Horse Lords, a rock band from Baltimore that will play Wesleyan’s Middle House on Thursday, April 28, makes instrumental music with some off-center, potentially disorienting properties. (That’s a good thing: If you’re going to a Horse Lords show, maybe you’re looking to get a little disoriented.)
On “Interventions,” the band’s third full-length album (its first for Northern Spy Records), interlocking, prog-rock riffs and melodic fragments sound, well, exotic, even slightly out-of-tune. But you adjust to the sound and ultimately sort of crave it.
Guitarist Owen Gardner and saxophonist Andrew Bernstein (a Weston native) met at Goucher College in Baltimore. Both men became interested in just intonation, a tuning system based on small, whole-number ratios, used famously by Harry Partch, La Monte Young and other 20th-century composers.
Gardner also studied Mauritanian guitar music, in which guitars are often re-fretted to suit traditional scales. Gardner re-fretted his own instrument, then went after Max Eilbacher’s bass. Bernstein learned how to play microtones by using false fingerings. (Saxophones are commonly constructed to play in equal temperament.)
The band isn’t writing music with the goal of getting listeners used to the sound of just intonation: They just like the sound.
“It’s the scale that we operate in,” he says. “A band playing in equal temperament [what we usually hear]: That has an effect on all of the music they’re making, but it’s not something they necessarily think about when composing a melody. Once you set the scale, you can move on to higher order musical concerns.”
You hear it on “Truthers,” the first track on “Interventions.” Eilbacher and drummer Sam Haberman settle into a brisk, triple-meter groove. Gardner and Bernstein weave repeating figures, staying within the barlines at first, then spilling across them. It’s all one chord, one harmonic zone, giving the music a static, droning quality — a mashup of minimalism, “Discipline”-era King Crimson, even 8-bit chiptune.
Instruments and players will pair up, in shifting combinations: On “Time Slip,” Eilbacher and Gardner play an octave riff in 5/8, Haberman plays a 6/8 groove, and Bernstein sustains long, coloristic tones, moving unexpectedly from note to note.
“Toward the Omega Point,” the longest, most hypnotic track on “Interventions” (at 9:35), involves Eilbacher and Gardner batting around a single pitch like a pingpong ball, gradually introducing new scale degrees and beat divisions and leading to a frenzied climax, over a straight-ahead beat by Haberman and Bernstein (on percussion).
“We’re not typically interested in time signatures just for the sake of that stuff,” Haberman says. “It’s just another realm of weird ideas we can find, and when we find one, we use it. It’s on par with all the other weird ideas and tricks we’re interested in trying out.”
“None of us are coming from math rock,” Bernstein adds. “We weren’t influenced by some of the bands that people talk about when they talk about us. Our band and those bands have similar interests in polyrhythm and rhythmic complexity within the rock form. We’re young American guys. This is the culture that we’re a part of. We make rock music, and we have all of these other musical concerns that we want to bring to that music.”
On Horse Lords’ two previous albums — a self-titled debut (2012) and “Hidden Cities” (2014) — the band went into the studio and banged out songs, capturing them in higher fidelity than it could produce itself. At the same time, trio of self-produced mix tapes (2012-14) offered loose, highly experimental frameworks for playing around with ideas.
“Interventions” was an attempt to blend the two approaches: the freedom to deconstruct songs and to recombine them in weird ways (the mixtapes) with studio-grade production values and the cohesion of a together in the same room (the albums).
“On [‘Hidden Cities’], we performed the music live in the studio, and then mixed with that,” Bernstein says. “It’s essentially a performance. With this record, we wanted to make something that was more naturally an album.”
Three tracks, also called “Interventions,” merge ambient field recordings with guitar harmonics, feedback and squalling saxophones.
“They aren’t interludes,” Haberman says. “We view those the same way we view the songs that we play.”
Live shows blur boundaries between composed and improvised music; listen closely enough and you’ll hear cues, often by Haberman, signaling moves to new formal sections, or simply that it’s time to get out of a song.
“There’s always room, especially for Owen and Andrew, to play around and do things differently,” Haberman says. “We typically try to find what we like to do and do that as well as we can. There tends to be more consistency in the way we play these songs than just pure improvisation, but they’ll end up being different every time we play them. It always comes down to intuition.”
HORSE LORDS performs at Middle House, 356 Washington St., at Wesleyan University in Middletown, on Thursday night, April 28. The time of the performance had not been set at press time.
