Tortoise - The post-rock wind of Chicago

Tortoise, one of the key bands of the Nineties, emerged from one of the most important musical laboratories in the United States: Chicago. It was precisely in the underground scene of the Illinois "windy city" that the foundations were laid for a new kind of rock, almost entirely uncoupled from its traditional rails and bent on a frenetic search for every possible cross-contamination with other genres, jazz above all. A new scene thus took shape, as influential on contemporary music as it was low-key, populated by bands lacking the "strong" image typical of rock tradition.

Although they've always stayed away from the spotlight, Tortoise have become - whether they like it or not - the standard-bearers of this movement. Led by sound engineer Doug McCombs and bassist John McEntire, the Chicago post-rockers make elusive music that defies definition. It's an astonishing blend of dub, ambient and psychedelia, drawing heavily on the melting pot of Nineties American alternative rock (in particular the slo-core of Slint), but also on German kraut-rock (Neu!, Faust, Can), the Seventies Canterbury sound, electric jazz and minimalism. Among music critics, some call it "post-rock", others "avant-rock". Some have ventured even more fanciful labels - like the "Sunday Times", which described it as "eclectic-jazzy-avantgarde-postpunk-rasta friendly". The British music magazine "Melody Maker" wrote: "American rock has remained stuck on the notion of the song as story, as autobiographical confession or pseudo-literary portrait. That's why Tortoise's music runs against the grain." Another distinctive trait of the band is the balance they strike between sampling and genuinely played music. Tortoise, after all, aren't just skilled assemblers of ready-made sounds, but also excellent musicians, some with a strictly jazz background, all inclined to swap roles freely among themselves.

Like other outfits in the post-rock galaxy, the Chicago band doesn't write songs so much as long, sprawling, multiform suites, breaking with the convention of track length too, traditionally limited to between three and six minutes. The most intoxicating proof of this is "Djed", the overture to their second album Millions Now Living Will Never Die: 21 minutes of pure instrumental delirium, marked by the boldest cross-pollinations, at the crossroads of dub, free jazz, kraut rock and modern avant-garde movements (minimalism above all). "Our background is a shared one," McEntire explains. "We'd all played for at least ten years in all kinds of bands, and we grew up listening to American hardcore and British post-punk."

In 1994, the self-titled album Tortoise introduced them to the US indie rock stage with an unprecedented fusion of lo-fi electronics, dub and ambient experimentation, and psychedelic-tinged homages to the sounds of Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock. For the occasion, a kind of "superband" came together, featuring John McEntire on keyboards (already a member of Bastro as well as Sea And Cake and Gastr Del Sol, the latter led by fellow ex-Bastro member David Grubbs), Bundy Brown on bass (also ex-Bastro and Gastr Del Sol) and Dan Bitney on percussion (ex Tar Babies). A darker, more hermetic record than those that would follow, Tortoise nonetheless manages to turn virtuosity into adrenaline, thanks to striking tracks like "Magnet Pulls Through", "Ry Cooder", with its gorgeous jazz-style vibraphone, and above all "Night Air", in which the slender notes of the horns accompany the listener through a long, starry night. Equally seductive is "Spiderwebbed", which manages to cross Morricone's epic scores with the most woozy "dub", brushing up against new wave (the Jah Wobble-style bass) and creating a disorienting effect of real originality. More than songs or jams, these are abstract renderings of musical collage. The album would be remixed the following year by some leading figures of the American indie scene, including Jim O'Rourke and Steve Albini, on Rhythms, Resolutions & Clusters.

