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We want people to get messy to our music

Walk Your Horses: Daniel Atwood and Schuyler Ruberry (Photo by Akil Simmons)

Electronic dance music isn’t normally the type of thing you hear at parties on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, but a new band is aiming to change that, one fan at a time.Walk Your Horses, made up of music lovers Schuyler Ruberry, Daniel Atwood and Kade Stallard, will soon release their first mini-album ‘Tiger’s Lane’.Two of their songs can now be downloaded for free from walkyourhorses.bandcamp.com/ .Mr Ruberry said the band just wanted to get their music out there.“We just want people to listen to it, download it and give it a try,” he said.“We don’t want to charge people to experience what we are trying to get across, but at the same time we want to eventually make a living and image out of it.“We are just growing right now and don’t want to charge people for something they have never heard of, we just want people to hear it, love it or hate it, whatever emotional trigger they get from it.“We just want them to be open-minded. We need more of that on the Island on a whole.”Walk Your Horses was formed about a year ago by Mr Ruberry and Mr Atwood. The young men realised they had a similar taste in music and had been talking about starting a band for a while.Mr Ruberry, 22, had been writing songs with an app called Garage Band on his iPad.He introduced the app to his friend “and pretty much ever since we have been trying to one up each other,” Mr Atwood said. “We used to kind of fight to grab it from each other to finish each others melodies and it spun out of that and grew from there.”Mr Ruberry said it started out as a love for creating electronic music, but turned into something serious. They invited mutual friend Mr Stallard to join the band and hoped to benefit from training he is getting in New York on the music design software they use.They came up with the name of the band while driving through St George’s ‘Walk Your Horses’ was written on a sign on the swinging bridge.It made a lot of sense to the guys, who thought it had a good ring to it.The band has recently moved on to a more complicated programme for laptop music and say they are inspired by different genres.Just by manipulating sounds on their computers, they are able to create new rhythms and beats, which they call sound design or audio science — they may start incorporating lyrics in the future.Their goal is to ultimately start playing live and make a career out of their passion.Mr Ruberry said: “I just want to see people get hyped up and freak out to our music. I just want to see thousands of people get messy to our music, just having a good time and getting wild, whatever that may be.“It’s in a lot of ways from the heart and really does come straight from the soul, so to see people dance or have some sort of emotional reaction or trigger to our music would be like watching a musician watching people cry to their music.”So far the reaction from the rock-loving public has been good, particularly with listeners in London and Florida.Mr Ruberry said people were mostly hearing about them through word of mouth or internet search engines. Some people were sharing links to their songs on Facebook and spreading the word to people on the other side of the world that way. “It’s reaching out to a lot of people really fast,” he explained.Though music genres like hip hop and reggae are most mainstream on the Island, the band members said they had been curious about other kinds of music from a young age.Mr Atwood said: “Initially it was my parents who influenced my taste in music, because my dad has quite a large collection of 1960s and 70s classic rock and even Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk. I guess it started with that.“I didn’t have that ‘I should only listen to these kinds of music’. I was always exploring, so when the internet came about and it was more accessible to listen to music it helped out a lot.“I remember going away and buying 20 CDs just because of the look of the cover of the album and trying out different things from there.”Mr Ruberry said his taste evolved out of a similar curiosity. “I was always curious what else is out there and what things sounded like,” he explained.“You will get different music that has different energies and emotional values, like hip hop is sometimes rough and strong and a lot of metal isn’t as dark as people think. “They are hopeful there might be some interest for their electronic music from the student population coming back from the US and UK.“They are exposed to a lot of electronic music so there’s definitely an opportunity on the Island,” Mr Atwood said.To find out about upcoming live performances, visit Walk Your Horses’ Facebook page.* To listen to some of their music go to their website: http://walkyourhorses.bandcamp.com/