Tuesday 2/21
CUDDLE MAGIC
with special guest STASH!WYSLOUCH (solo)
$15 advance and $15 at the door
$25 special seating (reserves one of the nine tables surrounding the performance area for you and guest holding a General Admission ticket)
8:00 doors / 9:00 show
www.cuddlemagic.com
www.stashwyslouch.com
We are SO PSYCHED about this show! Cuddle Magic is Benjamin Lazar Davis, Christopher McDonald, Dave Flaherty, Alec Spiegelman, Cole Kamen-Green and Kristin Slipp a six piece avant-pop band located between Brooklyn and Philadelphia. All six musicians are in-demand collaborators in New Yorks musical community and work with a wide array of artists, from pop superstars like Beyoncé to critically lauded independent musicians like Will She (Okkervil River) and Amanda Palmer (Dresden Dolls), as well as with respected gures of the avant-garde like Fred Frith and Ran Blake....
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Tuesday 2/21
CUDDLE MAGIC
with special guest STASH!WYSLOUCH (solo)
$15 advance and $15 at the door
$25 special seating (reserves one of the nine tables surrounding the performance area for you and guest holding a General Admission ticket)
8:00 doors / 9:00 show
www.cuddlemagic.com
www.stashwyslouch.com
We are SO PSYCHED about this show! Cuddle Magic is Benjamin Lazar Davis, Christopher McDonald, Dave Flaherty, Alec Spiegelman, Cole Kamen-Green and Kristin Slipp a six piece avant-pop band located between Brooklyn and Philadelphia. All six musicians are in-demand collaborators in New Yorks musical community and work with a wide array of artists, from pop superstars like Beyoncé to critically lauded independent musicians like Will She (Okkervil River) and Amanda Palmer (Dresden Dolls), as well as with respected gures of the avant-garde like Fred Frith and Ran Blake.
...a favorite new album of mine by a band that certainly has the most adorable name: Cuddle Magic...a spare bit of electronic pop inspired by music from Ghana. It leans somewhere between Sylvan Esso and the Postal Service.
- Bob Boilen, NPR
Philly-Brooklyn ensemble Cuddle Magic does meticulously orchestrated chamber pop thats part twee and part proggy. A few years back, the band resembled a folkier Dirty Projectors, but its yearning new single Trojan Horse demonstrates a new a nity for squashed synthesizers.
- Time Out New York
STASH! WYSLOUCH (solo) - No stranger to The Lizard Lounge, Stash! tonight performs solo brandishing his stringed instruments, incredible voice, and chant along metal meets bluegrass songs that you cannot resist.
MORE ON CUDDLE MAGIC
It's been a few years since the New Yorker labeled Cuddle Magics music "high concept chamber-pop. At the time, that was a fair statement about a band known to utilize 12-tone rows, odd meters, and extended techniques; a band which had collaborated with new music pianist Phyllis Chen and Third Stream master Ran Blake. But with Ashes/Axis, the bands forthcoming new full-length record, listeners are less likely to hear echoes of the academy. All sorts of heady compositional devices, both musical and literary, are still present, but the members of Cuddle Magic have learned to bury those influences deeper in the substrate of the music.
Ashes/Axis features songs written by three of Cuddle Magics band membersChristopher McDonald, Benjamin Lazar Davis and Alec Spiegelmanall of whom take turns as lead vocalist. In addition, Kristin Slipp, whose voice is prominent from the very start of the album, takes the lead on Slow Rider, The First Hippie on the Moon, Pt. II and Voicemail.
The album also features several co-writes: The First Hippie on the Moon, Pt. II was co-written by Lazar Davis and his brother Tim Davis; The First Hippie on the Moon, Pt. I was co-written by McDonald and Davis; Voicemail was co-written by Lazar Davis and Spiegelman; Spinning and Round And Round were co-written by Lazar Davis and Sarah K. Pedinotti of Lip Talk, and three of the songs on the album were co-written by Lazar Davis and longtime collaborator Bridget Kearney of Lake Street Dive. Those tracks, Slow Rider, Trojan Horse, and Getaway, are all pop songs hung over the frame of Bawa music from Northwestern Ghana. Parts of these songs were conceived just for the gyl, a type of wooden xylophone, and can be heard translated for this sort-of-rock band.
As with past Cuddle Magic records, the studio process for Ashes/Axis began with live full-band arrangements. Grooves were orchestrated with a set of unusual electro-acoustic timbres including a finger-picked, overdriven acoustic guitar, a bass clarinet with a cheap microphone nested in the bell, junk-shop percussion run through a vocoder, and a slew of Casio keyboards (bought, urgently, from an unnervingly tense family in rural Maine). After tracking the arrangements, several elements were then removed to allow for one final stage of recomposition. With Cuddle Magics Benjamin Lazar Davis at the helm, Bryce Goggin (Pavement, Swans, Antony & The Johnsons) and assistant engineer Adam Sachs chopped, distorted, distressed, and delayed elements in each song. The end result is a sound that is warm and precise, raw yet sophisticateda set of infectious pop songs from either an alternate reality or a paradoxically familiar near-future.
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