AEM021 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

Side A — The Packaging Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Side B — Paris/Happydent Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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