Horse Lords

Yesterday's New Music Friday included the release of the new album, Demand to Be Taken Alive!, by the Baltimore band, Horse Lords. If their music sounds somehow "different" to you, congratulations, you've got a good musical ear. They employ the just intonation tuning system championed by La Monte Young and Harry Partch, among others. 

I'm not a musician and have only the weakest of grasps of music theory so I'll probably get this wrong, but as I understand it, just intonation is a tuning system that allows chords and intervals to ring perfectly clear and doesn't produce "beating," those faint, restless "waves" heard during sustained notes. Thus, the tuning has a characteristically lush and resonant sound. 

The "just" in "just intonation" doesn't mean "only" or "merely," but instead means conforming to a standard of correctness, as in "just behavior" or "just reward." Notes in just intonation are tuned using whole-number frequency ratios that align with the natural overtone series. However, the downside is that an instrument tuned to a certain key in just intonation will sound beautiful in that key, but will sound out of tune in a different key unless the instrument is re-tuned specific to that other key. 

Nearly all Western music uses equal temperament to avoid this limitation. Equal temperament divides the octave into 12 equal semitones. Because of mathematical compromises, nearly every interval is slightly "out of tune" by a tiny fraction and chords can sound slightly less pure and can produce the "beats" that just intonation lacks. However, it allows instruments with fixed pitches (like pianos and guitars) to play in all 12 musical keys with equal ease. You can say that every guitar and every piano is ever so slightly out of tune, but nearly all Western Music uses equal temperament, in part because that's how western instruments are designed and built.

Horse Lords gets around this problem by using hand-modified guitars with repositioned frets, re-tuned and customized by the band's guitarist, Owen Gardner. The other band members are Andrew Bernstein (saxophone), Max Eilbacher (bass),  and Sam Haberman (drums). Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! also features vocalists Nina Guo and Evelyn Saylor, the first Horse Lords album to include vocalists (but no lyrics); toward the end of the track, note the use of the hocketing technique employed in the Ramayana Monkey Chant and elsewhere. The album also features bass clarinetist Madison Greenstone and trombonist Weston Olencki. 

Demand to Be Taken Alive! is streaming everywhere and can by purchased on Bandcamp. The band will perform at Atlanta's Drunken Unicorn on October 13.