Flutronix: Black Being
Cedille Records

With Black Being, Flutronix duo Nathalie Joachim and Allison Loggins-Hull have created a powerful statement about Black female experience that for the most part succeeds gloriously. This forty-minute electro-acoustic song-cycle is set to provocative text by North Carolina poet laureate Jaki Shelton Green and augments Flutronix with the Chicago Sinfonietta under the direction of Mei-Ann Chen. Scored for flutes, electronics, voice, and chamber orchestra, Black Being is distinguished by originality, imagination, and the relevance and timeliness of its subject matter. As eloquently articulated by Hannah Edgar in her album-accompanying commentary, Flutronix aspires with the project to “reclaim the time, respect, and agency so frequently denied Black women.” Edgar titled her piece “We Keep Coming,” words that function as a refrain throughout the work and become a mantra of empowerment never more resonant than today.

Joachim and Loggins-Hull, who founded the duo project in Brooklyn in 2007 and issued their eponymous first album three years later, are flutists, composers, and educators who've held posts at Montclair State University, Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, University of Hartford, and elsewhere. Currently Joachim's an Assistant Professor of Composition at Princeton, while Loggins-Hull is The Cleveland Orchestra's Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellow. Prior to its January 2025 recording at DePaul University, Black Being appeared in 2021 at the Arts Club of Chicago in a flutes-and-electronics arrangement and then received its chamber orchestra premiere with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in April 2022.

Meditating on the horrors of the American slave trade, the slow-burning “Angels” opens the work atmospherically, the music emerging cryptically with an insistently pulsing flute loop, flute flourishes, and vocoder-treated recitations from Joachim. The effect is, by design, haunting, and the patiently unfolding music feels as if it's creeping under one's skin, never more so than when the vocal intonations arrive. Fleshing out Joachim's hushed utterances in the queasy soundtrack are bellowing brass, thunderous drum accents, and shuddering string glissandos. Portentous and cloaked in darkness, the opening movement is followed by one that in its opening minutes is comparatively sunnier, despite the fact that “Water Babies” is in part about those thrown from slave ships. Its delicate intro rapidly cedes, however, to urgent, militaristic episodes before returning to a reflective state brimming with tentative optimism (“we are the light / streaming through cracked mornings”). Green's unsparing in her text, though she leavens harrowing imagery with the idea of dying slaves liberated from their corporeal selves and reborn as sirens.

Another shift occurs with the twilight-set “Moonpies and Stardust,” during which a night-time stream of insects is audible alongside strings and woodwinds. Wistfully reflecting on shared times with loved ones, the peaceful movement feels light years removed from the darkness of the opening one. Flute, bassoon, and oboe amplify the nostalgic mood until the music bursts to life as if awakening, Joachim's voice touching in its recollections. The concluding “Black Lights” bolts into being, drums pounding at high volume and the orchestra blazing. With anvil clanks punctuating the throbbing music, Joachim's voice enters but now offset by electronically altered vocal declamations. The effect's used to excess, however, and the music's impact is weakened as a result. The movement's message about, in Edgar's words, “the richness of Black womanhood across continents, class, appearance, eras, and experience” isn't negated by the treatments, but the words are already so powerful when delivered via Joachim's natural wail they're not needed. Tension-building, understatement, and nuance characterize the opening movements, which makes the closer a little less satisfying by comparison.

April 2026