{"title":"Horse Lords","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"horse-lords-interventions-copy","title":"Horse Lords - Interventions","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ciframe style=\"border: 0; width: 100%; height: 42px;\" src=\"https:\/\/bandcamp.com\/EmbeddedPlayer\/album=3850134741\/size=small\/bgcol=ffffff\/linkcol=0687f5\/artwork=none\/transparent=true\/\" seamless\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/horselords.bandcamp.com\/album\/interventions\"\u003eInterventions by Horse Lords\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/iframe\u003e\n\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWest African rhythms collide with just intonation guitars, art-fire saxophone, minimalist grooves, and collaged zapdowns on Interventions, the powerful third full-length from Baltimore’s Horse Lords. The band’s Northern Spy debut is also the first Horse Lords album to explore the classic studio-as-weaponry strategies of yore, mapping the quartet’s raw Baltimore lightning onto the experimental musique concrète territory surveyed by elder heads like Faust and This Heat.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFounded at the turn o’ the ‘teens by Andrew Bernstein (saxophone\/percussion), Max Eilbacher (bass\/electronics), Owen Gardner (guitar), and Sam Haberman (drums), Horse Lords quickly established themselves as avant-heavies with the two extended tracks of their powerful self-titled debut (Ehse Records, 2012). Playing custom electric guitars and basses refretted by Gardner, the band’s rolling polyrhythms chime with the strange and distinct harmonies of just intonation inspired by the master La Monte Young and other heroes. Where the earliest Horse Lords releases, also including Hidden Cities (NNA Tapes, 2014) concentrated on linear performance, a trio of Mixtape cassettes (self-released, 2012-2014) pointed the way towards the newest turn in the Horse Lords saga.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eChopped and screwed and stomped and smothered and dissolving to bells and then suddenly (as if through a flung-open door) back into some room where Horse Lords is playing at full flight, the three Mixtapes exploded the possibilities of the quartet. Changing contexts like flipping channels on a dadaistic cable box, the series found a whole expanded universe of Horse Lords there for the squonking. Realizing that promise, Interventions is (as they say) a new phase Horse Lords album with Bernstein’s saxophone and the microtonal guitars pinging through the stereo mix with single-minded purpose. Horse Lords is a band, its members serving a range of functions over multiple axes, from the audible (writing and performing music) to the structural (altering their instruments), to the soundscape in between (editing together Interventions’ threaded mini-suites).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePart of the newest wave of smarty-arty-weirdos playing DIY spaces and tea houses and college campuses, Horse Lords’ soaring heaviness achieves a true poise that seems equally primed to make the leap to concert halls and festivals. Making appearances on freeform radio station WFMU and concert recording site NYCTaper, Horse Lords are recognized, too, as a galvanizing live act, powered by the double-drumming of Sam Haberman and Andrew Bernstein. Last year, their Hidden Cities Remix to benefit the local Living Classrooms’ Believe in Music featured the work of influential contemporaries including fellow Baltimore undergroundists Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt of Matmos (contributing separately) and Guardian Alien drummer\/lead-brain Greg Fox.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFloating at the boundaries of composition and improvisation, electronics and performance, the underground and the vast improbable 21st century indie mainstream, Horse Lords exist in none of these places and all of them. More accurately, they exist on Interventions, the album you now hold in your proverbial hands, perhaps noticing the reflection of the imaginary room’s light reflecting on the LP cover, ready to cue up as you find yourself in the new beyond of tomorrow’s ecstasies and today’s Horse Lords.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Northern Spy Records","offers":[{"title":"Limited Edition \"Transparent Pink\" Vinyl","offer_id":44667150074079,"sku":"MLP-NS-075","price":23.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"LP + Digital","offer_id":44667150106847,"sku":"LP-NS-075","price":22.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD + Digital","offer_id":44667150139615,"sku":"CD-NS-075","price":13.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"FLAC Download","offer_id":44667150172383,"sku":"","price":9.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"MP3 Download","offer_id":44667150205151,"sku":null,"price":8.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0677\/9256\/8543\/files\/a1385902353_10.jpg?v=1703788582"},{"product_id":"horse-lords-mixtape-iv","title":"Horse Lords - Mixtape IV","description":"\u003ciframe style=\"border: 0; width: 100%; height: 42px;\" src=\"https:\/\/bandcamp.com\/EmbeddedPlayer\/album=647206295\/size=small\/bgcol=ffffff\/linkcol=0687f5\/artwork=none\/transparent=true\/\" seamless\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/horselords.bandcamp.com\/album\/mixtape-iv\"\u003eMixtape IV by Horse Lords\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/iframe\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor its fourth mixtape Horse Lords untwists the coils of its musical DNA into two tracks that wear the political and aesthetic ideals that have always coursed through their music on their sleeves. Their arrangement of composer Julius Eastman's \"Stay On It\" (1973) here finds the band turning the composition's angelically layered waves of vibes, strings, and brass into a hypnotically propulsive party. As translated by the Baltimore band—Andrew Bernstein (saxophone, percussion), Max Eilbacher (bass, electronics) Owen Gardner (guitar, clavinet), Sam Haberman (drums)—this \"Stay On It\" connects the ethereal airiness in Eastman's piece with pulsating dance music, recognizing that minimalism's empty space can be transposed into the spaciousness carved out by rhythm hitting the body.