Horse Lords & Arnold Dreyblatt - FRKWYS Vol. 18: Extended Field Horse Lords & Arnold Dreyblatt

Extended Field unites Horse Lords and Arnold Dreyblatt for the eighteenth volume of FRKWYS, an intergenerational collaboration of adventurous musicians drawn to the sonically radiant world of just intonation—an ancient tuning system in which scale intervals are derived from whole-number ratios. Dreyblatt first immersed himself in this approach in New York during the 1970s, while Horse Lords began exploring and applying its possibilities nearly four decades later. Together, they create a vibrant harmonic environment, fueled by a shared devotion to rhythm, achieving a marriage of discreet but related aesthetics for the ages. Dreyblatt is a pioneer of psychoacoustic phenomenon, serving as an assistant to La Monte Young between 1975 and 1977 before studying with the legendary Alvin Lucier at Wesleyan University. He discovered the sonic power of excited strings, retrofitting a double bass with piano wires and striking with a rapid thrum to produce enveloping clouds of metallic overtones. 

Dreyblatt’s 1982 album Nodal Excitation laid out a sonic blueprint that resides at the heart of his pulsating music today. He eventually moved to Berlin, and has led various ensembles over the years that have amplified and interpreted the compositional scaffolding he built around his ringing tones. In contrast to Dreyblatt’s hyper-focused practice, Horse Lords have built an ecstatic, hybrid sound all their own; hard-driving rhythmic sprawls support a collision of traditional ritual music, free jazz, and spectrally brilliant electronic showers of psychoacoustic sound. After cementing a devoted following with their 2020 album The Common Task, most of the band relocated to Germany in 2021, with guitarist Owen Gardner and bassist Max Eilbacher settling in Berlin, and saxophonist Andrew Bernstein a few hours away in Bavaria. Drummer Sam Haberman remained in Baltimore, although he reconvenes with the band for album recordings, including the 2023 album Comradely Objects, and extended tours Unbeknownst to one another the two parties shared a mutual interest in one another’s music. 

In early 2017 Dreyblatt’s long-time colleague and friend Werner Durand suggested he check out the band. He recalls, “After listening, I quickly replied: ‘Sounds great! A little like my music. I’ve never heard of them!’ I sent a message through their Bandcamp page, and they responded: ‘Hello! Thanks for the note, we’re big fans of your music!’ But it wasn’t until Dreyblatt caught the band in Berlin in October of 2021 that they finally crossed paths. Days later Bernstein proposed a collaboration. This process would unfold slowly but surely; both parties were exceedingly busy, and when the musicians eventually assembled, they had different harmonic conceptions to reconcile and needed someone in the room to fill Haberman’s percussive role. Dreyblatt suggested Andrea Belfi, a venerable Italian drummer and composer based in Berlin.

In the composing sessions that followed, Horse Lords and Dreyblatt learned the finer points of one another’s harmonic preferences and found ways to fuse them in a single unified sound. “Andrew and Owen proposed structures for navigating my tonal systems,” explains Dreyblatt, “while Max developed weighted algorithmic frequency patterns in SuperCollider.” Many denizens of the tuning universe hold stubbornly strong convictions about what’s right and what’s wrong, so the patience and openness from both parties is quite unusual, with the partnership bringing out fascinating accents and alterations.