become large and unruly

good morning ~

(click the link / porch cat to listen)

My Big Breakbecome large and unruly

today’s track tries to replicate with synthesizers all the celestial glory of having breakfast with the homies, featuring a field recording of the Hour touring band at a diner

I’m excited to be changing up the format of this newsletter - - my favorite part of writing these has always been turning it back around at the end and asking questions of the readers, so it makes sense to me to use this space for interviews. I really enjoyed my conversation with Michael Cormier-O’Leary - as much as I enjoy his various musics - and I hope you do as well, maybe we’ll do this kinda thing more often.

want to mention briefly that I will be in New York City this weekend playing a great show at Union Pool - I’m opening with a solo set, two great bands of buddies to follow, here are tickets and here’s the flyer:

okay on to the inaugural interview…

This edition of My Big Break features a conversation with Michael Cormier-O'Leary, a musician from Philadelphia that does a lot: member of the band Friendship, one of the founders of Dear Life Records, and discussed primarily here, bandleader of Hour, an instrumental ensemble that makes tremendously lovely music. They just released a live album, which you can hear here. You can find out more about Michael here on his website.

My name’s Michael Cormier-O’Leary. I’m currently on tour with a band I lead called Hour. We’re about six days into a two-and-a-half week tour that’s bringing us out to the True/False Film Festival.

How’s it going so far?

The shows have been quite good. We did run into some van trouble in Kalamazoo - the van we started with is still in Michigan with some possible transmission problems. We had to coordinate getting a van for the rest of the tour, so we had a stressful 24 hours. But we haven’t missed any shows!

How did the band deal with the trouble?

It was truly amazing, actually. We’re a seven piece on this tour and it was some Justice League shit, we all naturally addressed a part of the problem. Frank got on the phone with rental companies, Keith and Peter were navigating mechanics on a Saturday, everybody just slotted in. We managed to pull it off.

It seems like all the forces at play are trying to devalue music labor, forcing everybody into a smaller scale, but here you are crammed in a second van with a seven piece ensemble. How would you describe the collective energy of the band? And are you the band leader?

I do feel like and functionally am the bandleader because the group shifts in membership. There are currently fourteen people rotating through. We’ve only ever been able to get everyone together for a show twice before. It’s a challenge - touring with the seven piece iteration does feel like the ceiling of what’s possible. To make anything like this happen, someone does have to be in charge and that is me.

It requires many months of planning for us to do anything. Our whole year is planned out! All these folks - myself included - are involved in many other projects.

And this is not the most lucrative pursuit, but everyone involved does really care about it. That paired with the minor successes that pop up make it worthwhile. But then again, when things like our van trouble happen it shows just how close to the margin we are. It is absolutely a tightrope walk. Nobody’s quitting their jobs for this. Everyone cares about it and that’s the only reason it happens.

The music is very contemplative and intentional - it moves at a pace where everything is considered. I wouldn’t necessarily describe it as “fun music” but when it’s played everyone on stage smiles - obviously you’re all enjoying yourselves. Do you think that this music is fun?

It’s not exclusively fun, but it’s sure fun to play.

It’s a pretty direct emotional outlet for me, and an opportunity to live in some knotty harmonies. It requires a lot of listening and we surprise each other every night we play. There are moments of open improvisation that can catch us all off guard - that’s the fun part.

Last night we played Ice House in Minneapolis, a nice seated venue with people intentionally listening, immaculate sound. We were already feeling good. This one song’s got a chorus section that loops again and again and last night we just pulled the rug out. The open section just went to a place we haven’t really gone to before. Pretty intense and pretty discordant. It felt urgent in a way it doesn’t normally feel.

Touring with this music takes so much effort, so the reward of going further is kind of essential. The band is made up of people in four different states. We’re not fortunate to have all that much rehearsal. A two and a half week tour is pretty massive for fostering the group dynamic, exploring together. It’s kinda irreplaceable.

Gathering these folks, asking them to do this thing - you’re putting in considerably more logistical effort into making this band and this tour happen than many of your peers. Do you have a sense of why you’re inclined to work in this mode? Is there something you’re getting at with the big lift?

The music is what I’m getting at. When the band first started in Philadelphia we were six people in a basement - even then it felt like a lot. People would tell us “I’ve never seen that many people playing so little.” That was an early thrill, the subtle, textural possibilities. With a sextet we could settle into a compelling sonic world when not everyone had to be playing all the time. Otherwise you’d have to rely on tech to augment your sound - that’s not my thing, I don’t really own pedals. Instead of investing in the gear I invested in other people.

You’re working with an assortment of more classical instruments, you’ve got charts on stage - you don’t see that often in the spaces you tend to play. Is that something you’re compelled by?

I don’t come from New Music and I never really felt like a punk (ed note: he has a great, thematically appropriate song about this).

