Third Coast Percussion’s borderless music finds inspiration in fleet-footed beats

The model of electronic new music and dance identified as footwork may look a weird bedfellow to classical songs, but the Grammy-successful team Third Coast Percussion embraces the fleet-footed sound on Perspectives, a new album that pushes the notion of a percussion ensemble into contemporary territory.&#13

Footwork is the hyper-beat tunes born in Chicago’s underground dance competitions and dwelling events in the late 1990s. On 3rd Coast Percussion’s album, the design and style undergoes a mesmerizing transformation in a seven-movement suite named Point of view.&#13

The tunes, which normally clocks at 150 beats for each minute or additional, is by Jerrilynn Patton, a footwork enthusiast who began slicing up her have electronic beats at her parent’s house in Gary, Ind. She was doing the job in a nearby steel mill when Dark Energy, her debut album, received her vital acclaim in 2015 — although she suggests she’s drained of journalists trotting out the tale.&#13

Heading by Jlin, the electronic artist has absorbed footwork, but turned it within out for her collaboration with 3rd Coast Percussion. She did not score the get the job done on manuscript paper, but as a substitute brought her myriad layers of audio stems to the 3rd Coast musicians and jointly they fashioned a edition that could be carried out on more than 30 devices.&#13

On “Derivative,” steel bowls crammed with water and struck by mallets enable lay down a woozy, head-bopping groove, together with bongos, a bamboo “devil chaser,” a variety of gongs, woodblocks and motor vehicle sections.&#13

One more unconventional partnership on the album finds Third Coast Percussion composing music with a further band, the duo Flutronix, comprised of flutists Nathalie Joachim and Allison Loggins-Hull. Their piece, Rubix, functions punchy flutes dancing more than a chilled out vibraphone, and foggy episodes in which marimba, whirly tube and bowed flexatone provide an evocative backdrop of gentle and shadow.&#13

You can find one more blend on Views that may perhaps shock you, and it comes courtesy of Danny Elfman. You may know him as the entrance person for the peculiar ’80s rock band Oingo Boingo, or better nonetheless by his almost 100 film scores, for movies like Edward Scissorhands and Superior Will Searching. For the Third Coast musicians, he composed a 4-motion piece simply just termed Percussion Quartet. Contrary to a ton of educational music for percussion ensembles, Elfman helps make his quartet sing sweetly, leaning closely on the warm sounds of the marimba interlocking with tinkling tubular chimes and pitched steel pipes.&#13

It claims a good deal about this group’s dedication to brand name new tunes when the oldest piece on the album is from 1988. Philip Glass‘ Metamorphosis No. 1, at first for solo piano, undergoes an expansive, serene renovation. At just one level the gentle, see-sawing concept is taken up by a melodica, and later sparkles with a flurry of glockenspiel and crotales.&#13

3rd Coastline Percussion, with albums like Views, proceeds to thrust percussion in new instructions, blurring musical boundaries and beguiling new listeners. &#13

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