“Synergy means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the separately observed behaviors of any of the system’s separate parts.” – R. Buckminster Fuller
For nearly 20 years, the members of Tortoise have exhibited a synergistic effect on each other, enriching their assorted personal contributions to yield an amorphous, anomalous instrumental quintet.
Slapped with cover-all classifications like post-rock, kraut rock, and indie rock, the band’s creations often are indescribable mid-tempo conglomerations of grooves, harmonies, effects, and rhythms.
Swirling synthesizers and haute harpsichords splash against robust bass lines, dueling drum kits, and jazz-inflected guitar melodies, all while rubbing elbows with elements of dub, electronica, and art rock. Overlapped time signatures and percussive passages abound, as a marimba and vibraphone are incorporated with the aid of the band’s shuffling backline of beat makers.
Much of this stylistic diversity is thanks to the members’ backgrounds and outer interests, which branch out to frenetic free jazz, gentle indie rock, beat-based blippery, and unclassifiable weekly improvisational performances.
Using the studio as an incubator, the five pieces of Tortoise have assimilated these ideas and influences, congealing them into something unrecognizable — something exciting and rare. And it’s been there, the studio, where the group has logged long hours, creating, rearranging, editing, and re-editing the vast majority of its material.
“I think that it’s really interesting how the five of us are able to create this world that is sort of the sum of our influences and ideas,” says multi-instrumentalist John McEntire, whose Soma Electronic Music Studios in Chicago hosts the band’s recordings.
“I don’t know exactly how that works, and I can’t even say specifically that we reference anything in particular while working on [our material]. There’s always stuff floating around in the ether that I think either individually or collectively we maybe reference in an obtuse way.”
“It’s a good mix if you can’t even describe the music,” adds Dan Bitney, a fellow percussionist with multi-instrumental abilities. “Everything has sort of a mutant quality to it where it’s not really obvious. We’ll do something where the composition takes it out of a genre, hopefully.”
That genre-less mentality has always been at the core of Tortoise’s intentions. In the early 1990s, the band was borne from the ashes of a would-be “freelance rhythm section” between percussionist John Herndon and bassist Doug McCombs. As the group added more percussionists like McEntire and Bitney, Herndon was freer to experiment with electronics, sequencing samples and MIDI, and filtering drumbeats.
McCombs’ penchant for rhythmic tightness and harmonic accentuation became a staple of Tortoise’s sound, rooting the group in low-end grooves. Meanwhile, Bitney’s addition accentuated the band’s taste for polyrhythms, which were especially effective on seminal albums Standards (2001) and It’s All Around You (2004). Similarly, McEntire’s dynamic abilities and engineering prowess have been crucial to the band’s dense recordings.
But for all the above-mentioned abilities, Tortoise didn’t fully mature until joined in the late 1990s by jazz guitarist Jeff Parker, whose early love affair with low end and bass grooves attracted him to the band’s rhythmically rooted sounds. “I always hear music from the bottom up,” Parker says, “which is kind of why I was drawn to Tortoise’s music before I was in the band — like, ‘Man, I could get with these guys.’”
Parker’s addition to Tortoise came just before Slint guitarist David Pajo departed, resulting in a jazzier sound that changed the band’s guitar approach from a complementary element to an occasional focal point, much more capable of carrying a given piece. His first recording with the band, TNT (1998), launched what many consider to be the golden age of Tortoise.
“I love to play with as many different people as I can,” says Parker, one of Chicago’s busiest improvisational musicians. “I feel that there’s something to learn from every musical situation, be it positive or negative or whether it reinforces something that you’re dealing with anyway. Fortunately for us, for the collaborations that we’ve done, they’ve all been really positive and interesting.”
Parker credits Tortoise’s late-1990s stint as the backing band for Tom Zé, a legend of Brazil’s Tropicália movement, as being the band’s first powerful collaboration and opening their eyes to new possibilities.
“We did a tour with him for three weeks, and he’s someone who has so much depth and knowledge,” Parker says. “And besides being an elder, he also has this whole different musical sphere — Brazilian music and samba rhythm — and it kind of blew everybody’s mind. It was fantastic. I think that we all became a lot better musicians afterward.”
Indeed, Tortoise seemed to hit a synergistic stride immediately following this alliance, focusing its newfound musical awareness into Standards, an album that challenges for the title of best in the band’s catalog. Yet this work with Zé is just one of countless internal and external collaborations — collaborations that may paradoxically prove both vital and stunting to the band’s output.
Ironically, the same collaborative energy that drives Tortoise’s material tends to draw attention and energy away from the band, as outside musicians, fans, and the band itself seek to hear each member in a new context, one to which each member uniquely lends his own musical voice.
“It definitely makes us a stronger band to be involved in a variety of musical projects,” McCombs says.
“I think there is a pressure on us,” Bitney adds, “because it seems obvious that [collaborating] is what we should do — that it’s important for our careers. And I’m like, ‘You know what? The Ventures never hooked up with Mel Tormé or anything.’ It all seems interesting, and there are possibilities, but somehow there’s a pressure to it.”
