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  • From: Ross Grady <ross AT rossgrady.org>
  • To: ch-scene AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Fwd: Happy Horizontal Hold Trails
  • Date: Fri, 9 May 2025 07:47:38 -0400




Begin forwarded message:

From: Dave Cantwell <drcantwell AT gmail.com>
Date: May 8, 2025 at 11:22:02 PM EDT
To: Dave Cantwell <drcantwell AT gmail.com>
Subject: Happy Horizontal Hold Trails


To the point:
My band Horizontal Hold is (amicably) breaking up!  We've recorded an upcoming EP (more info' TBA) and two final shows:

Thursday,  June 19th at Ocean Grill & Tiki Bar, Carolina Beach--with Shelby Smoak Duo

Saturday, July 5th at Shadowbox Studio, Durham--with Maple Stave and Three Body Problem

It's been fun!  (And it'll be fun!)
Come say "farewell" if you can.  🙂

A bit wordier:
Here's some bittersweet news: After about twelve years of making our noise, Horizontal Hold is calling it quits and this fills me with what the kids call "feels".  
Lemme see...
The band started when new friends and long-term mutual admirers Kim Walker and I discussed playing music together once I was done with grad school.  (Pretty soon after that I simply dropped out, so I was ready to rock sooner than expected.)

I'm fairly certain that Kim was expecting/wanting me to play drums in this new band, but I kinda pulled the old switcheroo and showed up with a guitar.  I'd never played guitar in a band before so she was understandably skeptical.  But the rudimentary and fragmented (and, I guess, drummerly) way I play guitar fit pretty well with Kim's more dense and harmonically weird bass playing. 
We assembled a few versions of what became Horizontal Hold that included Shannon "Sho" Morrow and Viva Cohen but pretty quickly settled on what became our actual lineup of Kim, me, Kerry, and Elizabeth.  I'd played in the Scene of the Crime Rovers street band with Elizabeth and Kerry and chill-core trio Actual Persons Living or Dead with Kerry.  So I knew them pretty well (and I was/am also married to Kerry, so there's that), but Kim didn't know either of them all that well and it was a fun way for us all to become good friends.  Which is exactly what happened.  

Horizontal Hold, more than most bands I've been in, has been family-like in structure and feeling.  We compose very laboriously and co-operatively and...um...talkatively.  Musical ideas aren't as light-bulb-going-on intuitive as they are eventually agreed-upon.  There's lots of proposals, discussions, arguments, experiments, hypotheses, jokes, and lobbying.  It's probably the least-efficent way I can think of to write what are essentially noisy pop songs, but I love it and it makes the songs something absolutely unique to our lil band.  

Our first show was on a Thursday at our beloved Pinhook, opening for our friends' Silkworm tribute band and we played a cover of "Call Me Maybe" that I'm grateful was not documented in any way.  Despite this, we had a great time and were now A Band.  

We played a bunch of shows around the Triangle and did many middle-aged-people "tours", which were generally three-or-four-date long weekends to cities within an eight-hour radius of Durham.  Sometimes a tour would be, like, a show in Asheville and then the rest of a weekend spent at Kim's sister's lake house in Hickory.  We had many fun times and hilarious adventures and great shows and dreadful shows and dance parties and vegan sandwiches and much more.  

I'm forever grateful to the gals of Horizontal Hold for introducing me to the concept of staying in a hotel on a rock-tour.  Until then, I always slept on someone's floor or something.  But after HH booked our first mini-tour, one of them mentioned hotels.  I got all indignant and said "What?!  Hotels?!  Bring a sleeping bag 'cause we're gonna sleep on someone's floor; that's how this works!  I've never paid for a room on a punk rock tour!!"
And one of them said, without missing a beat, "Well, you've never been in a band with three middle-aged women before, either."
This delightfully adversarial interaction kinda set the tone for the band.  (Because of course they were right.  Sleeping on floors stinks.  Hotels is where it's at.)

