Horse Lords were founded in Baltimore in 2010; they evolved from the experimental
collective Teeth Mountain and began as a trio with drummer Sam Haberman, guitarist
Owen Gardner, and bassist Max Eilbacher, soon adding alto saxophonist Andrew
Bernstein to the core ensemble. Though Horse Lords grew out of the fertile Baltimore
noise and leftfield rock scene, a storied environment for artists and weirdos that has
nurtured many an influential outsider band (Lungfish, Matmos), their approach is more
omnivorous than the stippled rhythms of instrumental electric rock would indicate.

Across sixteen years of frequent touring, Horse Lords have released ten studio, live,
and collaboration albums in addition to a split EP with fellow Baltimoreans Lower Dens,
a handful of singles and compilation tracks. For RVNG’s FRKWYS series, the band
collaborated with Berlin-based composer Arnold Dreyblatt, a onetime student of La
Monte Young and Pauline Oliveros whose just intonation chamber music was a crucial
part of the post-Fluxus Downtown New York City environment.

With the relocation of three of the four members to Germany beginning in 2021, the
potential for more further creative exploration, and performance opportunities including
the Moers Festival (with an 11-piece lineup, interpreting Julius Eastman’s music as
well as their own), the interdisciplinary phases of the band’s music was poised for
fascinating new directions. The band observes “We are always trying to balance working within the limitations of the quartet and pushing beyond them.

For their second studio album on RVNG Intl., Demand To Be Taken To Heaven Alive!,
Horse Lords have followed this notion and augmented the instrumentation, expanding
the format slightly to include bass clarinetist Madison Greenstone (TAK Ensemble),
trombonist Weston Olencki (Nate Wooley, RAGE Thormbones) and vocalists Nina
Guo (Departure Duo) and Evelyn Saylor (Holly Herndon, Caterina Barbieri) across
a program of twelve original compositions.

Demand To Be Taken To Heaven Alive! is a reference to a line in a poem by Russian
Futurist writer Vladimir Myakovsky, and the band have also name-checked the
Bauhaus weaver Anni Albers (wife of painter Josef Albers), Islamic geometrical
patterning, Dutch avant-garde group the Maciunas Ensemble (themselves named after
Fluxus artist and typographer George Maciunas), composer/writers Tom Johnson,
Henry Flynt and Catherine Christer Hennix, and musically draw from sources as
diverse as Roscoe Holcolmb, James Brown, Kuwaiti/Bahraini sawt, and electronic
composers Maryanne Amacher and Jaap Vink.

As the members are keen to point out, Demand To Be Taken To Heaven Alive! is “a bid for the flattening of time and perception in favor of greater goods [and] the iterative
nature of reaching/building a paradise in this life, not the next,” and the new album at
hand is an illuminating starting point for eternal nowness.