Cuddle Magic

It would be easy to accuse Cuddle Magic of being Luddites if only they weren’t making music about a hundred times more interesting than all the panda cubs huddling in basements with SP-404s. I mean, samplers hell, these folks don’t even use electric guitars. The thing is, while there is much fascinating and beautiful music to be made with samplers, for many people who adopt the instrument carelessly it becomes a crutch. When each button you press creates not just a note (with variations in attack, volume, etc.) but an entire complete sound, it’s far easier to fill the aural space without much intention or thought. I think this is why it can actually take more skill to make great music on samplers: there are so many easy outs. When one loop sounds great, you have to actively disrupt it to create something new, whereas with acoustic instruments you have to literally play a repeated section every time. This may seem like splitting hairs but it makes a difference. It’s the same kind of difference illustrated by the fact that it’s easy to make deafening noise on an electric guitar and have the same absent expression on your face as someone adjusting the thermostat or reading page 712 of Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, while making the same kind of noise on, say, the saxophone requires you to sweat torrentially and turn sunset red and stumble around like you’re on whippets for the next 5 minutes.

There is also the seemingly unavoidable issue that samplers put a choke collar on rhythm, restrict (and basically kill) harmony, and, in doing the latter, tie down melody as well. Person Pitch is a fantastic record partly because it transcends those restrictions, uses them as rungs on a ladder to something beautiful, but inherent to sampler-pop is monotony in everything but texture. To superimpose loops over one another, they music be harmonically simple (read: one chord, probably a triad) and rhythmically simple (all the same time signature [read:4/4]) to avoid clashes. When the song is a pyramid of loops built on one chord, the harmony never changes (see the entirety of Person Pitch), which means the melody (if the chord is, as suggested, a major or minor triad) is restricted to one diatonic scale. I mean most pop melodies are diatonic anyway, but interest is often spiked by inserting non-diatonic harmony underneath. And look at bands like Grizzly Bear or the Dirty Projectors. That shit is all about shifting rhythm and meter, bizarre harmony and non-diatonic melody.

Cuddle Magic is just about the opposite of this, featuring twelve members, scattered all around Brooklyn and Philadelphia, most if not all of whom hold some sort of collegiate music degree and are masters of their instruments. What makes them great is not that they don’t use samplers or amplification, it’s that it would never occur to you while listening that there was anything missing. Every song is woven gorgeously together out of so many distinct sounds (all actual instruments played by actual human beings, if you’re into that kind of thing) that the color palette, rather than being limited by the aversion to electrics and electronics, actually sounds significantly more varied and expansive than anything I’ve heard in quite a while. It’s like the aural equivalent of the animation from Waking Life. The backbone of song is strong and clear, but the instruments filling it out are constantly shifting not only in terms of presence but in terms of timbre (ooh, music criticism word). Check out, for example, the banjo pattern that enters sneakily after the last chorus of A-side “The Packaging”, playing a hypnotic riff that actually does not line up with the rest of the band, intentionally creating a feeling that is both airy and tense. The arrangements here are impeccable, so perfect in their subtlety that it will take you minimum ten listens before you realize how brilliant they are.

These folks may avoid amplification but they embrace and understand experimentation. Clipped and percussive prepared piano is all over B-side “Paris/Happydent”, strings lushly pad out the periphery of “The Packaging”, bass clarinet thickens and cools the warm upright bass sound or adds reedy weight to breathy vocals, vibraphone adds muted bell-tones to the vocal sections of “Paris/Happydent”, contrapuntal vocals abound in both tunes, and meters are in constant flux. In fact, one of the most ravishing moments in the whole digital single is the first chorus to “The Packaging” in which the meter finally resolves into an even 6/8 and the male/female vocals are split into a round and set apart in achingly pretty yet elusive harmony. It’s a resolution of sorts, but Cuddle Magic always holds a little something back to keep you leaning forward.

Check out the start of “Paris/Happydent” (okay, yes, I know there are a few electronic elements here. Look, just shut up, I wanted to rant about samplers) where a jerky, atonal prepared piano riff is perfectly synced with punchy, crisp drums to build tension in a subtle and delicious way (that will also bob your head) until it finally breaks into the beautiful, dreamy, string-led 6/8 section. Music often sounds the most beautiful when you can’t immediately recognize what is going on, and Cuddle Magic thrives on that. This is pop music, don’t get me wrong, but there’s something elusive about all of it that just makes you want to put it on repeat, and when you do that and close your eyes, you feel like you are drifting into some other world. When the simple, pretty vocals finally kick in halfway through the track, after some vibraphone clusters and muted trumpet howls and string diads that combine to sound almost like a keyboard, they have a power that comes from the prior three minutes of searching. Purely experimental music gives you only the journey, experimental pop gives you both journey and destination.

The vocals on each track (incidentally, both songs are lifted from the band’s upcoming album Picture) are simple and pretty in an almost affectless way that recalls Sufjan Stevens (as does the epic swarm of acoustic instruments), but where in Sufjan’s music the endless repetition of harmony and rhythm (and even melody) gets tiring, “Cuddle Magic” is restless and shifting, and this keeps the music from ever becoming cloying or saccharine. There is in fact, despite the cutesy name, a pervasive, windy melancholy to their music that is crucial to its appeal. This is not disturbed (and is probably even enhanced) by the fact that the lyrics are almost entirely opaque.