Since we are a pretty inefficient band, composing-wise, we don't have tons of songs or a vast recorded catalogue.  An early EP we did with Jerry Kee, a long-player with Missy Thangs, and a future last EP we just recorded a couple weeks ago with Nick Petersen.  Our patient and lovely pals at PotLuck always were happy to help us with our records and have us at their Hopsctoch day parties and generally cheer us on and be the best hands-off co-op label you could want.  
I'm proud of all these records and in fact--at the risk of appearing immodest--truly love our album The Silence. It's one of my very favorite records I've ever been a part of.  We were cookin' and doing some weird things and I still love the sounds we came up with.  

In Horizontal Hold, I've had the great pleasure of not just playing in a band with dear friends, but also sharing bills with many wonderful people. For our third show we got to open for Bored Spies, a band featuring my rhythm section heroes Sooyoung Park and Orestes Morfin from Bitch Magnet.  But of course we've also played with countless lovely people who were not in as-notable bands and were "just" ordinary lifers like us--playing a show at Nightlight or a basement in Philadelphia or a dive bar in Jersey City or a weird bookstore in Virginia with yr friends 'cause it truly is the best way to spend a Saturday nite.  Some of these people are our great friends; some are people we'll never see again.  But we're all kinda the same.

In any case, Kerry and I live a couple hours away from Kim and Elizabeth now and rehearsing and band logistics have gotten a bit complicated and...well, all bands have a lifespan, after all.  This closing chapter is sad but I'm kinda glad I know about it 'cause several of my most important (to me) bands broke up suddenly and didn't have an opportunity to document our last songs or play a real farewell show—sometimes just a crummy last show that we didn't know was gonna be our last.   So I'm kinda jazzed about the chance to properly seal up Horizontal Hold, melancholy as it might potentially seem.    

We will always be great friends (and will almost certainly continue to make music together in some sub-combinations) and we'll be doing the social part of Horizontal Hold without the time-consuming musical part.  So in some ways we're kinda getting the best deal.  

Which brings me to these last shows:
Horizontal Hold has always been a beach-lovin' band.  We never felt we played music that beach bars would really like, but we would often take several beach trips a year (sometimes to play shows and sometimes not).  So sort of a super-fun way to celebrate this tradition is to play in Kerry's and my new adopted home of Carolina Beach, at the one hip venue that isn't gonna ask us to play "Carolina Girls" or whatever: the Ocean Grill & Tiki Bar.  This is a venue Kerry and I can literally walk to.  Their Thursday nite summer shows have been an enormously fun part of our life down here and I'm really honored that we talked our way onto one.  Opening is our pal and fellow-Carolina Beachian Shelby "Chip" Smoak (with whom I play bass guitar).  
This show is also fulfilling a long-standing dream-request that Kim has expressed to me multiple times but has recently revealed to be something of an exaggerated joke.  So this kind of elaborate, comic miscommunication is, in some ways, the ultimate send-off for Horizontal Hold.  

But we had to have another last show because we live in two places.  Playing at a venue that Kim and Elizabeth can walk to seems only fair and so we're at Shadowbox, which has become pretty much my favorite Durham venue over the last several years.  It's as D.I.Y. as B.C.H.Q. was, but it's, um, clean.  It's as spirited as a punk basement in some college town, but it has air-conditioning and a toilet that works. It's like the grown-up version of all the wonderful and disgusting places I've been playing my whole life.  (Also it was our Covid socially-distanced quasi-outdoor practice space that allowed us to continue playing during the lockdowns.)  And of course it's run by the best people.  

We are a Durham band at heart if not 100% geographically anymore.  So we have our favorite Durham bands playing with us: Maple Stave (whose Chris and Evan invited us to play our aforementioned first show back when) and Three Body Problem (the greatest weirdo minimalist dance-punks this side of the Raincoats).  These bands are comprised of many of my/our favorite people and it's gonna be so, so wonderful and sentimental and fun and we're gonna fucking rage so BE THERE, Durham peeps.  

♥️♥️♥️
--Dave C. / HH


  • Fwd: Happy Horizontal Hold Trails, Ross Grady, 05/09/2025

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