Horse Lords - Frkwys Vol. 18: Extended Field

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

Arnold Dreyblatt started experimenting with just intonation in 1970s New York, the tuning method where intervals come from simple whole-number ratios rather than the tempered scale most Western music runs on, decades before Horse Lords built their entire Baltimore-based sound around the same idea. That gap in time is exactly what makes this 2025 record interesting, not a tribute or a nostalgia exercise but two approaches to the same radical harmonic idea colliding in real time, both parties equally obsessed with rhythm as the thing holding it all together.

Advance opens the record establishing the shared vocabulary immediately, dense polyrhythm locking against harmonics that shimmer rather than resolve cleanly. The title track stretches past eleven minutes, the clearest statement of what happens when both camps commit fully to the same tuning. Suspension pulls back into something more spacious, and Impulse Array closes the record at its most hypnotic, rhythm carrying the harmonic strangeness rather than fighting it.

Two aesthetics, genuinely discreet from each other, finding more common ground than either camp probably expected.