Films that Influenced Horse Lords’ ‘Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive!’ 

To celebrate the release of Horse Lords’ sixth studio album Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive!, band members Max Eilbacher (bass/electronics) and Owen Gardner guitar/electronics) share a list of movies they watched during the making of the record, available now via RVNG Intl. Follow Max and Owen on Letterboxd. Read their accompanying notes for each pick. Anaconda An all-time hotel classic—over 15 years of touring, we have developed and refined an appreciation for the blockbusters of the past that now linger in the purgatory of cable TV. I feel like I have said “I barely slept, Anaconda was on last night” at many early lobby calls. How do you take what works for and against Anaconda and distill it into a 3-minute song? The Catch I watched this after a difficult studio session trying to figure out how to enjoy writing bass lines remotely. It haunted me on multiple levels, something I could still feel when I resumed the aborted writing session. How did Somai create something so pedestrian yet so disturbing? Where do artistic intent and the viewer’s subjective projections meet and depart? I was watching the film, wrecked by it, but also thinking about the same three bass notes. Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day A high water mark for leftist art using the tools of mass entertainment. An openly stagey and propagandistic romance whose characters are so lovingly wrought that their struggles and successes feel like ours, and through whom Marxist tenets are communicated with rare sincerity and directness, heeding Douglas Sirk’s (and country music’s) lesson that realism is not necessarily the most direct path to the real. F for Fake Music production is no less built on lies, but despite my best efforts I haven’t yet succeeded in exploiting this as gleefully as Welles, who apparently thought this was a masterpiece but seems to treat it like a joke? Silliness is serious. Heimat 2: A Chronicle of a Generation Conveys so vividly the joy and agony of creation and of creative community. This 1,500-minute journey through one of Germany’s tempestuous decades accompanied and mirrored the sometimes tortured path through composing, recording and mixing this record. Loose Corner We strive for a similar approach to examining sonic and/or musical phenomena—maybe best heard on “Playing and Reality”—exploring an illusion in a way that conveys wonder and curiosity rather than mastery. Great soundtrack as well, the sound of piano on tape bringing added wistfulness. The Suspect Political intrigue and betrayal unfold under the beautiful arcades and interiors of Turin. Intricate ornamentation and texture alone are not enough, and a hushed yet thrilling plot alone is not enough. Form needs both. How do you weave them together in a way that preserves, mutes, and amplifies? This film does a pretty great job of all this. 3 Women The Miles Davis 1974 live band and Pete Cosey left the feedback setting on a little too high and Davis did not do anything about it till near the end of the concert but it’s a movie made by the GOAT Altman. He takes the logic of dreams seriously and so do we. A Touch of Zen That in the midst of what one would expect to be the most intense action sequences the focus shifts to the stillness of the forest, the rustling of clothes and the imaginary whipping windy sounds of jumping: magical, and an effect we’ll continue trying to emulate. What's Up Connection It melts any notion of form and casts its sticky material into a barber pole spinning between a shop selling enlightenment and one selling sugary snacks. I had never experienced this level of play with the notion of fixed characters, cinematic categories, linear markings, all held together inside the container of a cartoonish movie plot—one so flexible that it can suddenly become a slapstick ethnographic film and just as unexpectedly return. Very inspiring.