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Until, at the start of the Nineties, the current resurfaces, the streams reconnect, and the resurgence finds a name: post-rock. The first to condense its aesthetic is the journalist Simon Reynolds in 1993/94, with a series of articles in Melody Maker and The Wire focused on a range of British artists. Three names in particular stand out as key: Bark Psychosis, Disco Inferno and (less well known, but actually the first to whom Reynolds applied the label) Insides.

Today these bands aren't the most remembered among those associated with the term: names and styles like Slint e Mogwai, Tortoise e Sigur Rós, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Talk Talk are certainly more popular. The stylistic, temporal and geographical distance between these musicians and those for whom the concept of "post-rock" was formulated says a lot about how much water has passed under the bridge since 1993, and how much the boundaries of the category have shifted, transforming from their original shape.

But this article isn't concerned with what came after. On the contrary, its aim is to dwell on what came before. To try, through pointers and listening, to answer a few questions: where do the sounds originally associated with post-rock come from? Which inspirations, and more broadly which precursors, anticipated the emergence of the trend? And what transformations did the aesthetics of other genres go through as they reinvented themselves, developed, and partly faded away, eventually giving rise to the "using rock instrumentation for non-rock purposes" approach that convinced critics and fans alike that a new musical territory had come into being?

The compilation accompanying the article, which proceeds essentially in chronological order, tries to trace the threads leading to the sound of the three tracks by Bark Psychosis, Disco Inferno and Insides placed at the start as points of reference. Reaching as far back as the progressive rock of the mid-Seventies, it arrives at the heart of the Nineties by following the unraveling of beat-rock, the guitar sound turning into pure texture, the discovery of dub, of "fourth world music", of a new kind of electronics, of post-minimalism, and the growing space claimed by silence.

 

 

Perhaps the first trait to emerge, within the dilations and atmospheric abstractions of the most psychedelic progressive rock, is a new kind of research into the timbre of the rock instrument par excellence, the guitar. A pursuit that explores its capacity not to slash or capture, but to conjure moods, bring emotional fragments into relief, suspend them, watch them shift. Emblematic, in this sense, are the recordings of Mike Oldfield, by the Pink Floyd at their most mature, of the duo Eno/Fripp, which highlight, among other things, the potential of effects pedals and looping to create soundscapes that are at once material and ethereal.

Moving forward through the years, this textural will take on multicolored forms, from the sound scorching guitar work of Keith Levene of the Public Image Ltd. – openly indebted to the flair of Steve Howe of the Yes – and the biting rarefactions of the avant-ambient-fusion Norwegian guitarist Terje Rypdal, all the way to the totalist cathedrals of composers Glenn Branca e Rhys Chatham, who, turning the approach on its head minimalist through the no wave will unleash a monumental, "meteorological" potential of the instrument that will spawn countless disciples in this field. soft/loud will spawn countless disciples.

If two names are to be singled out, however, as pioneers of the approach that would later belong to the former post-rocker (and indeed to the latter too, on closer inspection), they are Robin Guthrie of the Cocteau Twins and Vini Reilly of the Durutti Column. Moving on from the prog/post-punk hybrid pioneered by John McGeoch (Magazine, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Visage, Pil), the two build, without ever showing off too much, a progressive approach to the guitar dream-pop. Their style is sometimes foolishly framed as anti-virtuosic, but it's simply oriented toward a different kind of virtuosity than usual: rather than centering quintessentially rock elements like physical gesture, the riffs, the scrape, the cascades of reverb of Guthrie and Reilly condense the trajectories of their predecessors into a fully-formed and endlessly imitated language, grounded in the ability to dose notes and arrange pedals to achieve that interplay of light and shadow made of crystalline textures and watery echoes. The fallout is immediate, and disparate styles like that of the British And Also The Trees, the Spanish Bélver Yin (by now fully classifiable as post-rock) or the eclectic and highly progressive Maurice Deebank (Felt) easily confirm the pervasiveness of the approach.

