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Horse Lords.
A TRALEE venue will host the debut Irish show for Baltimore avant-garde rock quartet Horse Lords this Friday, April 12.
The Greyhound Bar will host a band with a meticulous sound centred in controlled minimalism, their experimentation with krautrock, post-punk, traditional Appalachian, African polyrhythms, arcane tunings, and use of electronics.
They will be complemented by Kerry’s finest, Ten Past Seven, with the show beginning at 9pm. For tickets click here.
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Horse Lords, formed in 2010, embrace Renaissance counterpoint, covers composer Julius Eastman, play instruments specially fretted for microtonality, and organizes its music through polyrhythmic matrices.
Guitarist Owen Gardner and saxophonist / percussionist Andrew Bernstein met in the ‘00s at Goucher College in suburban Baltimore—the former steeped in global folk musics and experimental music, the latter a budding composer.
As members of the rich Baltimore music scene, notably the band Teeth Mountain, they met bassist Max Eilbacher, who has subsequently blazed a path in electroacoustic music, and drummer Sam Haberman.
From the beginning, the Horse Lords have played music defined by repetition and complexity, often at length, and presented it in ways that telegraph their concern with questioning social and political norms.
Their self-titled 2012 debut album, on Baltimore’s Ehse Records, unveiled the band’s visual aesthetic—geometric art, no photos—and single side-long piece “Wildcat Strike.” Interventions (Northern Spy), from 2016, led off with a track called “Truthers.”
That same year, they championed Eastman, a musical and social radical, at a time when his posthumous fame was only beginning to build. Even their practice of dropping EP-length “mixtapes” between their five full-length albums to date undermines standard music-biz rigueur. They have done their best to democratize their touring experience as well, hitting the road often and playing as wide a range of venues as possible.
Horse Lords emerge from a year of Covid-enforce idleness with Comradely Objects, an album assembled in a more leisurely fashion that nonetheless finds them sounding more focused and urgent. Comradely Objects appeared on many album of the year lists including The Wire.
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