Composer Virgil Moorefield fashions tectonic plates of musical activity that collide and snap on his fourth full-length recording, the charmingly entitled Things You Need To Do To Get To Heaven. "Five On Six" gets this theatre of sound underway with an insistent five-note percussive tutti and tenor drum figure, lightened with swooning violin and suspended vibraphone which wrench the material into fresh inner relationships.

Later, when the rumbling drum clouds and nervy rattling of metallic percussion acknowledge the customary dominance of the strings, themselves becoming lighter and more mobile and working towards rather than against the meditative aura, pieces near a unity of sound that hints at transcendence. Once properly framed, though, as on the opening composition, a penetrating shrillness or moment of discord reestablishes a sense of gravity and distinction. To various degrees, then, smoothness is precluded, but contours and dynamics continually meet and interact in a kind of prolonged musical massage.

It is a meeting that is anything but bland or uneventful, however. Moorefield's episodic, cellular compositional approach maintains these myriad parts in a complete structure while allowing individual instrumental solos to abruptly burst out from the orchestral crowd. "Crosstalk" shows a tight and skilled variation of timbre and imaginative regulation of rhythm. Elsewhere the steady and unhurried pacing is washed over by glowering sonic roughage, which ensure that the individualistic impulse to express remains intact. Hence, there is formality, theatricality, noise and intricacy. And the scheduled and spontaneous recurrence of players and motifs makes for a focused music that is as intense as it is airy.