The final mutation, hinted at in the My Bloody Valentine, and then made explicit in Disco Inferno, is the substantial overcoming of the instrument's recognizability. With the effects chains essential to the sound shoegaze, the guitar's timbre appears transfigured, stripped of its attack noise and much of the harmonic traits that make it familiar (if we still recognize it today, beyond sheer habit, it's essentially only through the rhythmic iconicity of the strumming). With Disco Inferno, guitarist Ian Crause's band, there's a further step: by connecting the instrument to a sampler, each string is mapped to a different sample. The guitar's timbre disappears entirely, and the instrument becomes an enabler of ambient sounds, with only the different playing technique distinguishing it from an electronic keyboard or a computer.

 

At least as significant are the fates of the other two pillars of the rock triad: bass and drums. The former, already brought to the fore by new wave and by post-punk, gains new possibilities by encountering the rubbery depths of dub reggae and the rhythmic drive of funk. The rock-world reworkings by Jah Wobble (Public Image Ltd.) and Bill Laswell (active in a myriad of projects spanning avant-jazz and avant-prog: Material, Massacre, Curlew, Golden Palominos, Praxis, Last Exit…) are chiefly responsible for building a bridge toward the post- future, and these also spill over into the amphibious styles of A Certain Ratio and of the duo Eno/Byrne of the milestone “My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts“.

The fate of the drums, meanwhile, is intimately bound up with that of new electronic music, with the hammering anti-rock beats of certain acts kraut acting as a go-between (aided also by Giorgio Moroder) linking theunderground European scene and the emerging American house and techno cultures. Although one status legendary status has over the years been attributed to the beat motorik of Klaus Dinger of the Neu!, a clear disciple of the teachings of the Velvet Underground, it is the hollowed-out jazz touch brought to the post-rocker by Jaki Liebezeit (also traceable in Phew and in the collaboration with Czukay and Wobble, both featured in the playlist) that exerts the greatest influence on future Can . Steady yet versatile, never muscular but incredibly propulsive, and above all capable of shattering rock's heavy accentuation into a myriad of distinct points of focus, Liebezeit's style became a key model for anyone who, in the early Nineties, went looking for a drumming approach that broke with rock'n'roll and its countless offshoots. Another key touchstone for Britain in those years is the emerging jungle, itself geared toward rhythmic fragmentation, sometimes through the recovery of percussive elements world: its echoes, albeit heavily reworked, are clearly perceptible in singular experiments prog-dream-pop (though by now just a step away from post-rock) like those Spoonfed Hybrid e Butterfly Child.

 

 

The seeds of future post-rock are scattered across distant genres and eras, but in some cases what links them together, and to a potential audience, are a handful of cult labels. Label sometimes geared toward specific takes on a given style, and other times decidedly more multifaceted, but always able to embody an aesthetic of their own, a trait d’union capable of drawing enthusiasts toward multiple artists within their roster, and so fostering a cross-pollination of ideas and sounds.

Behind A Certain Ratio, Durutti Column (as well as Joy Division, New Order, The Wake) is the Mancunian Factory Records, a pillar of post-punk also linked to Belgium's Les disques du crépuscule, with a specific interest in post-minimalism (Wim Mertens, Gavin Bryars, Michael Nyman). Devotion to Mertens and Vini Reilly, but also and above all to the unclassifiable Tuxedomoon, brings the Italian label Materiali Sonori close to this group of labels, a significant player in many of the intertwined strands running through this compilation. In the catalogue of the label of San Giovanni Valdarno (Arezzo), alongside the names already mentioned, one finds boundary-crossing artists like Alexander Robotnick and Legendary Pink Dots, The Shamen e Arturo Stalteri (ex-Pierrot Lunaire), and above all a vast array of names linked to darkwave the most hybridized, and to the composite realm of "fourth world music", theorized by trumpeter Jon Hassell in cahoots with the usual Brian Eno: "A unified primitive/futurist sound that combines traits of world/ethnic styles with advanced electronic techniques."

Starting from not-yet-electronic forerunners such as Third Ear Band, the Germans Embryo or Italy's own Zeit, and arriving at the enveloping ambient/world project "Marco Polo" (with Roger Eno and Harold Budd, David Sylvian, David Torn, Arturo Stalteri, alongside masterminds Nicola Alesini and Piero Andreoni), we come across bands such as the Israeli Minimal Compact and Italy's own Minox, with decidedly darker, more wave-inflected tones. Materiali Sonori's contribution to the path toward post-rock also shows up in singular experiences such as those of Florence's Cudù (watery wave music spilling into mutant jazz) or Perugia's Militia, perhaps the ensemble closest to post-rock proper, with a kind of strongly atmospheric total music, perfectly balanced between melodic focus, post-punk moods, an experimental bent and progressive dynamism.

