Rigwreck finds The Crossing immersed in the urgent, word-driven choral writing of celebrated British composer Gabriel Jackson. The five works are guided by texts that wrestle with what the Earth tries to tell us, gun violence, longing, and the fragile bonds between self and world. Conducted by Donald Nally, the ensemble gives voice to poetry by Gustav Sobin, Pierre Joris, Dean Rader, Walt Whitman and Kārlis Vēdeņš (in Ieva Lešinska’s translation).

From the ecological reckoning of the title work, written in response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, to the intimacy of Yes, I am your angel and the spiritual expanse of Darest thou now O soul?, Jackson’s music requires the singers to come together in virtuosity and vulnerability. Each work was written for The Crossing and Donald Nally over the span of a decade and recorded in 2024 at St. Peter’s Church in Malvern PA. Rigwreck is contemporary choral music as witness and journalist, transcendent, and direct.

Over the course of the last 15 years, David Lang and The Crossing, the Grammy-winning chamber choir conducted by Donald Nally, have crafted a body of work that stands apart from the rest for its profound spiritual connection to our shared sense of humanity — through our stories, our myths, our beliefs and our dreams. 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙨𝙚𝙣𝙨𝙚 𝙤𝙛 𝙨𝙚𝙣𝙨𝙚𝙨 is a milestone of sorts, because it celebrates that connection, across time and space, to deliver a message that music can be a benevolent force for change if we only take the time to listen.

“This album is a collection of works that capture the intimate side of The Crossing’s relationship with David Lang,” Nally explains. “Only two were written for us, yet the others reflect a shared world view, a common idea about sound and community, and a collective focus on our reason for singing. David’s thoroughly considered thoughts on ‘why we do this’ have influenced The Crossing’s perpetually reexamined thoughts on that question: how to communicate deep feelings, absent of ego.”

With four Grammys and ten nominations, The Crossing takes a new direction with Ted Hearne's FARMING. In his new work, Hearne — the two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist praised by Pitchfork for creating “some of the most expressive socially engaged music in recent memory” — confronts technology’s ominous encroachment upon humanity’s very being. FARMING tackles the long-tail impact of settler colonialism and its philosophical motivations on agricultural degradation.

Hearne dives headfirst into the Uncanny Valley, conjuring a soundworld fraught with neck-breaking shifts and stylistic contradictions. Its unholy marriage of ersatz Americana, digitally altered choral arrangements, and hyperpop’s synapse-frying maximalism inverts technology’s smoothing impulses in favor of an unwieldy, knotty expression of modern ennui and alienation.

Upon its 2023 live performance debut, The New York Times called FARMING “a suggestive, chaotically ambitious, often poignant reflection on colonization, consumption, marketing, entrepreneurship.” It’s certainly intellectually audacious: In repurposing primary texts from William Penn and Jeff Bezos, FARMING contends with the mythological constructs humans erect to justify their participation in an economy’s unfeeling entropies — and reveals the ethical void at their core.