I moved to Philly in 2015 with the band Friendship to play in basements with punks. That’s how I know people - those are the communities that I know across the country. I feel really fortunate that West Philly when I got there was really welcoming to doing something strange. Hour’s first ever show was at All Night Diner, which no longer exists. I felt so comfortable trying to do this there. I could imagine so many scenarios where I wouldn’t feel as comfortable.

I definitely have some identity problems. I didn’t study this stuff. I studied music as much as I needed to in order to do what I was trying to do. And I came up in a scene where it felt like I could combine these impulses and present them in this singular way.

Presenting something singular is by some accounts the most punk thing you can do.

I’ll just add that Jason Calhoun is in this band and he was such a huge catalyst for me wanting to try this. I have such a clear memory of watching him open a show. He’s an ambient artist with an incredible body of work.

I would also describe him as pretty punk rock.

He is! And I had never seen someone set up on the floor like that - you know, now he’s moved up to the table - but at the time he was on the floor with his whole synth and tape loop rig and I had just never seen anything like that before in a space where I was so used to hearing guitar, bass, drums, singer. Suddenly I was one foot away from this person playing 30 minutes of the most beautiful, patient music I’d ever heard. I was stunned and I immediately asked him to play with me. That’s kinda how the band has expanded, I’ll see someone like Jason do what he was doing in an unexpected space. Hour tries to prioritize that - any chance we can give someone that surprising experience.

We live in such a lonely, disconnected world. But here’s this band that’s happily tooting around and making a huge effort to hang out with one another and play this music. It’s such an antidote to loneliness. It is anti-lonely music in a profound way. Have you talked about that as a group?

Not consciously [laughter]. I’m an only child so I can kind of mark a lot of my life’s impulses by trying not to be lonely. I think the band is pretty par for the course. At a certain point in growing up it was just like - I need friends. From an early age I relied a lot on friendships.

You’re also in a band called Friendship.

With guys that I’ve known since I was in middle school!

I’ve filled the lack of a huge blood family with a pretty extensive adult family. Hour is more of that. Not a conscious project, but the band kept growing because I’d see these players and I loved what they were doing. And it’d be like - well, that’ll work. It’s become large and unruly because I have so much I want to include.

I want to talk about the new live record that just came out. It’s great. It’s really serene music and then you hear clapping or comments from the audience and you realize that it really happened in all these spaces. What made you decide to compile these recordings this way?

I brought the band back from COVID dormancy when I was living in Maine in 2022. At that time it was just a four piece with me, cellist Evan McGonagill, pianist Erika Nininger, and our drummer Peter McLaughlin. I was writing what would become our 2024 album Ease the Work with those folks. But then when it came time to make the record, I found that I wanted the Philadelphia people involved, as well. So I ended up going back and forth, working on music with all of them. We didn’t actually all play together until it was time to record, 9 people live in studio.

In preparation for that, we started playing shows again in the Northeast and the gigs kept adding up. Fortunately our bass clarinetist Keith Nelson - who has foresight that I do not - thought to record the shows over the course of two years.

Eventually he brought me what he had done and we just sat in my kitchen just going show to show, listening to what we had done. It became clear that the songs - especially the older ones - are so lived in. We have stuff now that we didn’t have when we did the studio recordings. Some of my favorite versions of this music only existed as zoom recording. And putting out a single concert didn’t seem to do the group justice - there are just so many different iterations of the band. The shifting recording fidelities honor that, too.

My favorite part of the album is the location and time stamps on each of the tracks - when you read through it, you start to understand that this big, unwieldy group of people actually went to all of these places together.

Yeah and the types of places, too! How did this band go there? That to me is kind of essential to what we’re doing. A lot of these recordings came from a really fruitful tour we did in June of last year - seven dates in the state of Maine alone. We played to a lot of people who had no idea who we were - one show in a machine shop, one show in a movie theater. It was all over the place and so refreshing to not just be playing the same places that always get played. It felt meaningful.

Banks Garage especially - they’ve got a really cool thing going out there. Not an active machine shop anymore, but they’ve still got all the tools. It was a potluck, you know, out in Mid-Coast Maine. People drove some distance to be there because it was understood to be worth going to. I was really heartened - we’ve played plenty of shows in big cities that were much worse.

Who should I talk to next?

Well this one’s topical because we’re playing with him, but I would recommend Pat Keen - he put out one of my favorite records of the year last year called “I Saw a Bug.” It’s extremely good. Seeing it live last night was jaw dropping.

And then I’d say Lily Talmers who lives in New York City. She is a songwriter from Michigan originally who just put out an album called “It’s Cyclical, Missing You” that’s absolutely going to be one of my favorites of the year. She’s a songwriter operating on a level I literally don’t hear otherwise. I know a lot of songwriters but I consider her to be one of the best doing it right now.

But what about you? What are you investing in, people or technology? How do you include someone you admire in what you’re doing? Are you doing an impressive amount of less?