Show results forExploreIn StockArtistsActorsAuthorsFormatThemeCategoryGenreRatedLabelSpecialtyDecadesSizeColorDeals
|
Born Horses(Gatefold LP Jacket)
Product Notes
In upstate New York, deep in the seam between the Catskills mountains and the Hudson Valley, a richly
swelling, spellbound sound emerges, eddying and flowing like the local Esopus Creek, or in the
slipstream of the grander Hudson river, carrying the flotsam and jetsam of our hopes, dreams, fears. A
sound composed of organic and electronic; guitars, keys, brass, strings, woodwind, drums - and a voice
of incantations, tapping streams of consciousness that similarly eddy and flow.
Spiritually, literally, psycho-geographically: where else does Mercury Rev's ninth album Born Horses
spring from? This cascade of gleaming, glistening psych-jazz-folk-baroque-ambient quest that searches
it's soul but can never truly know the answer? A sound and vision linked to their exalted past whilst quite
unlike anything they have created before?
The answer is somewhere between the homes of founder members Jonathan Donahue (the hamlet of Mt
Tremper) and Grasshopper (the town of Kingston), in their veins and brains of their now-legendary
tapping of musical cosmology, and the vital presence of new permanent member Marion Genser (keys),
plus long-term ally Jesse Chandler (keys) and guests Jeff Lipstein (drums), Martin Keith (double bass)
and Jim Burgess (trumpet). A place that feeds off the levitating mood of their last album, 2019's
expansive tribute Bobbie Gentry's The Delta Sweete Revisited, and the instrumental psych explorations
under the names of Harmony Rockets and Mercury Rev's Clear Light Ensemble, and the spiritual
guidance of avant-garde artist Tony Conrad and Beat poet Robert Creeley, to whom Born Horses is
dedicated.
Born Horses opens with 'Mood Swings'. A trumpet, evoking mariachi and the windswept terrain of the
desert prairie, opens up to a dynamic panorama of sound, wandering through and enveloping Jonathan's
intimate recitation, conflating memories and confessions of feelings trapped and unwrapped: "My mood
swings come and go as they like / rebellious fickle teenagers, unable to decide." It establishes Born
Horses' tone of vulnerability and awe, and a little frisson of fear, testifying to the frailty of human
experience, buffeted by the currents all around us. The flightiness of feelings is further explored by the
metaphor of a bird, most clearly in 'Bird Of No Address' and the album's pulsating finale 'There Has
Always Been A Bird In Me'.
The album title, named after the majestically rippling sixth track 'Born Horses', was chosen because it's
words resonate through the entire record, encompassing the idea of flight ("I dreamed we were born
horses waiting for wings") and the phrase "You and I" that appears at different junctures on the album.
This is not the concept of two separate people, but two parts of one self.
The concept of Born Horses began pre-pandemic, and then once Mercury Rev were allowed to tour and
record again, Marion Genser moved over from her native Austria to join Jonathan in the Catskills, and
Mercury Rev in full flight. A classically-trained painter as well as a musician, Marion has become an
invaluable addition to the Rev chemical compound.
More inspiration was provided by the spirits of Tony Conrad and Robert Creeley, acolytes of progressive
thought and action who both taught at the University at Buffalo when Jonathan and Grasshopper were
students. Amongst other credentials, Conrad was an associate of John Cale and The Velvet
Underground, Creeley an associate of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and the Black Mountain poets. Gatefold LP w/ a 4-page booklet and inner sleeve
|