Horse Lords' Perpetual Motion Machine

In Theory is a semi-regular column in which Andy Cush takes a close look at the compositional underpinnings of songs new and old in search of a deeper understanding of how and why they move us.

Horse Lords were natural guests for the first installment of In Theory to feature an interview with an artist. First, because the Baltimore-bred instrumental avant-rock quartet, now based in Germany, is one of my favorite bands. Second, because their music involves a particular set of theoretical parameters. These parameters, as saxophonist Andrew Bernstein put it to me, are “integral to how we think about the music, but not integral to how the music is received.” You don’t have to understand them—don’t have to think about them at all—to have your mind bent and your body propelled into motion by the band’s fractal sense of groove. But understanding them might deepen your appreciation, or at least illuminate something about where the music is coming from.

For starters, Horse Lords is a band fanatically devoted to polyrhythm. What does that mean? Imagine you’re sitting behind the wheel of a car, at a red light, with your blinker on. You watch the little green arrow on your dashboard and the blinking amber turn signal of the car in front of you. Every so often, they seem to blink at exactly the same moment. Over the next few seconds, they drift apart, then come together, then blink at the same time again. They’re both working at steady pulses, but the pulses are a little different: say yours blinks every seven eighths of a second and theirs blinks every nine eighths. At times, they at times seem indifferent to one another, and at others, like partners in a mysterious dance. They are playing an elaborate polyrhythm, and you are hypnotized. Now imagine one blinker is a sax, another is a guitar, a third is a bass, and a fourth, fifth, and so on are all the different pieces of a drum kit. All dancing to their own pulses, separate and together, in and out.

Second, Horse Lords play in just intonation. This one is a little trickier. Imagine a piano. You play one key, then the key immediately below it, then the key immediately above. The distances in pitch between these adjacent keys are the same. This is equal temperament, the tuning system that governs almost all music you encounter as a Westerner today. It allows us to play music in a variety of keys—music whose tonal center can move around, a little E minor here, a little B-flat major there. But this flexibility involves a degree of compromise on the purity, or the accuracy, of the relationships between any two individual notes, relationships we call intervals. It’s a strange paradox: in order to make all those different keys sound in tune, you have to sacrifice a little of the in-tune-ness of the intervals that are the keys’ building blocks. Just intonation is a tuning system that predates equal temperament, and prioritizes getting those individual intervals right. You can’t fly around keys in the same way, but you can be more deeply rooted—more in tune—in any one particular key.

But these are just parameters. What does Horse Lords actually sound like? Not the rigorously academic band you might be imagining. They are giddy. Funky. Hypnotic, yes. Multi-colored. Ecstatic. Over 15 years, seven albums, and four mixtapes, they have worked with their particular set of constraints, which might at first seem narrow, and continued to dream up strange and thrilling new territory inside. Their music just keeps getting bigger, brighter, richer, more fun. Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive!, my favorite Horse Lords album yet and one of the best records of the year so far, has all sorts of stuff they’ve never played with before: trombone, bass clarinet, and deliriously Auto-Tuned vocals from a crew of guest musicians; folky acoustic guitar; fractal electronic sounds pushed newly to the foreground of the mix. 

And yet it still sounds exactly like Horse Lords, as their music always does. The band epitomizes a principle expressed eloquently by Igor Stravinsky in his 1939 lecture Poetics of Music: “My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles…The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the claims that shackle the spirit.”

I spoke with Bernstein and guitarist Owen Gardner last week, the former at the airport and the latter in a van, both headed toward Winnipeg, where they will begin the North American leg of a tour in support of the new album. We talked about polyrhythm and just intonation and how working with limits can be liberating. Lots of other stuff too. 

I have a hard time describing Horse Lords without leaning on technical terminology that doesn’t really convey the joy of what you guys do. Say you’re meeting a partner’s uncle for the first time, and he says, ‘Hey, I hear you play in a band! What’s your music like?’ What do you say to him?

Owen Gardner: It’s always the struggle. Someone was telling me recently I need to work on my elevator pitch. It’s funny, we’re like 15 years in, and I still don’t know what to tell these people. It’s hard, because you want to gauge the context and work within whatever context they have. But at a certain point, I really struggle to give somebody a good idea of what they can expect. And maybe they don’t actually care, so maybe it’s OK. 

Andrew Bernstein: I’m in this position quite a bit, where I’m with people who don’t know about the musical world that I come from. I usually lead with, it’s an experimental rock band, and if that doesn’t mean anything, I’ll say, it’s a rock band that draws on influences from jazz and contemporary [classical] music. And sometimes someone will say, ‘Oh, like a prog rock band?’ And I’ll say, ‘Yeah, like a prog rock band.’ 

There’s ways that we talk about it and think about it, and that we maybe foreground in the compositional process, but that doesn’t necessarily need to be apparent to the listener. I wouldn’t lead with just intonation or microtonal scales, because that might not even mean anything to the person you’re talking to. 

How integral are those sorts of concepts to the way that you guys yourselves think of the band? 

Gardner: Just intonation is a constraint that I find interesting. Everything is in just intonation, not because I think that’s how all music must be, but because—you can delineate an area where Horse Lords music lives, and just intonation is one of the things that delineates it. It’s a limitation that is generative. It’s very flexible. And it’s a way to give the music an identity, make sure it’s always itself. 

Related to the first question: I imagine you’re asked a lot what just intonation even is. How do you answer people? When I’ve written about it, I usually say something about how it emulates the natural behaviors of sound, but I find it very difficult to talk about in any more detail than that without getting into a full-on detailed technical explanation. It’s weirdly resistant to being put into layman’s terms. 

