Horse Lords - Frkwys Vol. 18: Extended Field

Extended Field associates Horse Lords with a pioneer to whom they clearly owe something, the eighteenth volume in RVNG Intl's FRKWYS series and a true meeting of two generations working the same strange tuning system from different directions.

Arnold Dreyblatt began experimenting with just intonation in the 1970s in New York, the tuning method where intervals come from simple ratios of whole numbers rather than the tempered scale on which most Western music relies, decades before Horse Lords built its entire Baltimore-based sound around the same idea. This gap in time is exactly what makes this 2025 record interesting, not an homage or an exercise in nostalgia, but two approaches to the same radical harmonic idea colliding in real time, with both sides equally obsessed with rhythm as a unifying element.

Advance opens the record by immediately establishing the shared vocabulary, dense polyrhythm clashing with harmonics that shimmer rather than resolve clearly. The title track spans over eleven minutes, the clearest statement of what happens when both sides fully commit to the same deal. Suspension retreats into something more spacious, and Impulse Array closes the record at its most hypnotic, the rhythm carrying the harmonic strangeness rather than fighting it.

Two aesthetics, truly discrete from each other, finding more common ground than either side probably imagined.