Two years later, having replaced Brown (busy with Pullman commitments) with David Pajo (ex-Slint), Tortoise release Millions Now Living Will Never Die ("best album of 1996" according to one of the best avant-garde music magazines, "The Wire"), which launches McEntire and co. into rock's firmament, even landing them on the covers of mainstream music weeklies like "Melody Maker" and "New Musical Express". We've already discussed "Djed", the "manifesto" of Tortoise's ambitious, cerebral sound but also of the eccentricity that pervades their pieces (disconcerting, for instance, the effect of the sound of a CD "skipping" a track, as well as the constant use of irregular timbres). Tortoise manage to "quote" with incredible ease masters of diametrically opposite genres, such as John Barry and Steve Reich, Neu! and Dub Syndicate. Less bizarre, but quieter and more persuasive, is "Glass Museum", which builds delicate swirls of guitar and vibraphone, showing off a gentle instrumental refrain, while the hum of the keyboards on "Dear Grandma And Grandpa" seems to belong more to the skies of space-rock than to post-rock abstraction. And while "The Taut And Tame", bouncing between bass pulses, plucked drums and subtle vibraphone phrases, indulges in a little too much baroque flourish, the closing "Along The Banks Of Rivers" is instead an eloquent lesson in how the composure of the Tortoise sound actually conceals a welter of suggestions, made even more poignant here by melancholy guitar lines: the trip-hop of Portishead is just around the corner. The format (the suite), the tendency to cut across genres, the "virtuosic" instrumental approach and the idea of music utterly detached from any social or political context are all clues that would lead to the easy equation Tortoise = neo-progressive. However, some fundamental factors are missing to prove the theorem: where progressive was driven by an epic, romantic impulse, McEntire and co.'s post-rock is cold mathematical abstraction; where the progster bands abounded in melody and arrangements, the Tortoise sound is dry and fragmented. If anything, adapting styles and trends to different eras and ideologies, one could sketch the idea that post-rock is a progressive stripped of every "utopian" and "fantastical" implication (the '70s) and surgically transplanted into the intellectual circles of an alienated, end-of-millennium Chicago. Meanwhile, guitarist Dave Pajo also leaves the band (to devote himself to Aerial M) and is replaced by Jeff Parker (a respected jazz musician, previously in Isotope 217 and the New Horizons Ensemble, as well as a member of the prestigious "Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians").

Working on the third album, Tnt, is therefore a sextet made up of John McEntire (percussion and keyboards), John Herndon (percussion and vibraphone), Douglas McCombs and Pajo (bass), Dan Bitney (drums and keyboards), and Jeff Parker (guitar and vibraphone). Though uneven, the album marks Tortoise's definitive consecration and remains their best-selling record to date: a hundred thousand copies worldwide, few or many depending on how you look at the post-rock phenomenon. Rather than a "pop" turn for the Chicago outfit, as some have suggested, Tnt should be seen as an attempt by the very band that had made shattering the song format its DNA to move closer to that format. Still, the instrumental tracks and the hyper-stretched song lengths remain. What makes the sound more accessible, if anything, is the introduction of drum'n'bass patterns and a string of effects bordering on the most rarefied dance music. A fine example is the sprightly "Almost Always Is Nearly Enough". While "The Equator" reveals Caribbean moods, "In Sarah" wraps the listener in soothing electronic breezes. The rest of the album, however, stays more firmly within traditional Tortoise territory. Among the most successful tracks, the kind that could work as soundtracks for imaginary films, are the diaphanous "Suring From The Gutters" and the poignant "I Set My Face To The Hillside", which ranges from flashes of Spanish flavor to mechanical dances worthy of Brian Eno; "The Suspension Bridge At Iguazu Falls", finally, reveals the band's most authentically "lo-fi" spirit, though veiled by textures with (once again) free-jazz leanings. More appealing and less pretentious than its predecessors, dubbed by some "Tortoise's fusion album", Tnt doesn't try to prove anything to the listener, but simply takes them by the hand into a dreamlike, timeless world, intoxicating them with sound rather than pointing them toward a path to follow.

Standards (2001), on the other hand, risks turning into an unsettling piece of evidence for post-rock's detractors: there's no longer emotion, only mannerism; no longer suggestion, only preciousness. Even so, the album also offers moments of energy. Tortoise, in fact, aren't afraid to tackle distortion and core-style roughness ("Seneca") without betraying the vibe'n'bass sound of their early days ("Benway", with crooked melodies reminiscent of Stereolab). It's a work that feels distinctly more rock, following the In The Fishtank experiment, a collaboration with the Dutch noise "terrorists" The Ex. "Standards" pushes the drums, often filtered and sampled, to the forefront, and the "dub" element, present in the band since the beginning, is even more evident, manifesting itself through Doug McCombs' bass, the absolute protagonist of a "Six Pack" with deep, dynamic sounds. The coldness, however, remains, as does the temptation toward mannerism, though sublimated by the band's stylistic exercises. But everything else is (substantially) boredom.