Bernstein: I usually take a similar tack to what you just described. It’s a way of tuning the instruments that draws from the physics of sound. You do sort of have to define it in relation to its opposite. It’s in tension with equal temperament, the dominant mode of music in our society. And I define it in opposition to that. 

With your album and track titles, artwork, and so on, you often present your music in terms of utopian leftist politics. Do you see the just intonation, or the polyrhythms, or anything else you’re doing, as a musical expression of your political ideals? 

Gardner: Just intonation, in a way, is very hierarchical, but I feel like the result somehow puts the listener in a state of openness. Although there is a very clear tonal center, and I can’t really argue that they’re in a non-hierarchical sound space, at the same time, I like to think it engenders a sort of focus and an openness that are related to liberatory politics. 

The rhythms are more clearly related. You’re not anchored in a single rhythmic experience that we are dictating. It’s a very open, three-dimensional rhythmic sort of playground. These different rhythms are both happening and they’re both right answers. Or there is no right answer. There’s no definitive master rhythm that you’re supposed to hear. And I also like to think that puts the listener in a liberated space. 

Bernstein: Also, even aside from the specifics of using just intonation or using polyrhythms, I think the choice to explore areas of music that are not the norm is a political act. The idea that there are any number of different ways to make music, and everyone can choose a system or a different tradition for themselves, outside of the hegemony of Western music. 

One of my of my favorite moments on this record is when an acoustic guitar comes in at the beginning of “After the Last Sky,” doing this sort of fingerpicking that seems derived from the blues. That sort of guitar playing makes so much sense as part of the vocabulary of Horse Lords, in that there’s often some sort of polyrhythm happening between the pulse of the bass notes and the more complicated syncopations on the higher strings, and there’s this droning pitch center that other things drift around. It’s a totally new sound in your music, but one that feels so natural. How do you go about drawing these new elements into your music while maintaining a connection to this very pure original idea of what the band is?

Gardner: The more abstractly you can conceive of the ideas—continuing to turn the material around and thinking, how else can I think of this?, the more you can continue to see its richness. Taking different perspectives on fingerpicking, for example. I had a very specific idea of what I was doing for that section, related to the kind of metric ambiguity I was talking about before. I’m not exactly sure why it needed to be acoustic guitar, but it seemed right. 

Bernstein: Acoustic guitar is a new thing on the album, and it’s so front and center. But Owen is always playing similar kinds of patterns on electric guitar. And maybe those don't come across as such direct references to blues and old-time fingerpicked music, but that’s always been a big influence on our music from the beginning. 

Gardner: It could be that the acoustic guitar was a way of saying, “Yes, that’s where this is coming from.” Because it’s true, in the past, I’ve been sort of puzzled that no one has drawn that connection. People will be like, you must listen to a lot of Don Caballero, or something. But I’ve been fingerpicking in our music for 15 years, and it seems very clear to me that it’s country-blues-influenced guitar playing. 

I’m not frustrated by it, exactly, but it’s strange. And sort of cool, also. Another way that the music is sort of open is that there isn’t a clear genre lineage that we’re laying out for the listener. It’s very dense in its frame of reference. And the listener can do what they want with that. If it sounds like Don Cab to them, that’s not the wrong answer. But it’s certainly not where I’m coming from. That piece is a very direct reference to Roscoe Holcomb, if you know his playing. But it’s not like there’s a wrong way to listen to it.

I have to imagine the mental space that you’re inhabiting as you’re performing this music live, with all its repetition and polyrhythm and gradual variation, is a pretty unique one, different from playing other sorts of music. Can you talk about how it feels? 

Gardner: You get this sort of floating feeling. We all are experiencing that. That’s something that’s important to me overall—to transmit that feeling, to have some version of a shared experience. It’s not like we’ve mastered something; it’s like we’re going through the same thing as the audience, but we have to play instruments at the same time. 

Especially on the new record, there are certain pieces where you’re really on your own. There’s so much rhythmic independence—or maybe interdependence would be a better word, because ultimately you can’t completely separate one rhythm from the rest. But with one careless moment you can just be completely lost at sea and have no idea how to get back to where everybody else is. There are a lot of nightmare situations like that. There’s tension at work, a lot of the time, playing this music, but also a unique feeling of freedom at the same time. 

Bernstein: It changes over time as we get more comfortable. Music that was really difficult 10 years ago, when we wrote it, and took a lot of focus to not get totally lost in, is not so difficult now. Because we’ve been playing it and know the feeling better. And now I can listen to what Owen is doing on a part and enjoy it a little bit more. Whereas before, and on some of the new music, I have to listen to him, but I can’t really pay attention to him, or else I’ll mess up my part. I need to focus on what I’m doing. 

It’s like you’re a ship in the night and you just have to trust the navigation. There’s no horizon and you just have to trust that you’re going in the right direction. 

That working toward being able to focus on the sound of the whole ensemble, rather than just yourself—it sounds like it could be one of the lifelong journeys of playing this music. 

Gardner: Yeah. It keeps it interesting too. I’m never tired of playing a song. I can’t really think about anything else. It demands focus. 

Bernstein: And when you reach that floating state, and everything’s just happening, and sometimes you feel the audience in that state too—It doesn’t happen every night, but when it does, it’s really powerful. 

That sort of interdependence that you’re talking about, Owen, strikes me as another way that the politics are expressed through the music. There are all these parts that are free to do their own thing while always being in support of some larger thing. 

Gardner: That’s a cool aspect of the feeling. You get outside of yourself, and become part of an agency larger than yourself. That’s really exciting, and can be disorienting too. That’s something I think about quite a bit, how to blur the boundaries between layers and subjectivities. It’s cool to not only think about that, but also feel it when you’re playing.