Horse Lords w/ No Thankyou & Silk Fence at The Iron Horse on Tuesday, October 6 2026
Horse Lords were founded in Baltimore, Maryland in 2010; they evolved from the experimental collective Teeth Mountain and began as a trio with drummer Sam Haberman, guitarist Owen Gardner, and bassist Max Eilbacher, soon adding alto saxophonist Andrew Bernstein to the core ensemble. Though Horse Lords grew out of the fertile Baltimore noise and leftfield rock scene, a storied environment for artists and weirdos that has nurtured many an influential outsider band (Lungfish, Matmos), their approach is more omnivorous than the stippled rhythms of instrumental electric rock would indicate.
Across sixteen years of frequent touring, Horse Lords have released ten studio, live, and collaboration albums in addition to a split EP with fellow Baltimoreans Lower Dens, a handful of singles and compilation tracks. For RVNG’s FRKWYS series, the band collaborated with Berlin-based composer Arnold Dreyblatt, a onetime student of La Monte Young and Pauline Oliveros whose just intonation chamber music was a crucial part of the post-Fluxus Downtown New York City environment. With the relocation of three of the four members to Germany beginning in 2021, the potential for more further creative exploration, and performance opportunities including the Moers Festival (with an 11-piece lineup, interpreting Julius Eastman’s music as well as their own), the interdisciplinary phases of the band’s music was poised for fascinating new directions. The band observes “We are always trying to balance working within the limitations of the quartet and pushing beyond them.For their second studio album on RVNG Intl., Demand To Be Taken To Heaven Alive!, Horse Lords have followed this notion and augmented the instrumentation, expanding the format slightly to include bass clarinetist Madison Greenstone (TAK Ensemble), trombonist Weston Olencki (Nate Wooley, RAGE Thormbones) and vocalists Nina Guo (Departure Duo) and Evelyn Saylor (Holly Herndon, Caterina Barbieri) across a program of twelve original compositions. Demand To Be Taken To Heaven Alive! is a reference to a line in a poem by Russian Futurist writer Vladimir Myakovsky, and the band have also name-checked the Bauhaus weaver Anni Albers (wife of painter Josef Albers), Islamic geometrical patterning, Dutch avant-garde group the Maciunas Ensemble (themselves named after Fluxus artist and typographer George Maciunas), composer/writers Tom Johnson, Henry Flynt and Catherine Christer Hennix, and musically draw from sources as diverse as Roscoe Holcolmb, James Brown, Kuwaiti/Bahraini sawt, and electronic composers Maryanne Amacher and Jaap Vink. As the members are keen to point out, Demand To Be Taken To Heaven Alive! is “a bid for the flattening of time and perception in favor of greater goods [and] the iterative nature of reaching/building a paradise in this life, not the next,” and the new album at hand is an illuminating starting point for eternal nowness.
Silk Fence is a New York–based instrumental electro-acoustic trio between three longtime friends and collaborators—Arian Shafiee (Guerilla Toss, etc.) on electric guitar, Booker Stardrum (SML, etc.) on drums and percussion, and Justin Frye (PC Worship, etc.) on double bass and tapes. The group stretches the sonic possibilities of their instruments while exploring long-form, texture-driven minimalism and time-based improvisation.
Recorded throughout 2024 and 2025 between Brooklyn and Bethel, New York, Silk Fence presents the trio at its most focused. Over the course of 35 minutes, the group creates unhurried snapshots that appear and dissolve––at times into immersive soundscapes, and at other times into unflinching, propulsive grooves. The album unfolds as a study in subtle changes within repetition, blending kraut-jazz intuition and slowly shifting acoustic and electronic textures. It batters and lilts, resisting easy categorization: crossing stylistic boundaries to arrive, ultimately, at a sound all its own, deeply rooted in the musicians’ shared devotion to improvised music in all forms. At just four tracks, Silk Fence is a complete, unfussy musical statement.
With traditional forms always in the rearview, the music carries a sense of ease that feels equally inviting and quietly engrossing, creating an expansive musical space that lands somewhere between ESP and ECM with a subtle nod to experimental American folk.
Silk Fence will be released by Ryan Davis' Sophomore Lounge Records in October 2026.
No Thankyou is a 2-piece experimental bossa punk band from Western Massachusetts. Their music is intricate and punchy, centering in an exotic and noisy sound. The songs began as jazz inspired guitar compositions written by Britt Brideau and took on a new life with the addition of Chris Bryne, a hardcore/ punk drummer from Seattle. Be sure to stay tuned for their debut album Yes Please.
