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“Till Human Voices Wake Us.” Special edition for the 20th anniversary of Umor Rex [cat. URXX-CLXIII]. Originally released in 2014 on cassette and digital only, this album became a key work in our catalog. Now, 12 years later, it is available on vinyl for the first time. This marks the first in a series of four special, limited reissues to be released in 2026. Amini’s album is based on poems by T.S. Eliot, with ambient expressions that at times recall Morricone’s scores. The interplay of textures and electric guitar creates emotional passages, a sense of cold resolution, and the quiet inevitability of an ending. “Till Human Voices Wake Us” was Amini’s first album on a non-Iranian label. Following this release, he has also published work alongside Umor Rex on labels such as Room40, Hallow Ground, and Opal Tapes, among others, and is now considered one of the most prominent figures in Iran’s contemporary music scene. "Already established within Iran’s music scene, Siavash Amini has crafted a powerful signature sound that blends meticulously assembled ambient synthesis with languid electric guitar melodies, recalling Lanois and Eno’s classic Apollo." — THE QUIETUS (Tristan Bath) "Till Human Voices Wake Us—an album of fragile ambient sketches and gentle drones—was something of a “breakout” album for Amini. “This release alone started me on this path that I am on today,” Amini says." — BANDCAMP (interview by Adam Badí Donoval)
Roméo Poirier’s Off The Record (faitiche 39) transforms the overlooked detritus of recording sessions into intricate, surreal sound pieces. Across fourteen short works, Poirier builds from accidental studio captures — engineers’ instructions, idle chatter, mic checks, false starts — fragments never intended for release. Drawing on the visual art concept of “Accumulation” pioneered by Arman, Jean Tinguely and Daniel Spoerri, Poirier assembles more than a thousand found sounds from archival tapes. Voices from old shellac grooves meet digital snippets lifted from YouTube, warped and reconfigured into vivid, shifting collages. The result is a series of miniature worlds where the mundane mechanics of music-making become the raw material for new sonic narratives. By reframing the prelude to performance, Poirier crafts a universal story about creativity in the studio — one that’s at once playful, intimate, and strangely cinematic.
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Hidden away amidst the bustle of Rio de Janeiro’s Catete neighbourhood is a small alleyway behind a cast iron gate. At its end is Bairro Saavedra, the courtyard surrounded by Neo-colonial houses where Brazilian guitar virtuoso Fabiano do Nascimento spent much of his childhood. Built in 1928, this secluded neighbourhood with its wooden shutters, tiled floors and tranquil benches, provides the inspiration for the title of Do Nascimento’s new album Vila, a collaborative project with a sixteen piece orchestra led by trombonist and arranger Vittor Santos. Recorded between Rio de Janeiro and Los Angeles, Vila is grand, tender, warm, playful and nostalgic. On this stunningly ambitious work, the delicate compositions led by Nascimento's guitar, which sits central in the mix, are surrounded by Santos’ breathtaking orchestral arrangements which swirl in all directions: complimenting, questioning, responding; in constant conversation. Like the eclecticism of the architecture Do Nascimento grew up surrounded by, his music straddles many worlds at once. He is known as a Brazilian acoustic guitar master and as such has collaborated with Arthur Verocai, Airto Moreira and Itibere Zwarg. But equally at home in Los Angeles's jazz and experimental music scenes, Do Nascimento is also known for his work with artists like Sam Gendel and Carlos Nino. Vittor Santos is an arranger and Trombonist who has worked extensively with many of the greats of Brazilian music, including João Donato, Marcos Valle, Toninho Horta, and Elza Soares.
Slow Riot for New Zerø Kanada E.P. is the only EP and second release by Godspeed You! Black Emperor. It was released in Canada on the Montreal-based label Constellation Records in 1999, and concurrently in the US by Kranky.
Jnbo is the moniker assumed by Melbourne / Naarm-based composer, producer/engineer and bass player Henry Jenkins. Jenkins is known to most as the producer/engineer behind Surprise Chef, Karate Boogaloo, and the Grammy-winning Frollen Music Library. Serving as College Of Knowledge Records’ in-house recording and mix engineer, Jenkins has provided the sonic constitution for Melbourne / Naarm’s instrumental cinematic soul movement. & Friends sees Jenkins turn his abilities to his own brilliant compositions. The album comprises 12 introspective instrumentals - deep, cinematic odysseys steeped in romance and sincerity, with an unmistakable ‘freak funk bump’. Jenkins explains the conceptualisation of & Friends: “I wanted to write a record I would look forward to recording with my friends. The music I was writing had a funk sensibility in the bass and drums, contrasted by a more cinematic approach in the harmonic and melodic content, with guitars slipping and sliding in between. I tried to make that contrast the character of the record. I felt that every song should have the same instrumentation and with the same personnel. This became an enjoyable creative constraint; how much variation could I pull out of the same 8 instruments over the course of the album? I wanted to find as much diversity as I could within these tight bounds.” Jenkins applied these principles to the recording of & Friends, bringing together longtime musical collaborators Hudson Whitlock, Darvid Thor and Callum Riley (Karate Boogaloo), Lachlan Stuckey and Jethro Curtin (Surprise Chef), Lewis Coleman and Lena Douglas (The Cactus Channel) to realise unconventional arrangements across three guitars, piano, string synthesizer, Hammond organ, drums and bass, with Jenkins himself assuming bass guitar and production duties. The resulting album is a strikingly unique melange; moments of picturesque ambience move into head-nodding funk, with the three guitars and three keyboards precisely arranged across the stereo field throughout. The record displays the influences of film composer Bernard Herrmann, lounge pioneer Les Baxter and Motown’s Lamont Dozier, alongside Jnbo’s own eccentric idiosyncrasies. Jnbo - & Friends is out worldwide College Of Knowledge Records on April 3rd 2026.
