Chicago

The Wednesday Tour De Weird

by Daniel Shoemaker and Allison Hadley | Mar 18, 2024 4:56 pm

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Honestly, Same/Ka Baird/Horse Lords
Empty Bottle
4/13/24

Bookended by instrumental bands, second opener Ka Baird at the Empty Bottle was a capella rendered in giallo, running vocals through a monstrosity of processors, samplers and synthesizers. From degraded vocal grunts to the disembodied howls that conjured a Boston Dynamics dog-bot gone feral, Ka Baird’s sound feasted on the oscillating incomprehensible, howling through a mouth full of marrow.

Some people attend concerts to sing along, some to dance, and others to experience something unique — something beyond the daily order, something to inspire beyond the typical carousel of common concerns. Critics have long posited a spectrum of music listeners. There are those who seek music that is familiar, nostalgic, consonant, and comforting, womblike. Others seek a challenge, a surprise, moments that eclipse the ordinary and the need to understand. Horse Lords and their openers — Honestly, Same and Ka Baird — leaned into the milieu of a ​“fuck around and find out” crowd.

The first opener of the evening, Honestly, Same, brought a five-piece acoustic and synth ensemble — Zachary Good, Lia Kohl, Mabel Kwan, Zach Moore, and Sam Scranton — onto the stage, where they performed luscious, botanical music that felt like Fitzcarraldo’s fever dream.

Ambient-adjacent improv grooves bubbled up as conversational instrumentals over a driving synth beat that propelled the sonic narrative. Smiling faintly, instruments ranging from cello to flute to pedal steel layered onto each other and created a captivating sound that soothed and intrigued — the perfect crowd builder and a great way to usher in a journey through somersaulting sound. 

Ka Baird, by contrast, was full of bile and vitriol. Dissonant spiraling stabs spun into tremulous bursts of chaos.

Many concertgoers sported hand stamps from the Laetitia Sadier show at the Empty Bottle the night before; in many ways the two evenings felt like a double feature for music nerds, each night catering to a slightly different generation. This evening’s crowd trended slightly younger and a bit more reverent toward the music, staying quiet and at least mostly entranced during the sets. Many clutched newly purchased records or held them in canvas bags sporting logos of record stores near and far.

Horse Lords — Andrew Bernstein on saxophone and percussion, Max Eilbacher on bass and electronics, Owen Gardner on guitar, and Sam Haberman on drums — topped off the evening with their dense compositions, each instrument tracing its own pattern of the intricately woven whole, a mycelial network of rhythms. Each instrument writhed alone, together. Eighth notes became septuplets, and then sextuplets as new rhythms slithered past one another. The rhythms took the form of choose-your-own-adventure tales, allowing the audience to pick which beat they vigorously nodded along with. A listener keyed into the metallic clangs of the guitar might find a totally different meter to vibe to than a listener stalking the saxophone skronks, which both resolved to different downbeats than the bass and drums. To oversimplify Horse Lords as math rock is to assume that the math always worked out; Horse Lords’ calculations permitted dividing by zero and finding the square roots of negative numbers. While a few successfully danced, almost all vibed; entranced, eyes closed, and nodding to one of many beats, perhaps tapping fingers to another. 

Horse Lords can be monolithic, a femur held aloft, epoch changing, perhaps. But it’s also music built on intersections, flux, chaos — a complex means of understanding the simple and a simple means to the complex.