When I reach Haley Morgan by phone at home—which is fitting—she is stretching—also fitting—to prepare for a show later that night. Morgan is the singer for the Western-Mass.-based electro-art duo Home Body. Home Body play dance music, which is inherently about the body—moving the body, feeling and articulating rhythms in the limbs and hips, a physical correlation between the body and the music. The body is an important part of who and what Home Body are.

Clubby dance music can sometimes seem oriented toward physical pleasure, but the meaning of connecting with our bodies through sound and through organized movement is greater than just our ability to pursue or project physical desires. We learn to carry ourselves in space, to convey poise and grace and self-possession through movement.

“It’s so easy to become separated from our body or not think about it as something that you have agency over or to think about it as something that you can reinvent yourself through,” says Morgan. Not surprisingly, Home Body have made fruitful connections with the world of fashion and galleries, sometimes making their music specifically for settings that showcase the multi-media art potential of music.

Haley Morgan, Home Body, photo by Michael Kusek

Morgan and her partner Eric Hnatow met at Hampshire College in Amherst. The two were a couple for five years or so before they formed the band, with Morgan having a theater background and Hnatow having played in some industrial electronic bands in Ludlow and Palmer.

Morgan and Hnatow want their project to connect with people, and they put thought and effort into making their shows visual, interactive, kinetic, and stimulating. They’re into “the power of spectacle,” says Morgan. “We use sound, we use light, we use costuming, we use dance, just to try to figure different ways to hook people,” says Morgan.

The music strikes a nice balance between the synthetic and the organic. Hnatow gets the beats pumping along with mechanistic oscillations, handclaps, and robotic clicks and hisses. Sometimes the bottom-scraping synth bass lines sound as if giant kazoos were buzzing beneath the fabric of the mix. The glitchy and smeared sonic textures serve as a fitting background surface for Morgan to sing, intone, and blurt over. She has a rhythmic force and emphatic articulation to her singing. Her vocals—with growls, coos, yips and dips—can bring to mind a range of idiosyncratic vocal stylists like Grace Jones, Sinead O’Connor, Robyn, Bjork, Yoko Ono, and even Alanis Morissette and Dolores O’Riordan of The Cranberries. Home Body are working on a new full-length record, one that could come out by year’s end.

Eric Hnatow of Home Body, photo by Michael Kusek

Listen to Morgan on “Inner Red” from the duo’s most recent release, 2014’s Guts. “Bite your tongue and swallow it whole/No need to name it, your gut will know,” Morgan sings. Another song, “Something Tempting” has lines about “turn[ing] our bodies back on.”
There are ways of knowing that don’t involve the brain, and that’s seems to be part of this band’s point.

“I think that sound vibrations, the music that we make—sound is movement, and I think that sometimes life can get too heady, literally coming from our brains,” says Morgan. “There’s so much more that we can understand about the world around us if we employ all of our senses.”

Want to hear what Home Body listens to on Spotify when they’re not making music? Check out our Take a Listen channel.

Morgan Hanley – singer, Home Body
Western Massachusetts
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The post Art-Dance Duo Home Body Keep It Corporeal appeared first on Take Magazine.

Cousin Moon is and isn’t a band. Yes, they are a group of people that play music together, and, yes, they just released an expansive album, a self-titled 17-track doozy of a project. It’s just that the term “band” cannot hold the entirety of their identity.

Cousin Moon is more like a recording collective, one whose roots took hold in 2004 between Karl Helander and his cousin, Aaron Moon, and one that’s been evolving since. The album itself is a masterpiece of DIY resolve. It places you on a vibrating string, dips you into melancholy wells, and then places you gently on the ground, slightly out of breath. Its sonic texture and layered harmonies leave your ears searching for an end to its depth. “Faraway,” a Karl tune, fills you with helium and takes your mind on a run around the block, while “Florentine,” Max’s song, weeps you into a trance. Cousin Moon is both deeply nostalgic and starkly contemporary.

Cousin Moon album art / created by Karl Helander and Phoebe Helander

When Karl met Max Wareham and Phoebe Berkel (now Phoebe Helander), he quickly folded the two into his familial project with Aaron. They were called Pale Cowboy, and they played out as a four-piece band. They rehearsed, played shows, and developed a local fan base.