Undoubtedly, pressure is something that Tortoise also feels from within, as it strives to reach its self-imposed expectations. In the past, they remained productive despite these standards; no more than three years passed between any full-length albums from 1994 to 2004. Yet unpredictably, this strain surfaced as the inimitable quintet set to follow up It’s All Around You in early 2005, and a group renowned for originality and creativity hit a wall.
Though major stylistic strides were taken between TNT and Standards, the band felt that It’s All Around You wasn’t a similar advancement, despite containing some of its finest creations. Whatever came next, Bitney says, called for another evolutionary leap.
Hours were logged in McEntire’s studio, where the band had spent so much time successfully building the brilliance of its back catalog, one chunk at a time, layer by layer. But little workable material came from these sessions, and the band began working on other projects, including a covers record in collaboration with folk mainstay Bonnie “Prince” Billy (a.k.a. Will Oldham) and a career-spanning, four-disc box set.
It would take four years to finalize the material for Beacons of Ancestorship, the group’s latest album that must be considered its most diverse release to date.
“This was kind of a strange record,” Parker says of Beacons of Ancestorship. “We kind of started right after we finished touring for It’s All Around You. But we didn’t have any songs, so we just set up some gear and started recording some ideas.
“It was really conceptual. We’d set up this chain of ring-modulated instruments, turn knobs, and see what happened. We did some stuff where everybody in the band played some minimal drum parts. We tried out a lot of experimental, conceptual ideas. A lot of the stuff was interesting, but it wasn’t really going anywhere.”
Ironically, it took a reversal of routine to make progress on the new material. At the advice of a good friend, the band got out of the studio and began writing songs in its rehearsal space. Though Soma previously enabled creativity and production, Tortoise resolved its “writer’s block” via traditional means — playing during practice, as opposed to layering ideas on top of one another in a recording session.
And in another aberration of the Tortoise tradition, Beacons of Ancestorship unfolded as one of the band’s most individualized efforts, birthing roughly two major compositional contributions from each member.
“It really varies by song,” McEntire says. “There were several that were quite finished, conceptually, before we started recording them. There are others that we spent hours and hours and hours trying to develop into something coherent.”
“But the thing is,” McCombs adds, “that even with the tunes where somebody else brought in the idea, it’s usually the collaborative process that makes the tune, and there are different harmonic and melodic elements — and rhythmic elements — that usually become more important than what the person actually brought to the band.”
With a heavier dose of buzzing, oscillating, digital instrumentation, particularly on the album’s first three tracks, the most recognizable difference with Beacons of Ancestorship is its emphasis on synthesizers. Plenty of new Tortoise sounds also are heard, as metamorphosing grooves lead to moments of fuzz bass, noodling guitar hammer-ons, and snare-heavy cadences.
“Gigantes” operates like a samba, split between two drum kits, and “Yinxianghechengqi” is a twisted yet straightforward rock jam, the band’s heaviest song to date.
“Northern Something” finds inspiration from batucada — an Afro-Brazilian style that stems from samba — and an old industrial tune, as alien sounds abound and a detuned 808 kick drum turns into a modulated bass line. Even a touch of Italian western directs “The Fall of Seven Diamonds Plus One,” which melds one of McCombs’ beautiful melodies with weighty thuds and the backing cracks of chains and snares.
And yet, for as removed from the traditional Tortoise writing process as Beacons of Ancestorship may be, parts of the album couldn’t escape the group’s studio-fiddling dynamic.
“Some of these shorter tunes — there’s one called ‘Penumbra’ and there’s one called ‘Monument Six One Thousand’ — we sort of put together in the studio out of demos that members of the band had brought in,” McCombs says. “We embellished those ideas, changed the arrangements, and turned them into Tortoise songs. Those are the kinds of songs that might have ended up as something completely different if we had spent time in the practice space working on them or figuring out a way to play them live.”
The album’s greatest example of post-production magic, however, may be “Gigantes.”
“‘Gigantes’ was kind of sitting there, flat,” Bitney says. “I remember McEntire turning to me, being like, ‘What do we do?’ And I was like, ‘Well, cut out the four minutes in the middle.’ And I remember him saying, ‘I have this idea, but I don’t know whether it will work’—[and it involved] a dulcimer.
“Then when I got it E-mailed to me, I was like, ‘Oh, my god, you fuckin’ saved that jam.’ Then we added that and a weird African guitar solo; those were put on after the song was mixed. In my eyes, it totally saved that composition.”
In all, Beacons of Ancestorship is both a step back — from the denser material and style of the two preceding albums — and a step forward, continuing Tortoise’s legacy of originality and greatness. It’s an album that fans will find strange, familiar, and endearing.
“I think that it’s fucking burning — the whole thing,” Herndon reflects. “I think that it’s the best thing that we’ve done. I just love everything about it.”
“I feel like we’re getting closer and closer to a really great group dynamic where everything fits in the right place,” McCombs says. “All five personalities blend together to make an interesting thing. There’s some kind of harmony that exists there that is beyond just writing a good song. As the years go by, we get more and more in tune with each other. Across the course of all of our albums, there are different touchstones and different things that I never would have thought possible 15 years ago.”