The Cedar Presents
HORSE LORDS with Sidi ould Ahmed Zeydan
Saturday, July 11, 2026 / Doors: 7:00 PM / Show: 8:00 PM
All Ages
Standing
$25 Advance, $30 Day of Show
*For Cedar Presented shows, a $4 facility fee is included in the ticket price (Ticket fee info here).
This is a standing show with an open floor. To request seating or other access accommodations, please go to our Access Page.
For Cedar presented shows, online ticket sales typically end one hour before the door time, and then, based on availability, tickets will be available at the door. Tickets purchased at the door will include a $1 Eventbrite fee.
LISTEN
ABOUT THIS SHOW
Horse Lords’ lengthy, hypnotic, polyrhythmic pieces draw from Krautrock, Afrobeat, and Appalachian folk traditions. The Baltimore-based quartet formed in 2010 and has spent the last 16 years touring relentlessly in the DIY music scene.
Horse Lords
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.
To learn more about Horse Lords:
Sidi ould Ahmed Zeydan
Sidi ould Ahmed Zeydan comes from the east of Mauritania, the home of the country's most respected griot families, where he learned the traditional lute repertoire from his grandfather Sid Ahmed ould Ahmed Zeydan, the foremost living authority on the subject. Applying these lessons to the guitar, modified with microtonal frets as is typical, Sidi quickly gained a reputation as one the country’s most innovative guitarists and was invited to accompany Mauritania's preeminent diva Dimi mint Abba until her death in 2010. He moved to the US in 2016, eventually settling in Eau Claire, WI, giving Midwesterners the opportunity—rare even in Mauritania—to hear Mauritanian classical music played by an absolute master.