On It's All Around You (2004) the band aims more for balance between the parts; the melodies emerge clearly, and a sense of serenity comes through in the sounds. They're after melody, arrangements crafted with tools they know inside out, which is precisely why they dress the songs so perfectly. In this sense it's calm music, not so much because of the quietness of the tones chosen (indeed the closing track "Salt The Skies" is driven by an almost hard rock riff), but because it's incapable of surprising or disturbing the listener, aiming instead to reassure them. The album's opening track, the title track, with its Latin-tinged guitar, and the cinematic "Crest", seem to serve that purpose: airy, docile, almost pop melodies, rich arrangements set within songs of a simpler structure than in the past. Of course, not everything works: between these two tracks we find "The Lithium Shifts", which sees Tortoise use vocals (Kelly Hogan's) for the first time, in sterile vocalizations (you know "Music For Airports"? well, something like that, only in a lounge version) that, over a micro-dub backing, are almost laughable. On the fourth track, "Stretch (You Are All Right)", they even recall, perhaps a little too closely, the Royksopp of "Melody A.M.". The middle section of the album instead presents two darker, more shadowy tracks: "Unknown", a sinuous, hesitant venture into the already-familiar depths of Badalamenti's music, which finally finds its release in the following "Dot/Eyes", where the relentless snare tries to keep on a leash the electronic flashes and blasts that help make it the album's most leaden, and perhaps most successful, track. "On The Chin" brings back the calm of a clearer sky; "Five Too Many" is a piece stirred by a Latin rhythm where the usual xylophone doubles the melody set by the bass, and a scratchy guitar steers the music toward more fusion-leaning directions. In short, we're in the presence of pure, elegant mannerism. The last track, "Salt The Skies", begins placidly but soon morphs into a driving hard rock reshuffled with a krautrock flavor, as if to say "well, we tried everything". There isn't a single transcendent track on this album, but there isn't a truly bad one either. Tortoise lay down their arms, giving up any ambition to progress.

The Brave And The Bold (2006) is a bizarre and not entirely successful collaboration with Bonnie 'Prince' Billy.

A Lazarus Taxon is instead a valuable release: a boxset consisting of three CDs and one DVD, containing rarities, extra tracks, remixes, music videos, live footage and more.

Beacons Of Ancestorship continues along the lines of the bloated, cold, somewhat prog mannerism of the two previous albums. The sound, however, becomes thornier and heavier: thanks mainly to new electronic touches with a vaguely Battles-like flavor. "Northern Something", positively vicious, rides an almost drum'n'bass sound, while the single "Prepare Your Coffin" can comfortably be likened to old-school Maiden-esque melodies.

Even more than Standards and It's All Around You, the album presents itself as a celebration of change. Across its eleven tracks, the shape-shifting flow of "Djed" coexists with the multicolored flair of Standards: there isn't a single track that ends in the same style it began, nor an instrument that enters without redrawing the geography of the styles in play.

A chasing of forms, a carousel of interwoven, overlapping, interpenetrating feats of skill, in which any sense of linearity vanishes. Halfway through any given track, the listener, at the mercy of the current, is lost among waves of synths and Warp-like jagged edges, with no way of plotting a course back.

More than a turning point, Beacons Of Ancestorship is another stylistic experiment, a new composite idiom from a band capable of speaking every language of rock without too many rough edges.

After seven years of absence, The Catastrophist sets out on a path toward greater accessibility, released on January 22, 2016. The simplification of structures and sounds comes at the cost of bite, noticeable right from the opening pair "The Catastrophist" / "Ox Duke", honest instrumentals that nonetheless come across to the listener as sonic wallpaper, lacking the force to deliver the hoped-for leap in quality. Things don't go much better with the electro gimmicks of the very brief "Gopher Island", an experiment aborted too soon, nor with the atmospheric, soundtrack-like landscapes that characterize "The Clearing Fills". Even the track that had been unveiled as a preview, "Gesceap", spends over seven minutes circling a single idea, picking up only in fits and starts, just as the choice of a cover ("Rock On", David Essex's old hit, sung here by the frontman of U.S. Maple) seems as pointless as it is avoidable.

