Horse Lords: Inside Their Microtonal Universe

I was interested in jazz, but also liked playing instruments and making sound. As a teenager, I played clarinet in the school orchestra, but when I started to come of age and get into punk rock in the early-to-mid ‘90s, clarinet didn't really seem to have a place in that world. I learned how to play drums because bands would practice at my house and then I started playing guitar in a grindcore band because we thought it was a funny genre – we were kind of like a slapstick grindcore band.

My experience playing heavy music in high school made me receptive to extreme sounds and I was getting more into noise music, electronics, free jazz and avant-jazz. It was actually my brother who played saxophone and one of my college roommates played the instrument in grade school. He basically lent it to me while I was becoming less inspired by the guitar.

I’d never considered circuit bending as a possibility for generating sound, but when I discovered there was music being made this way it was definitely a paradigm shift. It really blew my mind that you could open up an instrument and make sounds that it wasn't designed to make. I was studying electronic music at university and got very interested in recreating textures, repetitive minimalism and drone music, so I started treating the saxophone using circular breathing to create a never-ending cascade of notes using the embouchure like a filter.

It was pretty immediate. Max, Owen and I had already played in a band together and were hanging out a lot. I remember organising a dance performance where there were three string players and an upright bass. I was playing percussion, Max was playing some sort of noise violin and Owen played cello, so we were making very polyrhythmic music drawing on the harmonic series.

Out of that collaboration we wanted to keep playing together, but I wasn't playing saxophone at first - I joined to add percussive texture to the rhythm. Then one day I told the band that I was going to bring the saxophone along to see where it might fit in.

We have disagreements, but I wouldn't say they’re antagonistic and I actually think the counterpoint comes from resolving some of the tension because we all try to be kind to each other when it comes to rejecting each other’s ideas. We all want to make good music and work towards the same goals, so when ideas are shot down it never feels like a personal attack.

I mean, there are certainly times where we don't totally understand how something’s going to work out, but we’re willing to see an idea through to its final stages. The album version is rarely the definitive version because it continues to change when we play it live, so the compositional process never really ends.

Horse Lords came out as a two-track instrumental record, but as we developed as musicians we came to realise the tracks didn’t necessarily require that kind of duration and it became a challenge to develop them into a higher-stakes album format. At the same time, there’s a maturity to sitting with an idea, repeating something over and over and having the confidence to resist the urge to change something just to keep it interesting.

It was mostly due to logistics, although I don't think we would do it again this way and don't have to now because our drummer Sam has also moved to Germany. Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! is probably the capstone of this last five years, which has been a challenge, but satisfying and fun.

There’s something exhilarating about sending lots of files back and forth and getting excited when we hear the response to somebody’s demo or sequence. In that way, everything was a bit slow motion. Rather than play together and work things out in real-time like we usually do, we’d take a couple of weeks before getting a musical response to an idea.

Because of how Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! was made, we did have to be more intentional about how we were going into it from the start. This was the first time that we discussed, not only the material that we wanted to use for a vocal piece like “Eureka”, but the musical themes we wanted to explore from a philosophical viewpoint.

The ideas on our past records were much more subliminal. Again, we’ve played together for so long and we all share books, notes, podcasts and talk a lot about philosophy, art and musical aesthetics, so it's not like we have to have a thematic conversation when we're starting to make an album.

We wanted to include vocals in a new way, but didn't want to do it ourselves so we had to bring people in. Then we later added a trombone and bass clarinet player. That was really a product of the new community that we're now a part of in Berlin, although, funnily enough, everyone that we collaborated with is American.

We've always been part of a scene. In Baltimore, there were guys playing around with synthesisers on some of our first records and M.C. Schmidt from Matmos used to play with us and appears on one of our early mix tapes. This album was a continuation of that impulse, but in a new setting.

It's something I've always done because Ableton is my DAW choice. When I'm sketching or making an addition to something that another band member has shared, Ableton is the place I'll go to first to generate and sketch ideas. I'm not sure if everybody in Horse Lords has Ableton yet, but I'm sure everybody has used it at some point. I know Max does, and Owen used it to do a lot of the heavy lifting when mixing the record.

