Musical Magicians Disappear The 4th Wall

Cuddle Magic
The MAAS Building
1320 N 5th St.
Philadelphia
July 29, 2025

If there’s a palpable and immeasurably important change in energy that happens when the curtain comes up, or the lights fade, or the band’s walk-on music ushers them to the stage – what’s the shift when none of that happens? How can we understand the impact of the absence of pageantry, like when the fourth wall is demolished so neatly there's no evidence of its original build?

Live, Cuddle Magic have evolved into a group that forces this question, maybe never more so than with their recent performance at The MAAS building in the Kensington arts district. The group was playing the final show of a rare tour, with a new album, Underwater, on the way next month. The singles that are out so far are spellbinding.

There’s so many ways in which the band is currently challenging the norms and expectations of live music, and it feels right to list them out:

1. They perform facing each other, in the round, without the aid of the significant amplification of a PA system. The entire six-piece ensemble – Kristin Slipp, Benjamin Lazar Davis, Christopher McDonald, Dave Flaherty, Alec Spiegelman and Cole Kamen-Green – sings at different times, whether leading or in harmony or unison, without microphones. The bulk of the instrumentation is acoustic, yet unbelievably dynamic and varied timbrely. Rather than connect electronic instruments to a powerful amplifier, they’re utilized as quiet sound sources, as if spontaneously whipped out on the train; the tiny onboard speaker of a Yamaha PortaSound PSS-270 or Teenage Engineering OP-1 proved loud enough for all of us. As a listener, we receive these sounds unmediated, and directly; it’s the difference between a phone call and speaking in person.
2. Instead of a drum kit, Flaherty used a raised floor tom inventively to conjure an entire kit, playing the drum’s side with the brush to mimic high-hats, the mallet on the head for kick and brush for snare. How he conjured an entire sonic bed with such limited means was a minor miracle; nearly everyone in the group similarly displayed some form of extended technique or outside-the-box musicality at some point.
3. Someone in the group’s dog was meandering about the room. Not totally unlike the Natalie Jane Hill show I recently covered here, but with two remarkable differences: Hill’s dog joined her onstage, whereas there was no stage for Cuddle Magic, which contributed to the dissolving of barriers between musicians and audience but with regards to the dog meant total freedom to roam; this dog was far more energetic, restless and well-lit. (And tiny, with white fur.)
4. Returning to the in-the-round presentation: we, as a crowd, were seated, and so close to the band, under bright enough lights that no gesture was obscured except from your particular angle. We all had slightly different experiences visually and sonically based on where we were in the room. It made me think of was what performing and playing music in this way must be like. For starters, when a band rehearses, they typically do so in this way, facing each other. To perform in a way that feels no different must be so refreshing. What I loved most about it was the intensity of the intimacy we were witnessing, musicians face-to-face, with decades of music-making together already behind and inside them. One of the single-most mesmerizing, non-musical aspects of watching this group together occurred during a song on which Spiegelman sang lead. Accompanying him on guitar, Davis looked intently with wide eyes at Spiegelman, following his phrasing. These are musicians with seemingly no shyness or distrust of one another, sympathetically resonant, as if each were a single string on one instrument.
5. Not only does everyone in the ensemble sing, they all write the songs, individually or in pairs. (For Underwater, Flaherty designed an algorithm to determine the pairs; live, everyone but Flaherty and Kamen-Green sings lead at some point.) This keeps the compositional voice shifting throughout in a way that feels genuinely egalitarian; it also keeps the instrumental, arranging and accompanying roles shifting in ways that feel supportive. (I should mention their set included a few covers: Bridget Kearney’s “Whatever I Want” and Joan As Police Woman’s “Valid Jagger,” featuring the immortal lyric – and biggest laugh of the night – “honk if you got paranoia.” Both appear on their 2020 album Bath.) When your position as defined only lasts for three or four minutes at a time, nothing is set in stone; leading or following, waiting or participating, it was all active and attentive and demanded an alertness to the moment as well as to small, intricate details. They’d change gears from free-improvisational flourishes and immersive, melodic and rhythmic counterpoint to simpler, yet elegantly expressed folk or pop songs (like the divine “Halloween”: “I had dreams about you calling me up / saying that you’re falling in love / heard you met on Halloween / happy for you, can’t you see?”), all with an ease that belied the difficulty of what they were doing, and the collective mastery required.

In a way, the task of writing about a show like this feels strangely off because it’s less like writing about a “show” – with all its bells and whistles and clear delineations between life and art – and more like writing about something that just happened. I’m writing this in a well-lit coffee shop in Fishtown, with heart pine floors just like MAAS’s, and someone’s small dog just barked, and just like that, I’m taken back to the moment during Cuddle Magic’s final song, “Hundred Million,” where Davis, banjo in tow, calmly left the round to address the situation of their barking dog in the corner of the room, while the band played on, uninterrupted and unperturbed, their focus fully in tact. The dog’s anxious spell quelled, Davis returned to the center, facing his longtime friends once more, and got back on the track, right there with us. At least for the duration of their thirteen-song set, the sensation of being intensely together with a room full of strangers was profound; it’s a rare gift to witness such a clear-eyed collective.