3 out of 5

Label: RVNG Int’l

Produced by: Adam Asnan (recorded by)

Reading the liner notes for Horse Lords and Arnold Dreyblatt’s combo album Extended Field – part of label RVNG’s FRKWYS series which mashes up similar artists of different generations – both HL and Arnold mention that the artists had to decipher how to work with each other. While this may seem obvious for any type of split release, for composers who start with the math and work from there – everyone here exists in the above-my-head world of microtonals – I think that “deciphering” is truly more of an equation that needs balancing, versus a more organic groove one might find in a jam session. That’s not to minus out the musicianship here, as you can clearly hear elements of each artist in the mix, buuuutt… this arrangement also leads to what sound like compromises: the math juggled until it’s solved. It’s not, like, additive; with apologies to any lingering music theorists or mathematicians out there reading this stuff, who I’m sure I’ve done killed dead by this point with my wordy butchering – it’s not additive, it’s flattened.

We’ll also bear in mind FRKWYS general m.o., which leans into more atmospherics than not; how much that impacted the approach here, I’m not sure, but the four tracks on Extended Field do feel more in line with that style than wholly Horse Lords or Dreyblatt’s (very generalized) body of work, while at the same time, each side of this LP kind of approximates Dreyblatt slowly guiding HL to their more syncopated style, which, when released, is funky in familiar ways but is also held back to make room for Dreyblatt. I’m very much minimalizing, as there’s certainly a lot going on at the fringes to make this happen, but that’s how the end product ends up sounding to my ears. It’s much more jammy feeling than either of the artists individually (focusing on Dreyblatt’s of-this-era stuff, at least), without offering the kind of punctuations jam sessions tend to eventually get to.

Now if you try to set all preconceptions aside, and you just stumbled across this album and gave it a spin, it’s undeniably interesting, and surprises, on subsequent spins, with how busy it is with a rather minimalist approach. At the same time, there’s undeniable similarity in overall structure of both sides of the album, and between a fairly muted production (Adam Asnan), and the way the artists are being careful around the others’ precious notes, it’s better listened to as a loop over a singular sit-down experience.