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  The works of Point / Cloud, from the New York City-based composer and instrumentalist David Crowell, are transmissions from in between. Four compositions for percussion, guitar, and singing cellist offer pause amidst periods of transit—highway drives, detours to underwater pipe organs, or contrapuntal developments. Crowell’s intricate notions take flight, then build us a home in midair.
  
  Verses for a Liminal Space is the most recent composition to have emerged from Crowell’s decade-long relationship with the quartet Sandbox Percussion. Commissioned by a university consortium and completed during Crowell’s fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks, the work occurs in three “verses”: short, spaced circumnavigations, flowing into one another. A statement featuring vibraphone first winds up and down; vibraphones and marimbas then seem to freeze the music in place. The last verse is a bright, rotating canopy, grounded by repeated drum strikes.
  
  Crowell considers the eponymous Point / Cloud a response to Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint (1987), a defining three-movement work for guitar in which the soloist plays with pre-recorded tracks. (Lippel, who recorded Point / Cloud, also consulted with Reich on his own recording of Electric Counterpoint.) The title here evokes the work’s pointillistic texture and thick counterpoint, amassing over time into “clouds” of sound. Crowell follows a contemplative first movement with an introverted second, where wandering phrases hurdle gently over one another. Short sections in the last movement glow, settle, then bid adieu, if all too soon.
  
  Pacific Coast Highway, which follows, began life as an electric guitar and electric bass composition for one of Crowell’s previous bands, a virtuosic burst to be deployed in the middle of sets. Since then, the work has assumed what Crowell describes as “multiple personalities,” including the classical guitar duo version here performed by guitarists Dan Lippel and Mak Grgic. Crowell, who grew up partially in California, named the work in honor of one particular drive along the titular highway, imbued with an open-ended, exalted sensibility. Via dancelike passages that bend and wind after their namesake, Pacific Coast Highway routes us towards a novel destination.
  
  For Crowell, the concluding work 2 Hours in Zadar—performed by eco|tonal (Iva Casián-Lakoš and David Crowell), with text by Casián-Lakoš’s mother Nela Lakoš—is something of a surprise, an episode of spaciousness after three explorations of pulse and rhythm. The work, Crowell said, stands at the intersection of Crowell’s own compositional sensibilities and Casián-Lakoš’s musical strengths, as well as her Croatian ancestry. At the start of 2 Hours in Zadar, snatches of Casián-Lakoš speaking Croatian are embraced by organ-like electronics, derived from manipulations of Casián-Lakoš’s voice. Soon begins Gregorian-style chanting, accompanied by Casián-Lakoš’ fluid lines on cello and, later, samples of the peculiar hollow trumpeting of the Sea Organ: a marble stair in the Croatian coastal city of Zadar that conceals within its steps a group of pipes, “played” by the passing waves. Casián-Lakoš goes on to sing her mother’s text, describing a speaker who ponders the endlessness of the sea, surrendering to and yet—with plainspoken sweetness—refusing the water’s power.
  
  —Jennifer Gersten ... more
  Purchasable with gift card
  releases May 3, 2024

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