Music for Liminal Spaces and Moments
An exploration of the spaces between: the moment before entering, the hour between night and dawn, the breath before transformation. Drawing on Victor Turner's concept of liminality, these seven compositions inhabit the doorways of existence where identity dissolves and reforms.
Anthropologist Victor Turner coined the term liminality to describe the transitional phase in rituals of passage—the moment when initiates are "betwixt and between," no longer what they were but not yet what they will become. In liminal space, normal social structures dissolve. Anything becomes possible.
Turner observed that liminal periods are often marked by ambiguity, disorientation, and a sense of sacred danger. The threshold is where transformation happens—but transformation is never comfortable. To cross a threshold is to die to one self and be born as another.
This album emerged from conversations about the doorways each musician has crossed. Ralph leaving Peru for Brazil—the moment at the airport when he was neither Peruvian nor Brazilian, just a body in transit. Juan at his grandfather's deathbed, watching the old master drummer take his final breath, inheriting rhythms in that terrible silence. Mariah rejecting her acceptance to Juilliard, choosing instead to travel to Senegal—the letter unsent, the future unmade.
These are not nostalgic memories but living presences. Each threshold changed everything. The album asks: What if we could inhabit those moments? What music lives in the doorway?
The Antechamber—The Moment Before Entering
The antechamber—that room before the room. The waiting area where anticipation builds. The inhale before the dive. This track captures the pregnant pause before any significant entry: a job interview, a wedding ceremony, a hospital room, a first date.
The piece opens with near-silence—just the hum of a room, the ambient sound of waiting. Mariah plays sparse, suspended chords that never quite resolve, harmonic questions that hang in the air.
Juan's drums enter imperceptibly, building from the threshold of audibility. He plays with brushes at first, the sound of anxious hands fidgeting. The pulse is irregular, mimicking the arrhythmia of anticipation—heartbeats that can't settle.
Ralph's bass introduces a low drone that feels like the room itself breathing. As the piece progresses, the energy builds but never releases. The listener is held in perpetual pre-entry, the door always about to open but never opening.
The climax is a sudden swell—all three instruments rising to the edge of resolution—followed by a cut to silence. The door has opened. But we don't hear what's on the other side.
The Hour Between Night and Dawn
Madrugada—the Spanish word for the small hours, roughly 2 to 5 AM. Neither night nor morning. The hour when the veil between worlds is thinnest, when the sick often die, when secrets are confessed, when the insomniac confronts what they avoid by daylight.
The track is structured as a slow drift through the pre-dawn hours. Mariah draws on the French impressionist tradition of nocturnes—Fauré, Debussy—but infused with the specific melancholy of Caribbean nights, those hours when rum loosens tongues and old wounds reopen.
Juan plays with mallets, creating a wash of cymbal overtones that suggest the ocean at night—present but invisible. His rhythms are deliberately sleepy, the slow pulse of a house where everyone should be asleep but isn't.
Ralph introduces a walking bass line that evokes movement without progress—pacing, perhaps, or the circular thoughts of insomnia. As the piece progresses, the music lightens almost imperceptibly. The harmonies shift from minor to modal. Dawn approaches.
The final minutes capture that magical moment when the sky begins to gray but the sun hasn't yet risen—when it becomes possible to believe you might survive until morning after all.
This track was composed during Juan's year of insomnia after his grandfather's death. "I would play drums at 3 AM, very softly, trying to hear him in the patterns. Sometimes I thought I did."
Birth as the Ultimate Threshold
The first breath. That moment when a being transitions from aquatic to terrestrial existence, from dependent to independent respiration, from potential to actual. The most profound threshold any of us has crossed—and one none of us remember.
The piece begins underwater—muffled, pressure-dense, the heartbeat dominant. Ralph's bass plays the mother's pulse, steady and enveloping. Mariah's piano is filtered to sound distant, the outside world barely audible through the amniotic barrier.
The middle section captures the trauma of birth itself—sudden compression, disorientation, the loss of the only world ever known. The music becomes chaotic, almost violent. Juan's drums suggest both the contractions of labor and the terror of being expelled from paradise.
Then: silence. A pause that feels dangerous.
The first breath—a gasp, translated into Mariah's highest register. And then the flood: air, light, cold, the overwhelming sensory assault of existence. The music explodes into major tonality, exuberant and raw.
The final section is a lullaby—the first comfort after the first terror. We have arrived. We have survived. The threshold is behind us.
The Parallel Lives We Don't Live
Every threshold crossed means another threshold not crossed. Every yes contains a thousand nos. This track haunts the parallel lives we didn't live—the careers not pursued, the loves not chosen, the places never visited. The quantum ghosts of alternate selves.
The piece is built on a technique of musical "what-ifs." A melody begins, reaches a decision point, and splits: one path continues while the other fades but remains faintly audible, a ghost track running parallel to the main theme.
Mariah plays with prepared piano techniques—objects placed on strings that create phantom overtones, the sound of music that almost exists. Juan's cymbals are played with bows, creating sustained tones that seem to come from another room, another version of the song.