Then, they met Andy Cass, who began recording the group tenaciously, and joined the group as their bassist and sound engineer. “A big part of the equation was Andy. He’s a part of the band, and he’s always believed in the group, at times more than us,” Phoebe says. “The key difference between us and other groups that like recording is that we have Andy.” The group decided to prioritize writing and recording, so they played their last show in January of 2014 and turned inward to record the album. Together they began chasing a high standard of quality.

“Having something to lean against was a natural propellant to hold down the sound,” Karl says, speaking of Andy and the group’s need to develop a common language. They started with around 30 songs and experimented endlessly. “We kept adding new instruments and sounds, and then subtracting—trying to create more polyphony,” Karl says. “As songwriters, a lot of the music we like is larger than life. As you start to develop a song, it tells you what it wants. We had unlimited tracks and time because we had the engineer.”

Engineer Andy Cass / Photo by Georgia Teensma

Now, three years after its inception, the album is finished. Cousin Moon won’t be touring, but they’re moving forward. As Sleeper Cave Records, the group is now recording other groups. “We have three separate projects that will be coming out of the studio soon,” Karl says. Adds Phoebe, turning to Karl, “You and Andy are now a two-headed recording beast.”

“We’ve got some stuff cooking,” Max says, and it’s clear that wherever this group is going, it’s upward and it’s for the sake of the song.

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East Greenwich is a scenic coastal Rhode Island town with a lively restaurant scene and plenty of waterfront bars, but it’s not the most obvious destination for live music. At least it wasn’t until the newly rejuvenated Greenwich Odeum began regularly hosting live music acts. The venue aims to host an estimated 70 events this year even as it undergoes a major facelift.

The Odeum first opened its doors in 1926 as a vaudeville theater. Like many such venues, it transitioned from vaudeville into a movie house, which is remained for 60 years until it was finally crushed by the home video market. Now it’s back.

Newly-renovated Greenwich Odeum lobby

This year it’s been selected as one of two host venues for the Rhode Island Music Hall of Fame induction concerts. Rock bands, including Throwing Muses and Neutral Nation, will perform later this month at The Met in Pawtucket, while jazz and R&B performers will play the Odeum.

This year’s honorees include drummer Artie Cabral, who has been performing since the 1950s. He was resident drummer at the famed Celebrity Club, the first racially integrated nightclub in New England. He still performs regularly. Fellow inductees Dan Moretti, Billy Osborne, and Frank Potenza will share the stage on April 23rd.

“We’re trying to expand out breadth with more than just rock concerts,” says Odeum board president Dan Speca. Comedy is increasingly popular—comedian Jim Breuer is appearing in May, and twice now the Odeum’s hosted the original cast of cult TV series Mystery Science Theater 3000.

As a seated venue, the Odeum tends to draw a local 35+ crowd, according to Speca. But when Partridge Family star David Cassidy performed his penultimate concert at the Odeum last month, fans came from as far away as Mississippi.

Speca joined the Odeum board in 2014 and became its president last year. He likens the venue’s renovation process to a startup: taking small steps and constantly analyzing financial risk.

The Odeum currently has one full-time employee, who handles everything from production management to box office duties, as well as a handful of part-time staff and active board participation. “I was in there last night changing light bulbs,” Speca laughs.

With capital grants from philanthropic foundations and the state arts council, the interior was revitalized last year—“a total gut job,” according to Speca—for the first time in half a century.

This summer, newly installed sprinklers will allow the Odeum to increase capacity and serve alcohol. They’ll close for a few weeks and reopen in time for the Rhode Island International Film Festival in August. With its 25-foot long screen, the Odeum has been restored to its cinematic heyday.

“Summer is a good time to close,” Speca says. “Acts aren’t touring as much, and people are at the beach.” Next summer they’re hoping to install a lift, which will lead event attendees to a new 98-seat balcony.

What’s next for the Odeum? Upcoming headliners include Todd Rundgren (that show is sold out) and “musician’s musician” Graham Parker, plus ’60s girl group stars Mary Wilson (of the Supremes) and Darlene Love (of the Crystals). Let the good times roll.

Dan Speca, president of the board
Greenwich Odeum
East Greenwich, Rhode Island
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Anne Decker got involved in contemporary classical, or new, music not because of the curriculum she was studying in college. She jumped into this forum because she heard what her fellow students and composers were creating and had an AHA moment. “I said ‘Hey, I’d do that!’” says Decker of her response to the sounds she heard and the thought of helping realize performances of those scores. So she and some friends started a student-led new music ensemble, the first of its kind at the school where she was in Michigan.