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe music of Eastman, who passed away in 1990, is currently undergoing a much deserved revival, though his politically irreverent, playfully effusive, and unabashedly beautiful music still sounds ahead of its time. That Horse Lords would turn to him only reinforces the band's ongoing interest in rewiring rock's basic instrumental units, rock band as laboratory. For this experiment, guest artist Abdu Ali turns Eastman's program notes into a spoken-word introduction to the track, establishing the swaggering, joyous mood that follows.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMixtape IV pairs this gorgeously ebullient Eastman interpretation with \"Remember the Future,\" a track that takes the band's latent political leaning and turns them into pithy observation. That's not only because it's a sound and voice collage that includes chanting protestors recorded at the Women's March on Washington on January 21. \"Remember the Future\" takes a Samuel Beckettian I can't go on, I'll go on approach to song storytelling, weaving the voices of a man (Haberman) and a woman' (sound artist Bonnie Jones) into a twenty-minute excursion that bounces from electronic bubbling to an ambient tapestry and on to a galloping groove. Those two voices speak English. And they say things that make sense as individual sentences. They just don't make much sense when heard in their entirety, a verbal exchange that becomes content noise—an impish way for an instrumental band to point out that language can be a great way for people, politicians, corporations, and artists, to say nothing much at all.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCredits:\u003cbr\u003eRecorded and mixed by Horse Lords\u003cbr\u003eMastered by Jeff Carey\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSpecial thanks to the following, without whose tireless research and archiving our arrangement of Stay on It would have been impossible: Mary Jane Leach, Renée Levine Packer, Matthew Mendez, Kyle Gann, CCA: Glasgow, John Bewley and the music library at SUNY Buffalo\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Northern Spy Records","offers":[{"title":"Cassette + Digital","offer_id":44667172880607,"sku":"CS-NS-092","price":8.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"FLAC Download","offer_id":44667172847839,"sku":"","price":8.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"MP3 Download","offer_id":44667172913375,"sku":null,"price":7.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0677\/9256\/8543\/files\/a2331347761_10.jpg?v=1703789361"},{"product_id":"the-common-task","title":"Horse Lords - The Common Task","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ciframe style=\"border: 0; width: 100%; height: 42px;\" src=\"https:\/\/bandcamp.com\/EmbeddedPlayer\/album=64953826\/size=small\/bgcol=ffffff\/linkcol=0687f5\/artwork=none\/transparent=true\/\" seamless\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/horselords.bandcamp.com\/album\/the-common-task\"\u003eThe Common Task by Horse Lords\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/iframe\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHorse Lords make music for the liberation of mind and body. Propulsive in a way that inspires movement and that’s felt in the gut, the Baltimore quartet’s new album The Common Task points to a utopian, modernist ideal. The group’s use of algorithmic composition techniques, microtonal harmonies, and plentifully deployed polyrhythm aren’t secondary to the music’s danceability and rhapsodic swirl, but integral to the party itself.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Common Task is both the most cohesive and farthest-reaching record Horse Lords has released. A mystifying density of ideas collide at each moment, recalling as diverse a cohort as The Ex and Glenn Branca to raucous Saharan guitar music, Albert Ayler, and James Tenney. It integrates experiments that gestated in the group’s cassette-only mixtape series, which saw the band stretching out on extended compositions and more expansive sonic parameters as well as presenting more explicitly political material, while retaining the immediacy of their long players. As evidenced by the album’s title, as well as songs like “Fanfare for Effective Freedom” and “People’s Park,” the band’s penchant for radical politics is especially accentuated on this release. Embedded in the exuberant interplay of guitar and sax, the persistent pulse of bass and drums, are notions of egalitarianism and the subversion of established norms. