Sonograma Magazine: Between Breaths
Published on September 29, 2023
by Carme Miró | Share this post! 
Between Breaths is a deep reflection of sound, with unconventional timbres and tones.
Originally published in Catalan; translated to English below.
Onomatopoeias, which are very common in the language between musicians
—logical, since they portray the sounds—, they play a very important role in Between Breaths (‘Entre respiraciones’), an album of world premieres by four contemporary composers. Between Breaths is a deep reflection of sound, with unconventional timbres and tones.
Chicago’s Grammy Award-winning percussion quartet Third Coast Percussion harnesses the expressive richness of percussion, pushing it to unsuspected limits. To celebrate this new album, the quartet officially kicked off their season with a performance of the entire album at The Reva & David Logan Center for the Arts on September 2, 2023. Composer Missy Mazzoli, renowned for
her inexhaustible inventiveness, presents the work Millennium Canticles (‘Càntics del millêlenni’), in which she uses various materials, such as wooden bars, resonating metal tubes, bells and a variety of onomatopoeias and vocal expressions.
In Practice follows, a work written by the collective of composers Third Coast Percussion which is based on a sound meditation created from the personal rituals of the members of the quartet.
Sunny X by Tyondai Braxton—an avant-garde rock guitarist—is a work in which the author combines electronics and various acoustic timbres at a dizzying pace. Ayanna Woods, composer, singer and multi-instrumentalist, presents her work Triple Point (‘Triple Point’), a metaphor for the three states of matter. Her work reflects energy in constant motion and in different phases of boiling and sound dissolution.
To finish, New Zealand composer based in Brooklyn, Gemma Peacocke, dedicates her work Death Wish(‘Death Wish’) to Hinewirangi Kohu-Morgan, Māori artist, poet and activist. A whole metaphor of the shadows of the human being and the wound of the light.
The fascinating interpretation of Third Coast Percussion, with a monumental attempt to think about the sound of percussion, rigorously addresses a lot of diverse topics, proposed by four composers who are dedicated to conceiving reality with a set of sonorities of an artistic and creative dimension.