JR Samuels and Michael Cormier-O’Leary release new improvisations on Lily Tapes & Discs
Rochester’s Lily Tapes & Discs has just released a lovely pair of projects by Philadelphia’s veterans JR Samuels and Michael Cormier-O’Leary, both solo sets of improvisation fit for winter’s curiosity. As I listen along, I can’t help but think about wandering my house alone, because where else would somebody speak to you like these instruments do?
Cormier-O’Leary captures a “personal exercise” on Heard From The Next Room, gently pressing his piano into secret places with no plan but to share them with us. He clips excerpts side by side, extraordinary tenderness to ugly and melancholy, all dangling together on a clothesline. They sound quiet, but decidedly un-ambient because they don’t sit still—they remind me to keep moving too, to put away laundry, fix the window blind this afternoon. Wooden pins chattering in the piano, his keys prod anxious like a fork, twirling quickly into bebop runs like Sun Ra’s, or sweet pillowly changes like h hunt’s, whose influence Michael notes and whose album I love, too. The recording, he says, carries “personal moments with loved ones, [shared] gently, inadvertently, through the walls, day by day, as we settle in and lower our guards.” By the end, I don’t feel like I’ve heard quite a concert, but like I’m still just sitting in my room, forgetting if a day’s passed but not worried either way.
Instead of down the hall, Spasm, from JR Samuels, sounds like it lives inside your ear. It speaks through guitars and “tethered MIDI expression”—meaning a computer accompanies and responds, I think—which keeps me wondering, How did he make this? Are the notes I hear the notes he intended? And eventually, Does that matter? to JR? to me? Cold clicks, space-age echoes, and (possibly) backwards bug noises dance around his plucks, giving each track a new sound palate, keeping it all creepy. Calmest is “Awful Ballroom,” where spacious electronic pads blanket each chord under his thumb; “Symbol Rush” unfolds slow, too, as a conversation. But some tracks find Samuels hacking at the guitar vigorously, cramming his fingers high on the fretboard as they can fit; “Antipodes,” unsure and skittering, plays like the soundtrack to a prickly little critter exploring your garbage.
The two friends, bandmates in the great Friendship and co-founders of Philadelphia’s Dear Life Records with Frank Meadows, have shared so many recordings with us in the last 5 years, and these could be two of their most peculiar. Cassettes are out now on lilytapesanddiscs.bandcamp.com, with artwork for Spasm by Aaron Goldstein and HFTNR by Francis Lyons (circlechange.net), including the pair together for $15.
If you enjoy these, then find
JR Samuels’ older solo guitar experiment In Brend [2019, Dear Life Records]
and Michael Cormier-O’Leary’s compositions with Hour,
Anemone Red [2018, Lily Tapes & Discs] and Tiny Houses [2018, Sleeper Records]
as well as Lily releases
practice by jason calhoun [2019]
Rescuer’s Loops by The Nation Park Service [2022]
Cla-ras / Lung Cycles s/t [2018]
JR Samuels
https://thebeatlesabbeyroad.bandcamp.com/
Michael Cormier-O’Leary
https://michaelcormier.bandcamp.com/
Dear Life Records
