Horse Lords Come to PS21 with a New Record and Ava Mendoza

Sunday, July 19, 7:30pm | Chatham, NY | Tickets required

Horse Lords play PS21 on July 19, with Brooklyn guitarist and vocalist Ava Mendoza opening. The Baltimore quartet—drummer Sam Haberman, guitarist Owen Gardner, bassist Max Eilbacher, and alto saxophonist Andrew Bernstein—has spent sixteen years developing a singular sounds in experimental rock: polyrhythmic, microtonal, hypnotic, and built on a foundation of just intonation, the alternate tuning system associated with La Monte Young and other composers working outside standard Western pitch.

The band began as a not-so-serious exercise in applying that tuning system within a rock format and kept finding more to explore. Their live show has a reputation for pulling audiences into a kind of collective trance—the grooves lock in, then shift and fold back on themselves, until the starting point has become something else entirely. Pitchfork has written that Horse Lords believes experimental music has the potential to be more than merely aesthetic, and that every choice they make—including rebuilding their instruments according to an alternate musical logic—speaks to a desire to upend the status quo.

They come to PS21 in support of Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive!, out June 12, which the band describes as an attempt to "liberate the listener into a spiritual, ecstatic, and utopic dimension of sound."

Ava Mendoza, who opens, is one of the more compelling guitarists working in Brooklyn's experimental scene—her playing has been described as heavy and hypnotic, genre-crossing in a way that doesn't feel calculated. Her most recent record, Alive Alone, Alive Together, came out in May.

Pavilion Theater, PS21, 2980 Route 66, Chatham, NY. Tickets at ps21chatham.org.