Horse Lords & Arnold Dreyblatt

One of the second generation of New York minimal composers, Arnold Dreyblatt studied music with Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, and Alvin Lucier and media art with Woody and Steina Vasulka. His early activities in music and performance included the albums Nodal Excitation, Propellers In Love, The Sound of One String, and the opera project Who's Who in Central and East Europe 1933. Dreyblatt has invented a set of new and original instruments, performance techniques, and a system of tuning. Often characterized as one of the more rock-oriented of American minimalists, Dreyblatt has cultivated a strong underground base of fans for his transcendental and ecstatic music as a solo artist and with his Orchestra of Excited Strings.

As an instrumental unit, Horse Lords rely on a collective voice and focus to provide the band’s core strength; a process enriched by their disparate musical interests. The quartet, formed in 2010, embraces Renaissance counterpoint, plays instruments specially fretted for microtonality, and organizes its music through polyrhythmic matrices. The ingenious machinery of their music is humanized with exploration and passion.