Artist Overview: Tortoise

In the early 1990's a new genre term began to be bandied about seriously by serious music listeners. The term was "post-rock".

After nearly 40 years, rock had covered a lot of ground. It had incorporated blues, and country, and jazz, and classical, and reggae, and aboriginal music, and skiffle, and ska, and zydeco, and afrobeat, and electronic, and folk, and polka, and salsa, and pretty much everything. The question then was (and still is): are there any other frontiers left for the idiom to cross, or have all roads been exhausted?

That question remains unanswered; however, an answer to where the future may lie began to make itself known at the fringes of alternative rock and the fringes of experimental music.

"Post rock" was a loose movement that drew upon decades of the musical fringe: kraut-rock, minimalist classical (Philip Glass-school), avant-garde jazz, cool jazz, dub, math rock, tape music, electronica, ambient, and all other forms of musics from the edge. These influences varied from artist to artist, but for the most part, the idea was to mix as many disparate forms of music possible into something entirely new. It was usually intrumental based, with no vocals, or vocals subservient to the overall sound. The emphasis was on sonics and texture, not songs and hooks. It was a very cerebral form of music; devoid of image or posture (it was a rare post-rock band that put themselves on the cover).

Which divorces it from rock completely; it's not rock music, nor does it bear a rock image, but it comes from rock, and while it seldom rocks, it often rolls. In a way, it is the thinking man's modern rock.

Tortoise was one of the best post-rock bands of the 90's.

An alternative band that wasn't punk or metal, they instead plundered the vaults for sounds, drawing upon kraut-rock, ambient, avant-garde jazz, electronica, and a wide array of other influences, Tortoise, from Chicago, played a music most akin to cool jazz more than anything else and displayed virtuoso playing, which often featured a droning guitar and two vibraphone players.

Their leader was drummer and producer John McEntire; and most of the band members had indie credits in the Chicago region when the band formed. Tortoise began as a duo of bassist Doug McCombs (ex-Eleventh Dream Day) and drummer-keyboardist-vibes player John Herndon (ex-Poster Children), who began experimenting together in a studio and as an ad-hoc group called "Simple" in 1988. Interested in learning production, they experimented with a variety of rhythm techniques; much of their experimentation was inspired by the rhythms of dub pioneers Sly & Robbie. They considered themselves a rhythm section for hire; willing to back others on recordings. The pair was joined in 1991 by guitarist Bandy K. Brown and drummer-vibes player-producer John McEntire (both ex-Bastro), with an eye towards becoming a "double rhythm section". Percussionist Dan Bitney, who had played in a hardcore group on SST, Tar Babies, came aboard shortly after.

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