Most of it starts with a drumbeat or rhythm section, so I'll compose drum patterns in Ableton to map out an initial sketch, which are always subject to change once they get in the hands of the musicians that are going to play on them. Sam and Max have their own idiosyncratic styles, so I sort of know how they’ll play, but I'll often try and compose something in the style of Max’s bass playing even if I don't know how he’ll truly feel until he hears it.

For my saxophone parts, I'll sketch out a rhythm section part in Ableton and record myself over it, which is kind of what I did for the full session that I shared with you for the track “Before the Law”. That began with a drum and bass idea that I’d originally envisioned for my droning saxophone parts and Owen’s EBow guitar, but we liked the way that it sounded with the saxophone.

Support for microtonality in Ableton Live made a huge difference for us. It meant we could use any of Live's instrument Packs and software synthesisers while still playing in our preferred tuning system. Ever since Horse Lords started, I've used Live for sketching ideas, but because we write in a microtonal just intonation scale, those sketches couldn't easily become part of the final recordings. Once Live supported microtonal tuning, we could use those same sounds, not just for generating ideas, but as finished recordings on the record itself.

Some of the material I shared for the track “Second Galactic Utopia”, particularly the English horn line, relates back to an algorithm we developed in SuperCollider. It's not necessarily the pitches themselves, but the rhythm and form of that passage that come from the algorithm. Variations of the same process also appear on the title track, at the end of “Brain of the Firm”, and possibly elsewhere throughout the record.

We've always incorporated electronics into the band's music, originally working primarily with Max/MSP and, more recently, SuperCollider. Our experience with Max/MSP has also enabled us to develop custom tools in Max for Live, and that's an approach we'll likely continue to explore. The story is still evolving.

We've always been fascinated by how much compelling material you can generate from the smallest musical seed. We've all been influenced by the late American composer Tom Johnson, particularly his book Self-Similar Melodies, which explores how fractal geometry can be applied to melodic lines.

We were really taken with a lot of his writing, and although none of us have a formal background in mathematics, we adapted one of his recursive algorithms to produce expanding numerical patterns that became the basis for several melodies. We then orchestrated those ideas across the band and electronic instruments - sometimes played quickly, sometimes slowly. It’s a recurring theme over the course of the record.

A little bit of both. We're interested in generative ideas and how complex, spiralling structures can emerge from the simplest musical seeds. Part of the appeal is that, as a listener, you can often sense there's an underlying logic to the melodies without being able to identify exactly how it works. It's slightly opaque but always on the verge of recognition, and that tension is really satisfying. That idea has deep historical roots too. Early Renaissance music, for example, often used isorhythmic techniques in which rhythmic and melodic cycles of different lengths gradually phase against one another, creating intricate patterns that reveal themselves over time.

Exploring those kinds of structures is an inquisitive, self-learning process. It's fascinating, but we were never interested in just presenting the algorithm because that approach has been explored before. Although that can be interesting, we wanted to abstract it further - to orchestrate the material for the band and bring a human element to something that began as a mathematical system.

What interests me about music is the process of making and sharing it, and I enjoy the struggle. It starts from demos we made, goes back and forth through different iterations with other people and then we arrive at the completed work, which I’m talking to you about now. If I’d just generated a song, I don't know whether we’d be connecting over talking about music.

I've played around with LLMs out of curiosity, but I'm not that impressed with what they can do. Then again, I'm not a computer programmer, so maybe AI could be of use in the context of coding to help adapt an algorithm that I'm interested in using to generate melodies.

We were moving towards the end of the process and felt the track was still missing something. As the deadline approached, I was trying to find the right sound, but we simply ran out of time to schedule another recording session. In the end, we kept the sampled English horn because we liked how it sounded, but I think that also says something about the quality of modern orchestral sample libraries.

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Text and interview: Danny Turner
Photos: Kasia Zacharko, Justin Tsucalas