Deep Sea Vents

CJ Camerieri had never seen anyone enjoy live music the way Bruce Hornsby did. At the expansive Eaux Claires Festival in the Summer of 2016, yMusic, cofounded by trumpeter Camerieri a decade earlier, was in the midst of premiering a program with English folk trio The Staves.

Camerieri glanced to the side of the stage and spotted a basketball-tall man in sweatpants, bouncing around and beaming to what was being played feet away: Hornsby, of course. After the set, he raved to the combined ensembles, inviting them to his own Virginia festival. A collaboration on Hornsby’s 2019 album, Absolute Zero, followed, as did a short spate of shows in the early days of soon-to-be-doomed March 2020. For those five dates, yMusic’s other cofounder, violinist Rob Moose, hatched an idea: What if they wrote a song together and offered it up every night, the unexpected and previously unheard encore? And so, 'Deep Sea Vents'—an almost-vaudeville prance, with horns splashing and bass diving, a musical simulacrum of the teeming underwater world Hornsby delightfully described—was born.

Every night, the song became a cumulative joy, like a triumphant showtune from an aquatic musical that didn’t exist. 'Deep Sea Vents' is now the finale and title track of a spirited full-length collaboration between Hornsby and yMusic (BrhyM, you can call them), built with the same enthusiasm and openness that both parties spotted in one another on that steamy day eight years ago. An album of 10 songs about water and the ways we live with, in, or against it, Deep Sea Vents is Hornsby and yMusic as you have never heard them but also instantly identifiable in their own ways.