Chicago filmmaker Thomas Comerford, who’s also the man behind the rock band Kaspar Hauser, began working on the relatively quiet songs on his new record, Archive + Spiral (Spacesuit), as a kind of a lark. He had some tunes that felt too mellow for Kaspar Hauser, so he gathered some musician friends who seemed well-suited to them. But then, as he told Reader contributor Jessica Hopper in a Tribune story last month, “this thing happened while we were playing those songs—both the way I set up the process and the rapport we developed in the arranging and playing of the tunes just seemed to ask for more material, so I began to write new material to play with the solo band to keep things going.”