Today (March 3rd) sees the release of Baltimore quartet Horse Lords‘ Live in Leipzig (order via Bandcamp), which RVNG Intl. describe as an exploded view of the quartet’s unparalleled live show. After listening to the album and watching one of the accompanying videos below, the unparalleled nature of that musicianship is clear to see. The band’s pursuit of outre ideas and challenges to the pre-dominant 12-tone equal-tempered scale is remarkable but too much of a dark art for me to even attempt to get into here.
I was late to the table in discovering the hypnotic avant-garde rock of Horse Lords but was mesmerised by last year’s Comradely Objects, two tracks from which (Zero Degree Machine and Mess Mend) features on this release.
From the release notes, “Live in Leipzig documents Horse Lords a week deep into their second tour supporting Comradely Objects, and already at top technical, musical, and physical form. This combination becomes all the more potent and palpable in Horse Lords’ response to the live environment, and their service to an enraptured audience. Engineered by Alexander Mahn, mixed by Gardner, and mastered by Rachel Alina, the only experience that rivals this live recording is being front, center, and blown away at a Horse Lords show.”
The live album features all four founding members – Andrew Bernstein (saxophone, percussion, electronics), Max Eilbacher (bass, electronics), Owen Gardner (guitar, electronics), and Sam Haberman (drums).
The label also shared a video of them performing Mess Mend (watch below), which gives a brilliant insight into the complexities of their music and the demands it can place upon the musicians. Their music, as you can probably imagine, is hard to play, it is very beat-conscious, and there is no room for musical flourishes or loose playing; they are each like cogs in a machine. In one radio interview, they spoke of how, after much practice and repeated plays of a new track, they transcend that music when the need for heightened concentration soon dissolves, but this can take many months. One track from Comradely Objects, the eight-minute Plain Hunt On Four, involved the medieval technique of hocketing and took months of rehearsal before it was ready for the album, which was recorded during lockdown and allowed for some post-tinkering…a good enough reason why it’s not included on this live set.
On Mess Mend, watch the video below; they open with a Korg M1 piano sound, a mainstay of house music; you may associate the result with the Happy Mondays hit “Step On”, albeit an alien one. In case you are wondering, a Comradely Object is a term derived from the Soviet avant grade, and Mess Mend takes its title from a Soviet thriller by Marietta Shaginyan titled Mess-Mend: Yankees in Petrograd featuring an underground resistance movement that stands against the capitalist system. Quite apt when considering Horse Lords’ revolutionary creations and how they use polyrhythms and just intonation…I will not even pretend to understand the music theory, but I love the results.
When listening to Horse Lords, I found that their music was mentally triggering some African music I’d heard. Maybe it’s the structural repetition and dense detail they share. So, when I read that they’d been invited by Smithsonian Folkways to create a playlist for their brilliant ‘People’s Picks’ series, I had to include it here.
Horse Lords curated this 28-song-playlist last year; it’s a quirky and slightly mind-blowing musical odyssey. In their own words: “We might have embarked on this playlist—as others wisely have—with a theme to lend some cohesion to the result, but instead, we chose chaos…” Forget the chaos, like their own music, it’s an enlightening listen and worth exploring.
Read more about the playlist here.
Order Live in Leipzig via RVNG or Bandcamp