Things improve slightly in the second half of the record, where the more brilliant results come with the harmless but stylish lounge-funk of "Hot Coffee", and with the closing "Tesseract" and "At Odds With Logic", which offer a sly glance at what might "appeal" in today's indie world, though they deliver few emotions and ideas that are anything but avant-garde. The only moments where one can speak of something close to a minor miracle lie in the sumptuous psych-jazzy spirals of "Shake Hands With Danger", and in the necessary outside contribution of Georgia Hubley, who skillfully elevates the nocturnal "Yonder Blue" (and very Yo La Tengo-like) into something worthwhile, when it would otherwise have remained little more than an anonymous instrumental. This, and precious little else, is The Catastrophist: a tidy, polished, reassuring, excellently played little record, but one lacking in impact, which (alas) I fear we'll forget very soon, and which will only make us appreciate Tortoise's past output even more.

Tortoise's trajectory nonetheless signals, for the umpteenth time, Chicago as America's leading city for the avant-garde. The concentration of talent in the Windy City is almost unbelievable, something Sam Prekop, frontman of the Sea And The Cake, explains like this: "If New York reflects the world as it is, Chicago reflects the world as it should be".

In 2025, after nine years of silence, Touch is released: what should we expect from Tortoise's new output?

A radical overhaul of their sound toward unexplored horizons? A blending of genres so extreme as to have seemed irreconcilable until now? Or a new attitude capable of showing the way to future disciples of the post-rock religion?

None of that.

In Touch there's no revolution to speak of, but rather a confirmation of the band's unmistakable sonic identity.

As per tradition, on Touch every melody is broken down, dissected, stripped of its narrative linearity and immersed in a purifying bath of rhythm, between sulphurous pulses, Warp-style micro-beats and digital glitch. Then, as in an alchemical ritual, the melody is reborn, reinterpreted by other instruments or absorbed into a new sonic universe, often the polar opposite of the one before.

It's a highly evocative game of appearances and disappearances, one that seems to allude to the transience of earthly things, to the cycle of life and to the routine of days flowing by inexorably.

In this sense, "Works and Days" is perhaps the most emblematic passage: a lazy synth line rises above a rhythmic pulse saturated with industrial fumes; when trumpets and vibraphone enter, the track seems to take flight, only to be immediately grounded by the cadenced beat of unsettling bells.

Touch brings together all the recurring elements of Tortoise's career: the spaghetti-western guitar that traces phrases over the rough rhythms of "Vexations"; the tension of suspended arpeggios, doubled by vibraphone, in "A Title Comes"; and even the saturation that closes "Oganesson" could recall the famous CD-skip effect from Djed.

Nor is their customary use of electronics missing, evident in the minimal house of "Elka", nor the equally recurrent krautrock soul, with the Neu!/Stereolab-style motorik of "Axial Seamount", where luminous synths in the Eno mould seem to humanize the mechanical beats.

The cinematic power of their compositions remains, as ever, the star of the show.

It's hard not to detect, in the synth openings of the dark dub track "Promenade à deux", a noir atmosphere, or in the driving "Rated OG" a nod to blaxploitation and Italian poliziottesco cinema, right through to the epic "Night Gang", which closes the album with a luminous, solemn stride.

The ten tracks on Touch have unusually compressed running times compared to the long suites that in the past let the compositions breathe. This makes for a more accessible listen, but also a less memorable one: some passages, like "Layered Presence", come across as excellent concentrates of ideas that on other occasions would have been given room for broader development.

The Chicago of Tortoise and the Soma Electronic Music Studios is now a thing of the past: only two members still live in the "Windy City", while John McEntire resides in Oregon and Jeff Parker and John Herndon have relocated to Los Angeles. All this has made the pre-production work more complex, where every creative spark counts.

More than a new chapter, Touch feels like an ideal anthology of their sonic history: a lucid, self-aware return, one that looks back at the past with the calm of someone who, having once innovated a language, now contemplates its traces.

Contributions by Paolo Sforza ("It's All Around You"), Marco Sgrignoli/Mattia Braida ("Beacons Of Ancestorship") and Claudio Lancia ("The Catastrophist")

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