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 its 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.  

The record began with skeletal chords and a surge of self-reflection, from where  we are vulnerable alive to the notions and motions of time and reality.  

Jonathan:  

“I recited the words along the banks of the Hudson, into my phone – that’s why  you can hear steamships and seagulls… I’d return to the studio and align the  vocals to the music. It just happened that way. Sometimes you try to take a few  steps back from yourself, to separate yourself from fire. The voice has a certain  cadence that’s quite unsure of itself. It’s like stepping on to a frozen lake. If you  take the next step, will you fall in? Something tells me that that is where I prefer  to be, rather than going down the same highway again.”  

Grasshopper:  

“When Jonathan and I first met, one thing we bonded over was Blade Runner,  both Ridley Scott’s film and Vangelis’ soundtrack: that feel of the past and the  future, the haunting noir mood and the romance…Born Horses taps into some of  that. Looking back to childhood, to Broadway tunes, Chet Baker, Miles Davis’  Sketches Of Spain, records that our parents listened to, but we put a twist into  the future. From the beginning, Mercury Rev were on a cusp, between analogue  and digital, hi-fi and lo-fi at the same time. It was like Brecht or Weill, the words  suggesting visuals, and the visuals suggesting moods. We also thought a lot  about the desert on this record, and the urban desert.”  

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’.  

Jonathan:  

“When I opened my voice to sing on this record, this was the bird that sang: a  lower, whiskery voice, which surprised me as much as it may others who only  know my upper ranges in the past. I don’t know where the bird came from, but  it’s there now, and I don’t question it. It’s just the bird that wants to sing.”

The album title, named after the majestically rippling sixth track ‘Born Horses’,  was chosen because its 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.  

Jonathan:  

“It’s that part of ourselves that is breaking up, or in some ways, winding down,  to allow another new part of us to enter. We begin life by adding clay, throwing  more on top, and later in life, you let the desert winds of age blow things away.  The pencil doesn’t realise it’s dwindling down the more you write with it. The  

lead keeps going down, and life keeps sharpening you at the same time. How  much is left in me that is going to write before I run out? These scribbled  smudges are all I can go by. We didn’t make this album by throwing clay on top  of clay; we allowed time to erode what no longer matters, to reveal what was  always there.”  

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.  

Jonathan:  

“Marion had an incredible out-of-the-blue effect on the music. Her brushstrokes  were like a cosmic microwave background to the songs, which heated the record  alchemically, and boiled off everything that was unnecessary.”  

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.  

Grasshopper:  

“Tony was a trickster, who loved to shake things up. He knew how to put things  together than might not fit but became something new. Robert – the beauty of

his sparseness with words, but playful too, and a sense of romanticism. For me,  there is some subconscious echo in Born Horses of Patti Smith’s Horses, the  recitations, the poetry…. it’s like a tip of the hat.”  

Jonathan:  

“Tony not only had the history of New York’s Lower East Side, he also had the  minimal approach, that sumo-like stance, to be true to the art. Robert Creeley’s  minimal writing with maximal impact had a blues-like impression on me, almost  like haiku; that less is more, even for a guy who wrote as many words as I did  on this record. Boiling things down or, off, alchemically.  “We want to point people to these two very important men, who were outside of  what is considered the popular culture of that time. If there was a blueprint for  Mercury Rev, it came from them rather than The Beatles, and we’ve done  everything in our power to stay true to them.”

ABOUT RYLEY WALKER

Ryley Walker currently resides in New York City. But his latest LP is a Chicago record in spirit. The masterful Course In Fable, the songwriter’s fifth solo effort, draws from the deep well of that city’s fertile 1990s scene, when bands like Tortoise, The Sea and Cake and Gastr del Sol were reshaping the underground, mixing and matching indie rock, jazz, prog and beyond. 

Walker spent his formative years in Chicago, absorbing those heady sounds and finding ways to make them his own. Even though he emerged at first in folk- rock troubadour mode, it makes sense that he’s arrived at this point; each LP has grown more intricate and assured, his influences distilling into something original and unusual. To put it simply: Course In Fable is Walker’s best record yet, full of active imagination and endless possibilities. 

Last October, Ryley went straight to one of the primary architects of the Chicago sound to make the LP. John McEntire, Course In Fable’s producer/engineer/ mixer, can rightly be called a legend for his work with Tortoise, Stereolab, The Red Krayola, Jim O’Rourke and countless others over a prolific career that now spans more than three decades. Seeing his name in an album’s liners is pretty much a trademark of quality. 

Another Windy City exile, McEntire is based on the west coast these days, working out of the Portland, OR studio he’s dubbed Soma West. On the seven songs here, he delivers the signature shimmering and pristine sonics he’s become known for over the years. But McEntire was also intimately involved with Course In Fable’s overall creative process. “I told him to take the mixes and have at it,” Walker says. 

