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ADVENTURES IN SOUND AND MUSIC | INDEPENDENT SINCE 1982

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T y s h a w n Sorey

DEVIN TOWNSEND

B I G JOANIE HORSE LORDS

JOYCE

Andrew Poppy | Xhosa Cole

Trevor Mathison | OM Backxwash | Little Annie

THE WIRE 465 | NOVEMBER 2022 £5.95 | 9 770952 068120 11

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Looking For A Certain Ratio

Dynamic Baltimore quartet Horse Lords unleash the power of the harmonic system and challenge the Western bias of musical convention through just intonation. By Dan Wilson. Photography by Margaret Rorison

Making music ultimately boils down to sounding out a system for communicable emotional potential. At its most elementary, musicians define their own systems according to their whims, idiosyncrasies or habits; in every instance of music, a group or soloist consciously or unconsciously agrees upon a rhythmic/harmonic framework.

But there’s an overarching system that has steadily engulfed instrumental music over the last few centuries, affecting nearly all sub-systems, namely the equal tempered musical scale. One group which has galloped away from this stupendous paddock is Horse Lords, who have spent the past decade sounding out just intonation as a catalyst for change and wider systems awareness. Formed in Baltimore in 2010, the quartet make a startlingly persuasive case for pure tunings in their harmonically integrated instrumentation, and drumming which evokes whole-number ratios polyrhythmically, resulting in music that’s equally suited to classroom listening (in the manner of Diana Deutsch’s musical illusions and paradoxes) and heady festival freakouts. By escaping equal temperament (where a major third is four semitones) and using the pure harmonic intervals of just intonation (where a major third is exactly a 5:4 ratio), Horse Lords are able to harness previously obscured textural, timbral and psychoacoustic possibilities, exploring perceptual phenomena in ways that, until recently, were technically impractical for touring bands.

Digital technology facilitates alternative tuning experiments not only by making abstract numbers audible, but also by providing access to niche musical resources and worldwide communities. Back in 2006, when Horse Lords’ future guitarist Owen Gardner began getting to grips with just intonation, online information was scant; one rare oasis was theoristcomposer Kyle Gann’s LiveJournal.

This accounts somewhat for how distinctive the band are. Grassroots level research has its own benefits in setting a uniquer course, as Gardner tells me: “There’s something to be said for being stuck with your own path; having minimal points of reference.” The latter gradually opened up – the work of composers such as Maryanne Amacher, La Monte Young and James Tenney became more readily available over this period, all of whom were always key influences on the group. Researcher Amy Cimini has made Amacher’s work much more accessible recently. As for La Monte Young, his legendary inaccessibility is exemplified by the tale of his strongly worded complaints to the British Library in the 1990s after it catalogued a recording made by a staff member who, while in the US, had taken the initiative to capture a radio broadcast onto PCM digital tape.

In the space of little over a decade, the internet democratised opportunities to experience just intonation, allowing the young group to refine their hard-won expertise and put it into practice. Horse Lords are both the outcome of, and active participants in, a still ongoing paradigm shift in tuning and technology.

Prior to the group’s formation, Andrew Bernstein owned a small MIDI keyboard, and he recalls the excitement when an early version of Manuel Op de Coul’s gateway to microtonalism – the scale experimentation software Scala – was downloaded: “It was like, ‘You have a MIDI keyboard. We’ve got to plug this in so we can hear what these intervals sound like,’ and so we stayed up all night trying to figure out how to make the software work with the keyboard.” Perseverance clearly pays off, as Horse Lords are today a formidable force showcasing some of the most outre and progressive ideas in sound.

The presence of a laptop in the group’s live set-up sees it frequently miscredited as having a role in signal processing. Certain justly-tuned chords that would be excitedly identified as sounding crunchy by microtonal enthusiasts tend to have that crunch misattributed to electronic effects by new listeners. The newbie’s finger of suspicion points at the innocent comradely object: the laptop. “When there’s complex harmonic interaction, people come up to me and ask, ‘What was the laptop running?’ and it’s like, ‘Nothing! That was just everyone playing together!’” remarks bassist and electronicist Max Eilbacher. The laptop lends textural spice, but does not interfere with the instruments’ signals, at least thus far.

Held in the groove by drummer Sam Haberman, how is it that Eilbacher, Gardner and saxophonist Bernstein can produce simulacra of electronic tone from their instruments? In short, it’s because just

42 | The Wire | Horse Lords

Horse Lords in Baltimore, September 2022 (from left): Andrew Bernstein, Max Eilbacher, Owen Gardner, Sam Haberman

Horse Lords | The Wire | 43

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