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Doors 8pm / Show 8:30pm
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Almost all bands do it backward and upside-down. They start with years of playing live, creating their music in the crucible of performance with all of its impurities and in-the-moment inspirations, before committing said music to a recording that fixes it into an ostensible, exemplary form that eternally serves as an ultimate reference. And then maybe, someday, a few albums down the road, when the tours are shorter and less frequent and the cupboard is looking a little bare, they excavate and massage some favorite board recordings into a live album to fill a gap in some capitalist imagining of “career.”

Horse Lords are not like most bands. The Baltimore-founded, now internationally dispersed quartet puts performance at the center of its practice and approaches the studio as an entirely separate tool. The band’s intricate, polyrhythmic music is tightly composed and complex, leaving little room for improvisation. But elements of chance in Horse Lords’ music make it sometimes unpredictable in the moment, even to the musicians. After the pandemic forced the band to work more deliberately in the studio in composing and recording their most recent album, Comradely Objects, it felt right to assemble some recordings that both capture their galvanic performance attack and subtly interrogate the artifact of the “live album.”