Formed in the flourishing underground of West Philadelphia in the latter half of the 2010s, Hour has fluctuated in size and scope around Cormier-O’Leary’s clear yet open-ended harmonic framework and ambitious ear. Ease the Work builds on the bedrock of Hour’s first two records, Tiny Houses and Anemone Red, and represents the group at its most expansive in sound and membership. Ten musicians, heads from punk, experimental, and classical scenes up and down the east coast, made up the band at Hour’s August ‘23 residency in Queens, New York. The stage wasn’t big enough. The string section had to set up on the floor. Cormier-O’Leary has contributed notably across the landscape of independent music, and Hour is living, breathing, deep listening proof of his community-minded ethos.
Hour’s music cuts a broad pathway, and remains hard to classify or compare. Perhaps most at home beside work from Bill Frisell, Eiko Ishibashi, ECM Records, or the Louisville experimental chamber group Rachel’s, Ease the Work shows us life on the boundary of composition and improvisation. It reaches for the sweeping gestures and inspired pacing of classic film scores, Frank Sinatra ballads, and Scott Walker’s pop orchestra. It also retains the arresting intimacy of the band’s early work. Strings swell and harmonize in counterpoint with electric guitar, clarinet, and piano, while drums, synth pads, and field recordings complete the aural world. Cormier-O’Leary says, “it isn’t a soundtrack. If it was, there would be a movie.” Ease the Work might be its own movie. The protagonist walking. A gorgeous day darkening. A cat in the window. Always strange, always familiar. Sometimes struggling. Sometimes eroding into disorder. Sometimes pressing on, lifting up. Never quite into heaven. Always into beauty.
Lauren (Lou) Turner is a writer and musician in Nashville, TN where she plays music solo and in the band Styrofoam Winos. She is the author of Shape Note Singing (VA Press, 2021), her debut poetry chapbook about deep listening, making things, and her one-eyed cat Django. Born in Texas and based in Nashville, she co-founded the Winos with Trevor Nikrant and Joe Kenkel and is an occasional touring member for other bands like Peter One and Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band.
Turner made her label debut with 2020’s Songs for John Venn (SPINSTER)— called “some kind of low-key masterpiece” by Aquarium Drunkard, it heralded her as “one of the most promising indie rock songwriters in Nashville” (NPR Music). With Venn, Turner and her collaborators layered genre-bending production around her folk songs, ranging from flute-flecked kraut-rock to 70’s AM radio warmth. Turner’s third album Microcosmos (SPINSTER) was named a Best Album of 2022 by NPR Music’s Ann Powers, Aquarium Drunkard, Uncut Magazine, and others; and presents her songwriting at its most focused and spare yet, while also exploring the collaborative energy of live recording with her Winos bandmates as a backing band. A wryly self-proclaimed “domestic troubadour record,” it simultaneously hangs a backdrop of a spaghetti western-inspired landscape and playfully subverts the troubadour archetype via Turner’s celebrations of the infinitesimal.
Michael Hix is a composer and musician from Tennessee. His music incorporates synthesizers and electronics to build dynamic structures that evolve over time, delving into the human condition and the metaphysical dimension. His work draws upon classical minimalism, sacred music, analog techno & house as well as popular music. He lives and works in Nashville.
‘Composer, musician and Nashville Ambient Ensemble leader Michael Hix fell in love with experimental electronic music in the early 2000s, when avant-garde guru William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops came out. The four-volume series “blew my mind,’ says Hix, who was a student at Belmont at the time. ‘Basinski was a big inspiration to me because he’d built up this big community in Brooklyn in his loft, which he called Arcadia. I felt like if I moved to New York, I could build that kind of thing there.’
Hix left Music City for New York City in 2011. He lived there seven years, and might’ve stayed if he hadn’t become a father at the end of 2018. During his earlier tenure in Nashville, Hix hadn’t managed to make inroads into the city’s experimental music scene, so on returning home with his wife and son, he was pleasantly surprised at what he found. ‘I knew I’d be reconnecting with old friends,’ he says, ‘but I met so many new people making amazing music.’” - Nashville Scene