That DIY attitude is part of what infuses TURNmusic, a Vermont-based new-music chamber series that Decker helped create in 2014 and for which she is the conductor and artistic director. “I had been listening to all of the latest new music coming out,” says Decker of the formation of TURNmusic, referring to the wide-ranging outpouring of work from contemporary classically-versed composers. “There was this cool genre of music that I felt like wasn’t being represented in Vermont. Quite accessible chamber music is being written. I wanted to bring that stuff to Vermont.”

With encouragement from innovative violinist Mary Rowell, co-founder of the forward-thinking ETHEL quartet, Decker assembled a group of top-notch players committed to performing new music and playing it, in many cases, outside of the traditional high-culture venues where “classical” music often gets played. “She helped give me courage,” Decker says of Rowell, who is also a core part of TURNmusic.

“I just felt like there was a place for new music here,” says Decker. “I believe in this music. I’m a music educator. And I believe in hearing these high-level musicians that I’m working with. They should be heard. And they don’t have to be heard by the elite. It’s music for all.”

Anne Decker, TURNmusic in performance

TURNmusic has, in its three years of existence, been committed to music written by living composers. That, basically, means someone born after the advent of the age of mass entertainment, pop culture, radio, records, and the embrace of youth as a marketing demographic. These are composers who—unless raised in a classical-music commune—were probably soaking up rock, hip-hop, soundtracks, jazz, electronic music, non-Western music, and all kinds of other traditions beyond Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.

Though Decker, 42, was keen to bring new music to Vermont, she was also interested in highlighting some of the new music that was already being made or associated with the state. Composer Nico Muhly is a prominent name in new contemporary classical music circles. In addition to composing his own operas and other pieces, Muhly has gotten a lot of attention for his orchestrations and arrangements for performers within the artsy-leaning end of the indie rock world, people like Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Sam Amidon (also from Vermont), Bjork, Antony and the Johnsons, and Joanna Newsom. Muhly’s work was included in the first TURN series in 2014.

Other artists with a foot in both the contemporary classical and the world of indie rock that TURN has featured include Bryce Dessner, who plays in the band the National but who also has a masters in music from Yale and a highly regarded output as a composer. TURNmusic featured a performance of Dessner’s “Murder Ballads” in the fall of last year. Recently TURNmusic has included performances of work by Richard Reed Parry, a composer and multi-instrumentalist who’s known for his work as a member of the band Arcade Fire.

But highlighting the connection between the world of indie rock and contemporary classical music is just one of the threads TURNmusic tugs on. Decker also helped to create a collegiate composition prize that allows composers still finishing their formal education to have a piece performed by a professional ensemble. She wanted to zero in on collegiate composers because that was the period in her life when she fell in love with new music. TURNmusic also helped launch the North Country Electronic Music Festival.

Decker, whose day job is as a music teacher in the public schools, is also on the lookout for Vermont musicians, particularly those who might be slightly outside the world of new music, to ask them to consider writing for the chamber ensemble. “These are players who can play anything,” she says of her musical collaborators.

Montpelier Chamber Orchestra, which Anne Decker also conducts. Photo by Monika Rivard.

If the musicians in TURNmusic are open for just about anything, Decker feels that the audience is in a similarly receptive state. And the work of TURNmusic is, in part, about connecting with listeners, making the experience of hearing new music one that isn’t complicated by much uncertainty or anxiety about being thrust into some abrasive sonic terrain “I feel like I’m just building trust,” says Decker. “The fans are just looking for good music.”

Anne Decker–founder TURNmusic
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If you think live professional music only occurs in official music halls and venues, Sofar Sounds has a message for you. A worldwide organization, Sofar Sounds is dedicated to subverting the norms of booking, attending, and curating live music performances.

Want to host a musical soiree in your living room? That could happen. On a rooftop? Absolutely. With networks of volunteers and artists programming shows in Providence, Worcester, Boston, and New Haven (just to name a few), Sofar Sounds is quickly establishing itself as the go-to resource for New England artists looking for a paid gig in an unusual space, as well as a place for music lovers ready to experience live music in a different space.

Here’s how it works.

