Merging expansive chamber pop, indie folk, world influences, and experimental elements like 12-tone rows and complex meters, Cuddle Magic is a six-piece whose members have played individually with the likes of David Wax Museum, Woods, Fred Frith, and Beyoncé. They delivered their self-titled debut in 2008. Co-leader Benjamin Lazar Davis' subsequent trips to West Africa informed later releases, including 2017's Ashes/Axis, which incorporated Ghanaian Bawa music and imported instruments like gyl, a tonal percussion instrument. The group recorded their fifth album, 2020's Bath, together in a bathroom, with no overdubs. Formed in 2006, Cuddle Magic's original lineup consisted of Benjamin Lazar Davis of Okkervil River, Alec Spiegelman, Christopher McDonald, Kristin Slipp, Cole Kamen-Green, and Dave Flaherty, all students at the New England Conservatory of Music at the time. Their first album, Cuddle Magic, followed on FYO Records in early 2008. Davis traveled to West Africa in 2009 to study ensemble-style drumming, and the next year's Picture included an array of instruments, among them traditional folk and rock instruments, keyboards, strings, brass, woodwinds, and various percussion. The band's third album, 2012's Info Nympho, included songs written by Spiegelman, Slipp, Davis, and Ben's brother Tim Davis as well as one by Lake Street Dive's Bridget Kearney, who also played on the album. In 2014, the group issued the collaborative full-length Cuddle Magic & Phyllis Chen with the toy-piano experimentalist. That year, Davis returned to Ghana, this time with Kearney, for further music study. With members by then based in and between Brooklyn and Philadelphia, the band signed with Northern Spy Records, which released Ashes/Axis in 2017. Cuddle Magic returned on the same label three years later with Bath, an album recorded with all six bandmembers in a single bathroom rigged with 23 microphones. It was performed and tracked with no headphones, amplification, or overdubs. ~ Marcy Donelson