If you were an American indie rock act in the mid-90s, life could be strange. After the breakthroughs of Nirvana and Green Day the music industry spent several frenzied years trying to refine the formula for rock success. Labels indiscriminately hoovered up guitar bands in the post-grunge glut.
But the newfound interest in alternative music also buoyed some unexpected acts. “There were a lot of people looking to independent labels for the next Nirvana,” says Christian Frederickson, violist with the Louisville chamber music act Rachel’s. “While that obviously wasn’t us, I do think we benefited.”
Centred on guitarist/bassist Jason Noble, pianist Rachel Grimes and Frederickson, Rachel’s also sometimes incorporated clarinet, cello, vibraphone, samples and dancers as they crafted graceful, shapeshifting music that could, loosely, be described as post-rock – or a precursor to the neo-classical phenomenon led by Nils Frahm and the label Erased Tapes.
Despite their vast remove from the feedback-drenched clangour of grunge or punk, their 1995 debut, Handwriting, became an unexpected success. They were embraced by indie fans and demand outstripped supply: the occasion for our talk is a 30th anniversary re-pressing. Nevertheless, classical purists back then were not always so enthusiastic. “There were a lot of people who seemed deeply insulted that we’d put bass and drums with piano and strings and tried to pull it off with a serious face,” Grimes says with a smile.
In reality, Rachel’s were far from rabble-rousers – but they were a product of a fertile punk scene – part of a lineage that included Slint, Squirrel Bait, June of 44 and Bonnie “Prince” Billy, AKA Louisville-born musician and actor Will Oldham. “Louisville had a strong cultural identity at least into the 1980s – an identity that had the arts at its core,” says Oldham. He doesn’t qualify where Rachel’s fit in, only that they did. “I feel like to a great extent we can’t choose the sounds that come out of us and the music folks made here in Louisville always felt like a project of compulsion more than design,” he says. “With this in mind, the idea of genre is a time waste. This is what these people made and it lifted up all of us.”
The band had coalesced slowly. Noble, who later also played in the influential post-rock band Rodan, was at art school in Baltimore when a chance encounter in 1991 set the wheels in motion. “My friends and I were on the same bus as him and his friends,” says Frederickson, then studying at the Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University. “They were very clearly art students, and we were very clearly classical music students. We started going to each other’s events – I’d go up to the art institute for poetry readings or art openings, and he’d come down to the Conservatory for concerts. We started talking about this music he was working on and eventually cobbled together a recording session.”
Noble dropped out of art school and returned to his native Louisville. He later passed a tape of the session to pianist, composer and fellow Kentuckian Grimes. “I met Jason at a party,” says Grimes, who was living a dual life studying music at the University of Louisville by day and playing indie rock at night. “He came to my composition recital, and the band I was in, Hula Hoop, were playing shows with Rodan. We started hanging out and writing introverted piano music together. It was a very gradual way of becoming part of each other’s musical lives.”
Frederickson, meanwhile, would visit Louisville in his downtime, helping Noble transcribe, arrange and record new material. The trio formally became Rachel’s in summer 1994, recording Handwriting later that year.
They found a home with Quarterstick Records – the “arthouse” sister label to indie powerhouse Touch and Go Records. Feted for releasing records by Slint, Die Kreuzen and the Jesus Lizard, label owner Corey Rusk felt Touch and Go had become pigeonholed, so established Quarterstick to reflect his more eclectic tastes.
“Jason and I would have long gab sessions about music we liked,” says Rusk, who had worked with Noble on Rodan’s sole, labyrinthine album, Rusty. “It came to light that we both liked Arvo Pärt and Henryk Górecki and Gavin Bryars. Jason told me he and some friends had been working on music somewhat along those lines. I told him he had to send me a tape. He did, I loved it, and the rest is history.”
Released in 1995, Handwriting was unlike anything produced by America’s indie rock underground. Influenced by Michael Nyman, the album was lyrical, moving and elegantly understated, its sense of completeness belying its patchwork construction and the ad hoc manner in which additional players – from classically trained pals to members of “garage jazz”’ act the Coctails and recording engineer and Shellac bassist Bob Weston – had been recruited.
Almost overnight, Rachel’s went from being a recording project to a practical concern. “We had to figure out how to be a band,” says Grimes. “There wasn’t a master plan, but we had youth, energy and intention on our side. We gave it a lot of time and serious attention because it just felt so important and exciting.” Two albums were released the following year: Music for Egon Schiele, which Grimes was commissioned to compose for a theatre and dance group, then, later, the Pablo Neruda-inspired The Sea and the Bells. This flurry of activity was followed by albums Selenography (1999), Systems/Layers (2003) and EPs that included a collaboration with electronic act Matmos.
But momentum got the better of them. The long-gestating Systems/Layers became the band’s final album. A rewarding collaboration with the Saratoga International Theater Institute, with a stage setting involving nine actors, projections and a live pit orchestra, it left the musicians exhausted and overwhelmed. “We created a piece of art that was just completely unaffordable,” says Grimes. “We never, ever thought practically about the cheapest way to tour.”
Rachel’s would receive praise from the likes of Lou Reed and their music appears in films from Will Smith vehicle Hancock to Paolo Sorrentino’s Oscar-winning The Great Beauty. Today, Grimes continues to perform, publish and compose. In 2019 she unveiled a folk opera entitled The Way Forth, exploring the stories and voices of women through Kentucky’s history. The project continues to bear fruit, having led her to the life of the enslaved violinist and bandleader Henry Hart. She is now researching Hart’s family history, and preparing to publish new arrangements of his work. Frederickson, meanwhile, teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology while writing music and crafting sound design pieces for theatre.
Noble died of cancer in 2012 , and Edward Grimes, Rachel’s brother and the band’s longtime drummer, died in 2017. Reissuing the band’s work has, understandably, been a bittersweet process. “It’s weird and hard but that’s what it is to miss the people you love,” says Grimes. “Being in a band with my brother and my friends was such a fun romp. It’s impossible not to feel grief, love, joy and appreciation that we got to do all of this. It can be hard to work on and I have to put it down sometimes. Yet I know they would be excited about it, and the records still being in print is somehow miraculous.”
• The 30th anniversary reissue of Handwriting is out now on Touch and Go Records
