#the common task

[ruiditos]

Against Gravity - Horse Lords (2020)

[thenewobjective]

Horse Lords ~ The Common Task

Like the Bridget Riley-styled art of the album cover, The Common Task seems to emerge, fully armed, from the traces of a bright modernist history whose ruins yet infuse our hearts with hope. The many references of the album have been explored by better writerselsewhere, but the various anchors to the decade of 1970 weave this music together as a tapestry within which to glimpse into a dreamtime…

View On WordPress

[dustedmagazine]

Horse Lords — The Common Task (Northern Spy)

Photo by Audrey Gatewood

The Common Task by Horse Lords

Baltimore quartet Horse Lords have always churned out extended pieces of nuanced repetition and slowly building, microcosmic growths, broadly distilling the minimalist and avant-garde ideas. If you were presented a list of their influences, even remote ones, you might anticipate something academic or meticulously calculated. That, however, is not the result; the records speak for themselves, but live, hope there’s enough room to move your soon-to-be summoned body. It’s a wild yet controlled form of hypnosis.

The group’s precision and broader intent, however vague that could be, has remained sharp since day one. With each release they’ve expanded on a simple template of minimal grooves and slight, feathering manipulations of tempo and dynamic, loosely fitted around the core instrumentation displayed on their first album: cellist Owen Gardner hammering his just-intonation tuned guitar with stylings nearing both Taureg guitars and Henry Flynt; Max Eilbacher interlocking a series of bass grooves; Andrew Bernstein providing a swath of saxophone tones, choppy or long and extended, bleeding a score of overtones; and percussionist Sam Haberman keeping everything intact and pivoting underlying trajectories with scalpel-like exactitude.

After their first album, namely Hidden Cities or Interventions, they worked in additional elements, most notably Max’s inventive synth work and Andrew’s bold saxophone techniques, reflected in each of their collaborative and solo outputs which lead to other worlds entirely. And on Mixtape IV, a less formal album release, they collaborated with Abdu Ali and honored Julius Eastman’s piece “Stay on It.”

Which leads to The Common Task, no doubt their most experimental and political work yet. The first two pieces, “Fanfare for Effective Freedom” and “Against Gravity,” will scratch any previous fans itch for a trademark Horse Lords burner. Even so, the cumulative years has heightened the group’s anticipation of each other’s moves. “The Radiant City,” in a way, mirrors the breathy saxophone tones of “Against Gravity,” starting with a thick bagpipe line that surfaces and resurfaces on-and-off with distorted guitar, exacerbated saxophone, and synths that mimic the bagged woodwind instrument. The interplay is an extension of Horse Lords continuing craft of fanning out each particle of sound to play with the differences in the granular.

“People’s Park” strikes a balance of these previous tracks and what’s to come with the 18-minute “Integral Accident”; being the most buoyant of Horse Lords’ tracks, the general pulse of “People’s Park” is initiated by an effected loop sauntering over and tapping other elements to join in on its teetering trot, as it develops into a low-slung groove broiled in sizzling and colorful electronics and devolves into a swamp of those same sounds. Occupying the second half of the album, “Integral Accident” quite possibly exposes the internal workings of Horse Lords’ approach to composition more than any other piece in their catalog. It starts off like something pulled from a Groupe de Recherches Musicales session, with an open field recording, contrasting tones from a sole vocalist and a steady violin tone, and full-spectrum synth manipulation, and it slowly builds into a rolling force that parses elements continually while stretching it’s momentum.

Horse Lords build and release tension just as adeptly as before on The Common Task, in many cases doing so in shorter windows. Their nearly ten-year core pivots rhythmic and tonal ideas athletically, and their ability to pull elements from anywhere and everywhere is seemingly more fluid with each record. With The Common Task, Horse Lords simultaneously stay within their own signature pocket and poach outside elements, expanding how large that pocket seems.

Ian Forsythe

[grinderbot]

Death is merely the result or manifestation of our infantilism, lack of independence and self-reliance, and of our incapacity for mutual support and the restoration of life. People are still minors, half-beings, whereas the fullness of personal existence, personal perfection, is possible. However, it is possible only within general perfection. Coming of age will bring perfect health and immortality, but for the living immortality is impossible without the resurrection of the dead.

What Was Man Created For?, pg 76. Nikolai Fedorov