A 2020 double GRAMMY nominee, for both Best Small Ensemble/Chamber Music Performance and Best Engineered Album!

Grammy Award-winning, Chicago-based percussion quartet Third Coast Percussion teams up with influential, genre-defying multi-instrumentalist, record producer, songwriter, singer, and composer Devonté Hynes (aka Blood Orange) for an album of imaginative, evocative instrumental music created as the live soundtrack for choreography by the adventurous Hubbard Street Dance Chicago company. The album’s three works, all world-premiere recordings, represent Hynes’s debut on disc as a classical composer. In Perfectly Voiceless, Philip Glass-style minimalism gives way to a catchy pop melody. There Was Nothing blends synthesizer sounds with bowed mallet percussion instruments and moments of meditative lyricism recall the music of Lou Harrison. The expressive harmonies within the gauzy textures of For All Its Fury point to Hynes’ love of Debussy. Third Coast arranged Hynes’ music for its immense collection of diverse instruments and performed them on stage with the Hubbard Street dancers in Chicago and on tour. The Los Angeles Times praised Hynes’ “lush score” and Third Coast’s ability to summon “otherworldly sounds from a multitude of idiophones, drums and other devices.” Chicago’s New City Stage applauded Third Coast’s “extraordinary performance” and “ceaseless river of sound.”

REVIEW:

Third Coast Percussion grabs onto the Ambient Minimalism of the music of composer Devonte Hynes on the recent album Fields (Cedille CDR 90000 192), which creates universes of sound primarily out of mallet interlockings and ambient electronics. If New Music could remind you of some album track in Prog Rock, this could qualify for its cosmicality and spacey directedness.

This is New Music for people who may not much like New Music, or for those unfamiliar with such things. It is primarily good music beyond category.

I fully recommend this one for all progressive folks, for those who do not mind or even welcome a bit of groove and New Music fans who are open to the new in whatever form our artists see fit, regardless of preconceptions. Minimalists will also take heart I suspect. For this is very good indeed.

– Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review