The result is a rich, immersive affair — a headphones record if ever there was one. Course In Fable’s songs are twisty, labyrinthine things, stuffed full of ideas (Walker half-jokingly calls it his “prog record”). But no matter how complex it gets, the album is never overwhelmingly busy. Wiry guitars melt into gorgeous string sections (arranged by Douglas Jenkins of the Portland Cello Project). Tricky time signatures abound but feel as natural as can be. Melodies open drift in unexpected directions but remain downright hummable. Like Walker’s beloved Genesis, the pop element is never too far from the surface even when shit gets weird. (And speaking of weird, Ryley says that in addition to Genesis, much of the album’s inspiration comes from “Australian extreme scooter riders on YouTube and balding gear heads on Craigslist.” Go figure.) 

To help put together these various puzzle pieces, Ryley assembled a band made up of several longtime collaborators. Bill MacKay (another Chicago mainstay) and Walker have made two excellent instrumental duo records of interlocking guitars and warm give-and-take — a rapport very much in evidence throughout Course In Fable. The freakishly talented drummer Ryan Jewell has performed with Walker for years now in a variety of settings, from straight forward song-centric sets to blown-out improv extravaganzas. Bassist Andrew Scott Young (Tiger Hatchery, Health&Beauty) has logged many miles on tour with Walker; he and Jewell are frequently astonishing, a buoyant-but-always-locked-in rhythm section, able to navigate sometimes dizzying turnarounds with apparent ease. Listening to the interplay between Walker and these musicians and you might be fooled into thinking they’d spent a year road- testing Course In Fable’s songs. But it all came together relatively fast, thanks to demos, rehearsals and the kind of musical empathy that comes from years of playing together. 

Beneath the wondrous interplay, you’ll find some of Walker’s most personal – if still typically cryptic — lyrics, hinting at some of the trials the songwriter has been dealing with in recent years. Balanced with necessary doses of dark humor and oddball poetry, Course In Fable feels most of all like a life-affirming record, fresh air in the lungs, sun on your skin. “Fuck me, I’m alive,” Ryley sings at one point, a moment of both disbelief and pure joy. 

Walker has released his albums on a who’s-who of independent labels over the past decade — Tompkins Square, Dead Oceans, Thrill Jockey and Drag City among them. This time around, he’s doing it DIY-style, putting Course In Fable out on his own Husky Pants imprint. You’re in good hands. This is an album that sounds great (mastered by Greg Calbi), looks great (artwork by Jenny Nelson and design by Michael Vallera). It probably even smells great. Whether you’ve been onboard since the beginning or are new to the Ryley Walker universe, you’re in for a treat. 

ABOUT LIZ LAMERE

Pledging to Keep it Alive with her debut album in 2022 (In The Red), Liz Lamere doubles down with her latest full-length second album, One Never Knows, released on In The Red, June 14. Dedicated to her late partner Alan Vega, with whom she collaborated on his solo works for over three decades, Lamere’s minimalist approach to creating music is clearly in line with the Vega aesthetic that she helped develop with him during countless experimental hours in the studio since the late 80s.

Today sees the release of lead single, “Vibration,” with an accompanying video directed by filmmaker and photographic artist, Jasmine Hirst. Says Lamere; "Vibration is about personal empowerment. The pulse represents our life force and the power that comes from within. It's about commanding that force and manifesting what we want to see in the mirror's reflection. It's about believing until the impossible becomes the probable."

"The video intentionally captures the expressions of one's personal movements within the song. Movements that are both poetically calm and violently harsh are juxtaposed to transform into various stages of oneself and the subliminal influences that are contained within the song. The video was shot by Jasmine Hirst in one day in New York City."

Lamere teamed up again with her and Vega’s son Dante Vega Lamere in their Dujang Prang NYC home studio surrounded by the Suicide singer’s spectacular light sculptures, co-producer Jared Artaud, and mixing and mastering engineers Ted Young and Josh Bonati. One Never Knows is thematically charged with Lamere’s genre-defying boundless sonic energy and unparalleled poetically driven lyrics. Each song threads the needle with the defiant lust for life energy that motivated Lamere through her early double life as both high-end Wall

Street lawyer and downtown New York punk drummer, then meeting her life partner and performing, writing, recording and touring internationally with Alan Vega from 1985 until his death in 2016. Since then, together with Artaud she has co-produced two Vega albums from the vast Vega Vault archives, Mutator (Sacred Bones, 2021) and Insurrection, released on May 31, 2024 on In the Red Records. Vega had always encouraged Liz to create her own music. After he passed away, she began writing as a form of catharsis, which became the inspirational bedrock for her solo music. Lamere said, “at the end of Alan’s life, he was using the expression “one never knows” to underscore that we don't know how much time we have in this realm or where this journey will lead us. It was a phrase that had resonated so much for me. Alan taught me to go bravely into the unknown; to be fully present in the moment and deeply explore what is already here.” As for the themes on “ONK,” Lamere says, “this album touches on universal themes and variations on those ideas that are very personal to
me. I hope it will also resonate with listeners. Knowing we never fully know, accepting the certainty of uncertainty and striving to keep learning and growing is incredibly freeing.”