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.