 

4AD is the other crucial name in this underground journey. From this dream-pop, goth and alternative rock temple/label come the records of Cocteau Twins, but also peaks of post-punk abstraction such as the solo albums of Colin Newman of Wire (a self-declared bridge between progressive and post-rock aesthetics). And the British band that perhaps more than any other anticipated the fully-formed shapes of early post-rock: Dif Juz. Authors of a dynamic, strongly instrumental dream-pop, they reconciled the crystalline arpeggios descended from Reilly and Guthrie with jazz-rock touches and a markedly progressive flair, thereby anticipating not only the sound of Bark Psychosis, but also later bands such as Tangents, The Drift, Arms and Sleepers, Tristeza. Also tied to 4AD is the sub-label Guernica, which released albums by two names already mentioned, Insides and Spoonfed Hybrid.

Another pillar of independent and alternative rock, Rough Trade also plays its part: though more scattershot in its output, its catalogue touches a considerable portion of the artists featured in the playlist (and many others who could have made the cut!). In 1988, in particular, it released a record that stands as a landmark at the crossroads of dream-pop, dance music and liquefied post-punk: A.R. Kane's "69". Listening to it today, it's hard not to detect within it one of the first clear convergences of the many threads traced so far across the previous ten years. In the early Nineties, A.R. Kane founded their own label, H.ark!, through which came the first works by Butterfly Child and the two Papa Sprain EPs "Flying To Vegas" and "May", which led Simon Reynolds to include the band in his earliest introductions to post-rock.

 

 

Turning to yet another label — in the jazz field this time — brings us to a theme that deserves further exploration. If there's a single label that can be said to have authored a new approach to silence, it's certainly the German Ecm Records. Founded in 1969, it has since been renowned for its refined, eclectic taste, able to blend fusion, minimalism, ambient, world music, and modern classical into a third stream jazz as varied as it is instantly recognizable. What unites the many, hugely significant names on its Seventies/Eighties roster is above all an interest in sparse, muffled sonorities, at times seeming almost hollowed out: Pat Metheny, Keith Jarrett, Jan Garbarek, Terje Rypdal, Enrico Rava, John Abercrombie, Steve Tibbetts, Stephan Micus, Eberhard Weber, Jon Hassell, Ralph Towner of Oregon, Kenny Wheeler, John Taylor and Norma Winstone's Azimuth…

It's likely that interest in the Ecm style contributed to the growing attention paid to stillness in alternative rock on its way toward post-. But over the course of the Eighties, several pop and rock artists, before it all converged into a recognizable aesthetic, explored rarefaction in a manner similar to what Bark Psychosis and company would later do. For some of these, a direct influence on future post-rockers is easy to imagine: folk guitarist John Martyn, ex-Soft Machine member Robert Wyatt, and ex-Japan singer David Sylvian were figures well known and respected by the British alternative critics and audience. Less plausible is any awareness of the achievements of the American band Dark, who carried the crimsonian torch with a gamelan-rock made as much of emptiness as of density, or of Japan's Makoto Matsushita, author of a spellbinding and remarkably pared-down City pop.

 

But early post-rock didn't stand out only for its pull toward stillness. Just as important, if less conspicuous, is the richness of its sonic stimuli, understood both as a kaleidoscope of timbres and, in some cases, as forays into high volume. Mastering the roar, in short, is as essential to early post-rock as embracing silence.

From this point of view, the Eighties herald a major transformation: the advent of the sampler. Instruments like the Synclavier and the Fairlight CMI bring new experimental possibilities to big-budget pop, resulting not only in melodic-rock megahits but also in unlikely hits, such as those by Laurie Anderson and sound-manipulators Art Of Noise. Among the ranks of sound alchemists — and silence alchemists too — must certainly be counted American cellist Arthur Russell, who on "World Of Echo" combines looping, delay, distortion and acoustic timbres, opening a glimpse into a futuristic use of rock effects in a context that is no longer rock (if it ever was).