PROJECT NOWHERE 2026: HORSE LORDS + COMMON EARTH MINERAL + STEFANA FRATILA
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PROJECT NOWHERE IV: A MULTI-DIMENSIONAL MUSIC EXPERIENCE
Project Nowhere x Burn Down The Capital presents:
HORSE LORDS (Baltimore, Maryland)
COMMON EARTH MINERAL (Toronto)
STEFANA FRATILA (Toronto)
Visuals by Anthony Piazza
Thurs Oct 1 @ The Garrison
Tickets: https://link.dice.fm/Dd0eea80dabb
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Horse Lords
https://horselords.bandcamp.com/album/demand-to-be-taken-to-heaven-alive
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.
Common Earth Mineral
Long time friends Yianni Kourmadas (Hermit Thrushes) and D. A. Meeks (Holiday Rambler) merge their musical histories in a new heavy minimalistic duo, Common Earth Mineral.
Meeks, behind the drum kit in this scenario, is utterly locked into a world of cycling, methodically morphing patterns. Relentless sludgy riffs seem to settle under their own weight, embracing the hypnotic pull of rhythmic force, propelling heavy passages forward with ease and unity. The two instruments often feel like they are merging into a single percussive blast that is slowly unfurling, letting errant drones drift off of it like a vapor trail. A growing fog of lost tones swells & pulses underneath the synchronous crushing double blasts of percussion & bass. Raw notes are covered in coarse dissonance while cymbal hits and flourishes cut through the off-gassing sonic residue of crunching riffs. Decaying tones rumble only to be blown aside by the next shattering hit.
Common Earth Mineral embodies both the prodding methodical slowness of sludge / doom metal and the angular tense energy of minimalist punk. Switching between these worlds, they dabble in the valleys between with seamless continuity. Though the music requires a rigid structure to capture the suspenseful energy that is imperative to these forms, it never feels inorganic. Employing a trancelike quality of pounding austerity, the duo’s relentless quest for small movements made transformative is an addictive substance. Self-described as “long music,” the slow unfolding of ideas trapped in the constant brooding motion is meditative music for the restless soul. Even as one song resolves, its visceral rhythm still churns in your mind. With a textural palette that borrows from metal and a compositional sense that looks to krautrock and the 20th century’s classical mavericks, Common Earth Mineral fits perfectly into the legacy of noise rock duos straddling genres and creating outsized sounds. A common mineral is necessarily more than the sum of its parts.
Stefana Fratila
https://stefanafratila.bandcamp.com/
Stefana Fratila is a Romanian-born artist, composer and sound designer based in Toronto, Canada. She is also a DJ and co-founder of Crip Rave, an event platform showcasing and prioritizing Crip, Disabled, Deaf, Mad, and Sick body-minds within safer and more accessible rave spaces.� She created Sononaut, 8 open-source VST plug-ins that emulate the atmospheric conditions of the planets in our solar system in collaboration with NASA scientists and Jen Kutler.
She has exhibited and performed her work internationally, including at MoMA and e-flux (New York, USA), Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria), MUTEK (Montréal) / MUTEK.AE (Dubai), and the International Symposium on Electronic Art (Paris, France). She has also completed residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Wave Farm Transmission Arts, SAT (Société des arts technologiques), and CMMAS (Mexican Centre for Music and Sonic Arts). She was a winner of the Canadian Screen Award for Best Sound Editing (2022), Best Sound Design in a Feature Length Documentary (2024), and the Director’s Guild of Canada Award for Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing (2023). Her film scores have screened at Le Centre Pompidou, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma Montréal, Leeds International Film Festival, and The Viennale.
Resident Advisor called her most recent album, I want to leave this Earth behind, “a spellbinding LP of sound art that delights and unnerves in equal measure” while Bandcamp Daily highlighted it as “41 minutes of space travel that perfectly capture the immense possibilities of sound.” She has opened for artists like Mary Lattimore, Claire Rousay, Lucretia Dalt, and Julianna Barwick. Under her alias DJ Crip Time, she has appeared on NTS Radio (London), Rinse France (Paris), The Lot (New York), Refuge Worldwide (Berlin), Radio Nopal (CDMX), HKCR (Hong Kong), n10.as (Montréal), SutroFM (San Francisco), and Hotel Radio Paris.
This event is 19+
About Project Nowhere:
Project Nowhere returns to Toronto’s west end on 𝐎𝐂𝐓 𝟏-𝟑, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔, promising the best of underground heavy hitters and exciting up-and-comers from Toronto and beyond.
3-Day passes are available now: https://link.dice.fm/k219b88d4175
IG: @projectnowherefest
https://www.projectnowhere.org/
Join the mailing list at https://www.projectnowhere.org/ for exclusive access to presales, announcements, and giveaways.
Project Nowhere would like to thank its partners & funders:
Canada Heritage
Ontario Creates
Toronto Arts Council
City of Toronto
Exclaim! Magazine
Also Cool Mag
RANGE Magazine
Woodhouse Brewing / JCBC
Collective Arts
Adamson Systems Engineering
Sideshow
This project has been made possible in part by the Government of Canada.
