“We keep coming”: Flutronix releases monumental recording

Earlier this month, Cedille released Black Being, a four-movement song cycle for flutes, electronics, voice, and chamber orchestra by Flutronix (Nathalie Joachim and Allison Loggins-Hull) that explores and reclaims the Black female experience.
 
Hannah Edgar’s program note for the album details how Black Being evolved over the years. It started in 2018, when Flutronix began a two-year residency at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, that introduced them to the work of North Carolina poet laureate Jaki Shelton Green. Captivated by her writing, especially recurring themes of sisterhood, living history, and slippages of time and place, they asked Green to write new text for Black Being. Through themes of strength, sacrifice, beauty, fear, and survival, Black Being gives voice to the complexities of Black womanhood and provides a musical lens into Black female cultural realities and conditions.

Flutronix outlined the poem’s narrative arc by segmenting it into four chapters. Blending historical and contemporary references, the refrain “we keep coming” ties each movement together. The first two movements grapple with the horrors of slavery, especially the middle passage, and evoke a sense of immeasurable weight and grief. The narrative progresses through to the nostalgia-filled third movement, a meditation on the comfort and memory of shared space with loved ones (in Loggins-Hull’s words, “it’s leisure, it’s ease, it’s some sweet hammock lifestyle.”) The cycle’s iterative finale hurls off the weight from the earlier sections and, in Edgar’s words, “affirms the richness of Black womanhood across continents, class, appearance, eras, and experience.”

Flutronix first introduced Black Being in a small-scale version at the Arts Club of Chicago, that the Chicago Tribune praised as “the most stunning live performance” and named among the Top 10 Classical Music Events of 2021. In April 2022, Black Being’s co-commissioner, the Cincinnati Symphony, premiered the chamber orchestra version with Mei-Ann Chen conducting. Chen and Flutronix reprised the work in 2025 with the Chicago Sinfonietta for the orchestra’s annual Martin Luther King Day concerts. The performance on this album comes from recording sessions that immediately followed those January 2025 concerts.

Nathalie Joachim says: “This project is a revolutionary opportunity and serves as a bold statement, by using the symphony orchestra, which is the pinnacle of western classical music… to elevate and celebrate Black women.” 

Black Being is made possible by generous support from an Anonymous donor, The Robert & Isabelle Bass Foundation, Inc., and the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University.