As I said at the start, it would be easy to write Cuddle Magic off as reactionaries in an age of exciting new technology. Easy, that is, until you listen to their music and discover how beautiful and forward thinking and rich it all is. Movements in independent pop music come and go with alarming speed these days, but thankfully for all of us, people like Cuddle Magic are following their noses into some of the best and most unconventional pop songs we will ever have the privilege of downloading.

Gabe Birnbaum - The Ampeater Review

by Jason Rabin

(excerpt)

...

Cuddlemagic, the experimental/eclectic orchestral jam band with dual Boston/Philly citizenship, transported us to another realm to close the festival. Cuddle Magic incorporates a variety of strings, percussion, woodwinds and electronica into their sound. I remember vibes, dual drum kits, a clarinet, a flute, a tin whistle, guitars, upright bass, I believe violin, and some RadioHeadean equipment providing strange frequencies, distortions and beats. For all this, Cuddle Magic’s sound is gentle and lyrical, highlighted with soft, sensitive vocals and lyrics ranging from the absurd to the whimsically melancholy. These kids know what’s up musically. This is prehipster-aesthetic classical arrangement, striving unashamedly for beauty, married to a playful spirit of experimentation and grounded in a desire to stay accessible and contemporary. Check out their Myspace Page for a hint of their sound, but don’t stop there: Cuddlemagic is undeniably a live experience, mellow but completely engaging. - The Deli

by Carolyn Huckabay

Seems like every song on Cuddle Magic's Picture (FYO) is reminiscent of something else — and that's not necessarily a bad thing. "The Packaging" sounds like a pluckier, more sedated Vampire Weekend; "Don't Forget" politely screams Postal Service; "Fanfare" gets down like Colonial jam bands might have; and "In So Far" drops hints of — get this — slow-jazz Jamiroquai. The Brooklyn- and Philly-based multi-instrumental ensemble (which gets a little Polyphonic Spree-y, what with its 10-member roster) deals in odd time signatures and a signature funk-folk sensibility that lets the band go in a million different directions, all at once. Somehow, it totally works. - Philadelphia City Paper

by Jonathan Donaldson

Things aren’t always what they’re called — we know that flying fish don’t fly and starfish aren’t even fish. As for the experimental chamber-folk ensemble Cuddle Magic (who come to Lizard Lounge tonight), well, they aren’t very cuddly. You can forget the heart-on-notebook indie cuteness suggested by their name — the Brooklyn/Philly nine-piece are more evocative of the sorts of pursuits that might lead to cuddling. Like the din of a jazz club at half past whiskey, the creeping soundtrack of a suspense thriller, or dreams of travels in distant lands.

Yet Cuddle Magic’s random spontaneity is part of the plan. “There was this crazy mathematical graph paper all around me and all around my room,” says composer and multi-instrumentalist (guitar, ukulele, bass, vocals) Ben Davis. He’s describing the experience of writing “Content Contempt,” from Picture, Cuddle Magic’s forthcoming February sophomore release. Putting his New England Conservatory smarts to use, Davis took a 660-beat cycle and tried to turn it into a composition that didn’t sound as if it had been based on graph paper at all. The result sounds like the creation of self-taught musicians wandering into new territory. A contemplative piano theme is met by a fleet of recorders, a rickety banjo, and a droning violin — and those are just the more recognizable instruments. Were it not for the more familiar indie touchstones of Davis’s own laid-back, layered vocals and the hesitant post-rock drumming, it could veer into modern chamber-music territory. But like much of Cuddle Magic’s repertoire, “Content Contempt” is something that can connect with both music heads and those who go on gut alone.

It wasn’t always graphs and oblique compositional concepts for Davis. A second-generation musician, he began his “career” as a child writing songs with his brother Tim (who is Cuddle Magic’s main lyricist) and his father, Peter, a regionally renowned upstate New York multi-instrumentalist. While plying the family trade performing traditional pre-bluegrass contradance music with his father, Davis heard something intricate and fascinating in traditional folk that a lot of listeners seem to miss. As he puts it, “Folk music has a lot of crooked aspects to it.”

Davis went on to New England Conservatory, connecting these crooked dots between academic music and traditional folk and world musics, and eventually he met co-composer and fellow multi-instrumentalist Alec Spiegelman (clarinet, flute, guitar, vocals). Davis and Spiegelman, who both also play with Boston singer-songwriter Miss Tess, then began pulling together the multitude of musicians who would contribute to Cuddle Magic’s debut disc in 2006.

As opposed to a studio project, where players and songwriters are brought in as hired hands, all nine Cuddle Magic participants have roles that are essential. The band can go from a Lambchop-esque cinematic sprawl to a West African–flavored groove (Davis recently spent three months studying music in Mali and Ghana) in the shake of a baton. Those who enjoy music with a bit more focus might be distracted — Cuddle Magic do like to change horses midstream. But if you’re drawn to more precocious music, the rewards are many. Says Davis of their audience, “People can feel the tension being built, like the plot in a movie.” And if you are so inclined, you can grab some popcorn and find someone to cuddle with.
- Boston Phoenix