zealand art music has a home.

MORE TO COME ...