A band or individual artist applies to perform at a Sofar Sounds show. Sofar volunteers choose three acts from the pool of applicants, and secure a space for the performance that isn’t a conventional venue. Once the show is booked, Sofar Sounds’ members near the show’s location get a notification stating the date of the show and the neighborhood where the show is located. Typically hundreds of people sign up, so only a subset of people get an invite to the show. Once invited, show-goers learn where the performance will be and what bands are booked.

Mark Schafer, an ambassador at Sofar Sounds in Boston, says his team works hard to program the right kind of shows and select a diverse group of performers. “We’re very careful to make sure that we curate shows based on quality and diversity,” he says. “We want to make sure we represent all the voices in the music community.”

A recent show in Boston, for instance, featured a pop singer, a stripped down punk band, and a folk duo in the same night. “We intentionally do that kind of thing when we can,” says Schafer. “The hope is you’ll love everything, but if you see something you don’t like, all you have to do is wait a little bit for the next act, which is going to be something totally different.”

The band Aria Lanelle, Sofar Sounds, Myles Tan photography

Sofar’s subversion of music industry norms doesn’t stop there. The group almost exclusively works with local musicians and selects spaces that are not conventional venues for live music performance, essentially any space that isn’t a bar or venue.

Using unconventional performances spaces keeps Sofar Sounds bookings hyperlocal. “We’re able to tap into the local music scene much easier than a traditional venue can,” says Rachel McCandlish, another Sofar Sounds volunteer. “It’s great to be able to help those smaller bands and guarantee them an audience.”

“We pretty intentionally go for people who are either completely unknown and haven’t even put out a record yet, or artists that are on their way up,” says Schafer.

In addition to exposure to a guaranteed number of dedicated music lovers, bands who play a Sofar Sounds show get compensated for their time and performance. Artists either get paid, receive some form of hospitality, and/or are featured in a professionally shot and edited video of the live performance.

As the organization grows and adds new networks across New England, Sofar Sounds wants to become the platform for up-and-coming performers in their networked cities and bands as they pass through New England towns. “We want to make it so everyone who comes through Boston on their way up plays a Sofar show, because it’s consistently the best show featuring emerging artists,” says Schafer.

“We don’t want to get bigger and bigger bands,” adds Schafer. “We want to make sure we get the best bands and intentionally continue to get artists that many of the people in the audience have not heard before.”

Mark Schafer and Rachel McCandlish, Sofar Sounds
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Musician Rick Reyes may have been born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, but his heart and his music lie in Puerto Rico. Which is one reason he’s created the Puerto Rican songbook project: It’s his way of sharing a piece of Puerto Rico with the world.

Reyes, who refers to his Connecticut hometown as “Bridgeportorico,” moved back to Puerto Rico when he was a young child. He lived there until he was 13, at which point he and his family moved back to the States.

It was a tough time to move, Reyes recalls, and it was music, and Puerto Rican in particular, that helped him through the transition. “When you move any place as a child…it’s a big transition in your life,” Reyes says. “I was taken aback by leaving friends behind, starting again new.”

“I used to always write my thoughts and feelings as a little kid,” he continues. “My outlet became to write more. I picked up guitar. Things became songs.”

These songs eventually turned into a music career, which in turn evolved into a dedication to spread the sounds of Puerto Rico. The Puerto Rican songbook project began with an arts grant in 2016 that placed Reyes as artist in residence at the Bijou Theater in Bridgeport. The grant enabled Reyes to perform once a month with various Latin-centric groups, as well as develop the project.

While not the sole focus of Reyes’ concerts—he performs regularly with Cosmic Jibaros, the Pasofino Social Club, and Novela Sin Tiempo—the Puerto Rican songbook project is meant to be a Puerto Rican musical travel guide of sorts, featuring songs from the 1920s to the ‘90s and highlighting the contributions of Puerto Rican composers. Reyes, who is a member of the Nest Arts Factory in Bridgeport, has also developed a few workshops on the topic.

Reyes is pleased with the feedback he’s getting on these performances so far. (You can catch the next one April 22 at the Bijou). “It’s had such an impact in the community,” Reyes says. “It’s a community that needed to realize their roots. It’s a very healing show for folks.”

That healing seems apt given that’s what music initially did for the young Reyes newly transplanted in America. “When I started writing music, it was not with the intent of following any particular genre but to let me emotions out,” he says. “It was the only way I could express what I was feeling. Like many artists you paint your soul, you sculpt your emotions.”

Rick Reyes – musician
Bridgeport, Connecticut
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