058 :: ALIVE
Listen to "058 :: ALIVE" on Spreaker.Featuring
Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! by Horse Lords, released by RVNG Intl. in 2026. Listen / Buy direct
Transcript
Right from the start we are greeted by an unfamiliar sonic world. The sounds are metallic, like a transmission from the future in some machine language we don't understand. The rhythms and the harmonies are jolting, agitatedly jumping from one phrase to the next. But the music is also completely locked in, ticking away with the precision of an atomic clock, until that atom explodes into an unstoppable groove.
With the introduction of the full ensemble, the sounds from the start are recontextualized, but almost made stranger, now surrounded by a circus of other foreign tones: squeaks and squawks and boings and buzzes. The band is clearly cooking, but what they're serving up is so bizarre. If I focus my attention on any one element, what I hear is barely recognizable as music, just a little sonic fragment, looping without end. But together they meld into something remarkable, a dynamic mechanism of interlocking motion, a tight-knit tapestry of interleaving notes. It's hypnotic, but in no way soporific; it lights up my senses, invigorates the air, and with its own persistent animation, makes everything feel more alive.
And with the introduction of – would you call these vocals? perhaps just voices? – whatever they are, with their addition the song seems to reach a fever pitch of polyphonic revelry, ping-ponging across the stereo spectrum in an increasingly frenetic but always impeccable dance. It makes me appreciate just how uncommon it is to hear anything this incomprehensible. And I don't mean that I can't bop along to the beat or follow the repeated melodic figures. For music this avant-garde, it's got a real groove and is entirely listenable. But when I try to apprehend the sensory manifold before my ears as music, I find myself at a loss. In a very literal sense, I do not know what this is, or what's going on. And I love that. How often is it that music makes you feel this at sea?
And as the piece shifts into its next groove, it's again hard for me to resist wanting to break this music down, to count out every measure, to decompose it into each of its constituent parts and understand how they all fit together to form this extraordinary machine. And if I wanted to get all music theoretical about it, I'd have plenty to talk about, from polyrhythms to just intonation. This is, without a doubt, highly intentional music: everything has been constructed just so, and so it's natural to want to understand the intention behind it. But as I listen to this music over and over again, I actually find myself resisting this explanatory impulse. Because to explain this music is to miss out on just beholding it and experiencing it and letting it work its magic on you. And that is surely its actual intention.
Ultimately, what I find most striking about this music is not its experimentalism or its eccentricity, but its seemingly bottomless desire to delight, with surprising sounds atypically arranged in time and space, all these little sonic flourishes that tickle the senses and induce in the listener a childlike amusement with sound. It makes me feel like I'm hearing music for the very first time, still confused by how disparate noises can be united to form an organized whole, newly dazzled by how such a sensory miracle is even possible. It's a reminder that the experience of music should always begin with wonder and bewilderment. And if our senses have been dulled to that sense of wonder from overuse and overexposure, sometimes what we need is music like this, to present us with something so radically different and unexpected that we can't help but stop and be awed anew.
Liner Notes
I didn't know anything about just intonation before discovering Horse Lords, and it's interesting to read about, an alternative to the equal temperament system that's more standard today. I can't claim to be able to hear the exact difference, but I'm glad to know there are contemporary musicians and composers that nerd out about this stuff.
There's a good interview with Horse Lords up on Hearing Things (paywalled, but you should subscribe).