Ralph's bass is central here: he plays melodic variations that suggest roads not taken, bass lines that could have been but weren't. At several points, the trio splits into distinct musical paths that gradually diverge until they're playing entirely different pieces simultaneously—the sound of lives growing apart.
The reconciliation comes at the end: all the divergent paths collapse back into a single theme, a single now. The other doors close forever. We are left with only the life we chose.
This track was written in the weeks after Mariah received her acceptance letter to Juilliard. She was practicing the response—the polite decline—when the melody came to her. The door she didn't take gave her this music.
The Dominican Wake—Death as Passage, Not Ending
The Dominican velorio—a wake that can last for days, filled with music, stories, dominoes, rum, and laughter alongside tears. Death in this tradition is not an ending but a passage, and the velorio helps the soul find its way. The threshold between worlds remains open while the community keeps vigil.
Juan leads this composition, drawing directly from the palos de muerto—drums of the dead—that are played at Dominican wakes. These are not mournful rhythms but propulsive, celebratory, helping the spirit dance its way to the other side.
The piece alternates between sections of grief and sections of fierce joy. Mariah plays hymn fragments that dissolve into stride piano—the wake is also a party, after all. Ralph's bass carries the weight of sorrow in some passages and the momentum of dance in others.
The centerpiece is an extended drum solo by Juan, channeling his grandfather's patterns, the rhythms that connect the living and the dead. He plays as if the threshold is right there in the room, as if his grandfather might step through at any moment.
The piece ends with a procession: the music marches, carrying the soul from one world to the next. Then silence—not the silence of ending but the silence of arrival. The threshold has been crossed. The velorio is over. Life continues.
This is Juan's requiem for his grandfather, Ramón Reyes, the master drummer who initiated him into the sacred rhythms of Villa Mella. "I played these patterns at his velorio. Now I play them so he can hear, wherever he is."
That suspended moment when the flash has occurred but the sound hasn't yet arrived
The interval between lightning and thunder—that suspended moment when the flash has occurred but the sound hasn't yet arrived. A threshold measured in heartbeats, counting the distance to impact. The space between seeing and understanding, between event and consequence.
The piece is constructed around a repeating pattern: sudden bursts of musical "lightning"—sharp, bright attacks across all three instruments—followed by varying durations of suspense before the "thunder" arrives in the form of low, rumbling responses.
The intervals vary, keeping the listener in perpetual anticipation. Sometimes the thunder comes immediately; sometimes the wait stretches unbearably. Mariah uses the piano's full register to create the contrast—crystalline upper notes for lightning, deep pedal tones for thunder.
Juan's drums capture both elements: the crack of the snare as lightning, the thunder of floor tom and bass drum. Ralph's bass provides the rumble, the seismic aftermath of the strike.
As the piece progresses, the storms intensify. The intervals shorten. Event and consequence compress until they become simultaneous—the moment of direct impact, no distance at all. Then, as all storms do, it passes. The final minutes are clear, calm, the air washed clean. The threshold of the storm has been crossed.
Transformation in Darkness
Inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar doesn't simply grow wings—it dissolves entirely into a kind of cellular soup before reconstituting as something completely new. The ultimate liminal space: total dissolution as the prerequisite for transformation. You cannot become a butterfly without first ceasing to be a caterpillar.
The album's epic closer, at nearly twelve minutes. The piece moves through three distinct phases corresponding to the metamorphosis.
Phase One: The Caterpillar's Last Walk. A melody that we've heard fragments of throughout the album—the album's "caterpillar theme"—is stated fully for the first time. It's beautiful but limited, earthbound. The trio plays it with tenderness, honoring what must be lost.
Phase Two: Dissolution. The melody fragments, dissolves, loses all recognizable structure. This extended middle section is the album's most experimental passage—prepared piano, extended bass techniques, drums played with foreign objects. The music becomes "soup," formless but alive, pregnant with possibility. This phase is uncomfortable, even frightening. Transformation is not gentle.
Phase Three: Emergence. From the chaos, a new theme emerges—related to the caterpillar melody but utterly transformed. Where the original was earthbound, this soars. Where it was simple, this is complex, incorporating elements from all seven tracks, from the entire album's journey through thresholds. The butterfly has wings made of every door we've passed through.
The piece ends not with triumph but with flight—the sustained, uncertain motion of new wings testing the air. The chrysalis is empty. What emerges is unknown, even to itself. But it flies.
This track captures Ralph's experience of leaving Peru—the dissolution of everything he knew, the long incubation in Brazil, and finally the emergence as an artist who was no longer purely Peruvian but something new, something winged. "I was a caterpillar in Cusco. I became soup in Salvador. I don't know what I am now, but I can fly."
Anticipation, Ritual, Birth, What-if, Death, Measurement, Transformation
Extended techniques, ambient passages, stark contrasts between silence and intensity; the album's most experimental work yet
Victor Turner's liminality provides the conceptual framework; each track explores a different threshold while contributing to an arc of transformation
After the introspective silence of the previous album, Thresholds embraces the discomfort of change. The trio is no longer just exploring—they are becoming something new.