Project Nowhere x Burn Down The Capital presents:
HORSE LORDS (Baltimore, Maryland)
COMMON EARTH MINERAL (Toronto)
STEFANA FRATILA (Toronto)
Visuals by Anthony Piazza
Thurs Oct 1 @ The Garrison
Tickets: https://link.dice.fm/Dd0eea80dabb
__
Horse Lords
https://horselords.bandcamp.com/album/demand-to-be-taken-to-heaven-alive
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.
Common Earth Mineral
Long time friends Yianni Kourmadas (Hermit Thrushes) and D. A. Meeks (Holiday Rambler) merge their musical histories in a new heavy minimalistic duo, Common Earth Mineral.
Meeks, behind the drum kit in this scenario, is utterly locked into a world of cycling, methodically morphing patterns. Relentless sludgy riffs seem to settle under their own weight, embracing the hypnotic pull of rhythmic force, propelling heavy passages forward with ease and unity. The two instruments often feel like they are merging into a single percussive blast that is slowly unfurling, letting errant drones drift off of it like a vapor trail. A growing fog of lost tones swells & pulses underneath the synchronous crushing double blasts of percussion & bass. Raw notes are covered in coarse dissonance while cymbal hits and flourishes cut through the off-gassing sonic residue of crunching riffs. Decaying tones rumble only to be blown aside by the next shattering hit.
Common Earth Mineral embodies both the prodding methodical slowness of sludge / doom metal and the angular tense energy of minimalist punk. Switching between these worlds, they dabble in the valleys between with seamless continuity. Though the music requires a rigid structure to capture the suspenseful energy that is imperative to these forms, it never feels inorganic. Employing a trancelike quality of pounding austerity, the duo’s relentless quest for small movements made transformative is an addictive substance. Self-described as “long music,” the slow unfolding of ideas trapped in the constant brooding motion is meditative music for the restless soul. Even as one song resolves, its visceral rhythm still churns in your mind. With a textural palette that borrows from metal and a compositional sense that looks to krautrock and the 20th century’s classical mavericks, Common Earth Mineral fits perfectly into the legacy of noise rock duos straddling genres and creating outsized sounds. A common mineral is necessarily more than the sum of its parts.
Stefana Fratila
https://stefanafratila.bandcamp.com/
Stefana Fratila is a Romanian-born artist, composer and sound designer based in Toronto, Canada. She is also a DJ and co-founder of Crip Rave, an event platform showcasing and prioritizing Crip, Disabled, Deaf, Mad, and Sick body-minds within safer and more accessible rave spaces.� She created Sononaut, 8 open-source VST plug-ins that emulate the atmospheric conditions of the planets in our solar system in collaboration with NASA scientists and Jen Kutler.
She has exhibited and performed her work internationally, including at MoMA and e-flux (New York, USA), Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria), MUTEK (Montréal) / MUTEK.AE (Dubai), and the International Symposium on Electronic Art (Paris, France). She has also completed residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Wave Farm Transmission Arts, SAT (Société des arts technologiques), and CMMAS (Mexican Centre for Music and Sonic Arts). She was a winner of the Canadian Screen Award for Best Sound Editing (2022), Best Sound Design in a Feature Length Documentary (2024), and the Director’s Guild of Canada Award for Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing (2023). Her film scores have screened at Le Centre Pompidou, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma Montréal, Leeds International Film Festival, and The Viennale.
Resident Advisor called her most recent album, I want to leave this Earth behind, “a spellbinding LP of sound art that delights and unnerves in equal measure” while Bandcamp Daily highlighted it as “41 minutes of space travel that perfectly capture the immense possibilities of sound.” She has opened for artists like Mary Lattimore, Claire Rousay, Lucretia Dalt, and Julianna Barwick. Under her alias DJ Crip Time, she has appeared on NTS Radio (London), Rinse France (Paris), The Lot (New York), Refuge Worldwide (Berlin), Radio Nopal (CDMX), HKCR (Hong Kong), n10.as (Montréal), SutroFM (San Francisco), and Hotel Radio Paris.
This event is 19+
About Project Nowhere:
Project Nowhere returns to Toronto’s west end on 𝐎𝐂𝐓 𝟏-𝟑, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔, promising the best of underground heavy hitters and exciting up-and-comers from Toronto and beyond.
3-Day passes are available now: https://link.dice.fm/k219b88d4175
IG: @projectnowherefest
https://www.projectnowhere.org/
Join the mailing list at https://www.projectnowhere.org/ for exclusive access to presales, announcements, and giveaways.
Project Nowhere would like to thank its partners & funders:
Canada Heritage
Ontario Creates
Toronto Arts Council
City of Toronto
Exclaim! Magazine
Also Cool Mag
RANGE Magazine
Woodhouse Brewing / JCBC
Collective Arts
Adamson Systems Engineering
Sideshow
This project has been made possible in part by the Government of Canada.
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Where is it happening?
The Garrison, 1197 Dundas St W,Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
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Host or PublisherProject Nowhere
