Hidden Horse’s music has a certain post-apocalyptic feel to it. Perhaps because of the colors that the music enunciates, or the feeling that one is living in some reality filmed on CCTV. Despite this, it is difficult to say that the music of the duo formed by João Kyron (keys/electronics) and Tony Watts (drums) is pessimistic or a reflection of some announced cataclysm. No, and maybe that’s the difference of creating hauntology music in a city like Lisbon: the feeling, the ghosts, are there, but the pressure of a gray sky falling on us is not; there is still tension, pressure, but there is more a feeling of ruin than everything collapsing. The difference is noticeable. It’s music that doesn’t weigh on your shoulders or your head. It makes you dance.

After “Opal” (2022), Hidden Horse present at ZDB their new work, “Incorporeal”. Launch day and the realization of more than a year of work, in which Kyron and Watts realized how they could bring the live dynamics, when they interpreted the themes of “Opal” in concerts, to the studio. “Incorporeal” feels freer, the sound breathes, the influences of the past – krautrock and industrial – are now open assimilations, less attached to form and more willing to create sensations. The immateriality alluded to in the title is not only about the fears we associate with the world of hauntology, the future we can never realize, but also about the sensations that Hidden Horse’s music makes us feel in the present: wanting to take off from first impressions, going to other flights.

Live they become a trio, with Ana Farinha (Candy Diaz) helping to transform the precise studio sound into a very organic event, which allows Kyron and Watts to also let go and go to places close to the krautrock cosmos. AS