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“Fanfare for Effective Freedom” augments its slippery 5\/8 groove with keyboard runs that seem pried from a Terry Riley album, an apt reference for musicians interested in ecstatic release and sonic emancipation. “Integral Accident,” an 18-minute piece that occupies the album’s entire b-side that features the first sung vocals on a Horse Lords album, was originally composed for a program focused on the concept of “revolution.” Even more than 2016’s Interventions, now a classic of the underground and praised by the New York Times as “live, shivering with energy,” electronic elements have been fully enmeshed into the band’s template, from synthetic treatment of bagpipes on “The Radiant City” to the dub and reggaeton-inspired drum edits and synth pulses of “People’s Park.” \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHorse Lords are the Pied Piper of experimental music and radical thought. Their music is unabashedly fun, and experiencing it in a live context is an experience of collective ecstasy, each body moving to its own notion of what the beat may be. That shared experience, the joy of unified flow and motion, allows the ideas typically understood as “difficult” to be more easily absorbed. By using musical forms that point towards new ways of being, thinking, and organizing, by constantly re-evaluating assumptions and compositional systems, Horse Lords provide a model for society at large. By showing just how joyous it can be to imagine new futures and possibilities, by making us dance and howl with each tectonic shift, they show how dazzling the path towards utopia could be.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Northern Spy Records","offers":[{"title":"Limited Edition \"Galaxy\" Vinyl","offer_id":44667183464671,"sku":"MLP-NS-124","price":23.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"Standard Black Vinyl + Digital","offer_id":44667183530207,"sku":"LP-NS-124","price":22.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"CD + Digital","offer_id":44667183497439,"sku":"CD-NS-124","price":13.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"FLAC Download","offer_id":44667183595743,"sku":null,"price":9.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"MP3 Download","offer_id":44667183562975,"sku":"","price":8.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0677\/9256\/8543\/files\/Horse-Lords-The-Common-Task-digi-art-e1646419172836.jpg?v=1703789713"},{"product_id":"horse-lords-hidden-cities-lp","title":"Horse Lords - Hidden Cities","description":"\u003ciframe style=\"border: 0; width: 100%; height: 42px;\" src=\"https:\/\/bandcamp.com\/EmbeddedPlayer\/album=2535733799\/size=small\/bgcol=ffffff\/linkcol=0687f5\/artwork=none\/transparent=true\/\" seamless\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/horselords.bandcamp.com\/album\/hidden-cities\"\u003eHidden Cities by Horse Lords\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/iframe\u003e\u003cp\u003eNNA Tapes is pleased to announce “Hidden Cities”, the second LP from Baltimore’s Horse Lords. Over the two years since their critically acclaimed self-titled debut, Horse Lords have become fixtures on the American DIY scene, touring with Matmos, Guerilla Toss, and Guardian Alien, and playing festivals such as Hopscotch, NXNE, and Fields Fest. Recorded and mixed by Chris Freeland (Wye Oak, Lower Dens), on “Hidden Cities” Horse Lords square the circle, making music that is alternately tight and loose, real-time risky and process oriented, reconciling the sweaty force of a killer basement show with the icy precision of conservatory training.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn opening track “Outer East” the band showcases its considerable range and sick chops: over a low-slung motorik groove, Andrew Bernstein spins a smoky web of sax-into-delay that recalls Terry Riley’s “Reed Streams”. The song turns an unexpected corner five minutes in as guitarist Owen Gardner—who has structurally altered his frets into a just intonation tuning system—carves beguiling arabesque figures on top of Max Eilbacher’s insistently funky bass. Sam Haberman then breaks in with a fierce drum solo, from which the whole band erupts into a relentless forward moving ecstatic riff that blurs the difference between prog, no-wave and minimalism. It’s a compressed lesson in the effortless eclecticism and muscular playing that makes this band so mesmerizing live. Following “Outer East” with barely a pause,  “Life Without Dead Time” rides a mutating polyrhythmic grid that showcases the synthesizer and signal processing chops of Eilbacher (whose solo LP “Red Anxiety Tracers” came out to critical acclaim on Spectrum Spools last year).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA gradually building ramp built of field recordings, tape manipulation and modular synthesis, “Tent City” introduces the second long-form composition on the album, “Macaw”. A floor burner at their live shows, “Macaw” builds rhythmic tension and release before coalescing into a unison burst of festivity and abandon. Bernstein’s woodblock figure pulls away from Haberman’s steady beat and the resulting groove plays out like a krautrock duel-in-the-sand between two offset patterns competing for dominance in a vivid strobe effect. By the ten-minute mark, Gardner’s guitar hits a Bo-Diddley-meets-Group-Doueh sweet spot and the track lifts off in a final spiral of ensemble unison hammering. A coda for extremist signal processing, “All That Is Solid” manipulates and processes the record’s preceding riffs into liquid pools of unrecognizably alien new forms, setting you down on the other side of “Hidden Cities” at once startled and becalmed. It’s vital, thrilling, and utterly transcends its many influences to arrive at a new place on the map for forward-thinking American rock music.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"NNA Tapes","offers":[{"title":"12\" LP (With Digital Download)","offer_id":45567661080799,"sku":"LP-NNA-075","price":18.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Digital Download (WAV)","offer_id":45567661015263,"sku":null,"price":8.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Digital Download (320 MP3)","offer_id":45567661048031,"sku":null,"price":8.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0677\/9256\/8543\/files\/NNA075.jpg?v=1714759480"}],"url":"https:\/\/shop.northern-spy.com\/collections\/horse-lords.oembed","provider":"Northern Spy Label Group","version":"1.0","type":"link"}