Thursday 20 April 2017, 7.30pm
“One of the strongest avant-garde bands in New York.” – Ben Sisario, New York Times on ZS
Two of the most exciting bands currently playing in the US, we're very pleased to host New York's ZS and Baltimore's Horse Lords (Thursday only) in April. Both strain at the edges of a thrillingly unquantifiable number of genres in a trance-inducing mash of prepared tuning and polyrhythms that absolutely has to be experienced live.
“This is a band that believes that experimental music has the potential to be more than merely aesthetic, and every one of their choices—like taking apart their instruments and rebuilding them according to an alternate musical logic—speaks to a desire to upend the status quo.” – Pitchfork on Horse Lords
Zs was founded in 2000 and has existed as a trio, sextet, and quartet, now solidifying into the trio formation of Sam Hillmer, Patrick Higgins, and Greg Fox. While our music has been variously categorized as no-wave, brutal-prog, and post-minimalist, Zs is primarily concerned with making music that challenges the physical and mental limitations of both performer and listener. Manipulating extended technique, unique instrumental synthesis, and near telepathic communication, Zs aims to create works that envelop the listener and unfold sonically over time, evoking unspoken past, present, and future rites and ritual.
“Within an hour it was all over and done with, but in that span Zs managed to cover more ground than a less ambitious band might approach over the course of its entire career. Their sound is unlike just about any other band out there today, and they played one of the most outright fascinating sets I've seen this ” – Noise Floor
West African rhythms collide with just intonation guitars, art-fire saxophone, minimalist grooves, and collaged zapdowns on Interventions, the powerful third full-length from Baltimore’s Horse Lords. The band’s Northern Spy debut is also the first Horse Lords album to explore the classic studio-as-weaponry strategies of yore, mapping the quartet’s raw Baltimore lightning onto the experimental musique concrète territory surveyed by elder heads like Faust and This Heat.
“Far from residing in some sort of rarefied liminal space between the guitar/bass/drums band format and an array of seemingly juxtaposed musical traditions (the avant-garde, minimalism, American folk, African percussion), Horse Lords stand upright with one hoof confidently planted in the thick of each of these camps and insist that they can have it all if they (and we) damn-well please.” – Tiny Mix Tapes