Antonio Carlos & Jocafi, the legendary duo from Bahia whose music has embodied the soul of Brasil for over five decades, return with a bold new collaboration: Jazz Is Dead 026. Introduced to Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad by Beto Barreto of Baiana System, the meeting was instant magic. “The first time we met, it was like family,” they recall. That kinship led Younge and Muhammad to invite the duo to Los Angeles, where they carried a handful of ideas and created new songs on the spot—an intuitive, improvisatory process that defines the Jazz Is Dead ethos.
The story of Antonio Carlos & Jocafi begins in Salvador at the close of the 1960s, when the pair first joined forces as composers and performers. In 1971, their debut album Muita Zorra! introduced Brasil to a sound that was both rooted in Bahia’s folk traditions and attuned to the modern pulse of samba, funk, and MPB. From that record came Você Abusou, an anthem that became one of the most recorded songs in the history of Brasilian popular music. The duo quickly distinguished themselves through their ability to channel the everyday life, humor, and struggles of Bahia into universal songs that resonated across the country and beyond.
Through the 1970s and 1980s, Antônio Carlos & Jocafi wrote and recorded music that blended the sacred and the profane, Afro-Brasilian traditions and urban funk, biting satire and joyous celebration. Their compositions were picked up by some of the greatest voices of their generation: Clara Nunes, Gal Costa, Maria Creuza, and Sérgio Mendes among them. They also contributed to television and cinema, writing theme songs that became part of Brasil’s cultural fabric. Despite their success, they remained deeply tied to Bahia, drawing constant inspiration from Salvador’s streets, the Mercado Modelo, the rhythms of candomblé, and the irreverent humor of the people.
Now, with Jazz Is Dead 026, Antônio Carlos & Jocafi reaffirm their creative vitality while introducing their timeless Bahian spirit to a new generation. “Adrian’s love for Brasil is greater than that of many Brasilians,” they say, noting how deeply he listens, studies, and channels the rhythms, stories, and feelings of their culture. The result is an album that bridges Salvador’s Mercado Modelo with the global stage, weaving Bahia’s folkloric traditions into Jazz Is Dead’s analog soul.
This collaboration stands not only as a continuation of their journey but also as a testament to the enduring power of Bahia’s music—a sound that carries history, resistance, and joy in every beat. From Você Abusou to Jazz Is Dead 026, Antônio Carlos & Jocafi remain essential voices in the evolving story of Brasilian music.
The road is a wrinkled timeline. Uncanny flatness conceals unfolding textures, transparent layers and open tabs. The truck cuts the landscape, tracing the road with a line of mad logic that composites time, space, thought. On “Le Camion de Marguerite Duras,” French duo Jean-Marie Mercimek have returned with a road movie for the blind. Composed and recorded by Marion Molle and Ronan Riou over six years across France and Belgium, this unlikely distillation of microtonal MIDI composition, French B.O., and post-punk chansons brazenly expands the duos’ penchant for lowkey narrative spectacle.
Across “Le Camion,” sounds form a theatrical screen. Our ears are the curtains drawn wide and listening with a look that pans across the shot. No title cards, they cut straight to action. The truck is a camera, zooming and framing the tracks as scenes. Songwriting and sound design blur in a tangle of delicate economy. The balance of mutant music-boxes and dewy miniatures recalls otherworldly hits from Gareth Williams’ Flaming Tunes, Residents, and catchier corners of the Lovely Music catalog. Strange, sure, but this flick is never quite a cartoon. Molle and Riou’s vocals dilate into a cast of very human characters. Voices sing borrowed texts like untrained actors (playing themselves, in fact) stepping into the frame once before disappearing forever. And when they’re gone, you miss them. But here in the truck, it all comes back again under the cyclic spell of repose in perpetual motion. Turn up the radio and appuyez sur le champignon.
W.25TH is proud to announce the reissue of Cindy Lee's Cat O' Nine Tails, originally released in 2020 as an extremely limited edition of 50 lathe-cut LPs housed in silk-screened jackets. This essential collection, released in the wake of What's Tonight To Eternity, has long captivated die-hard fans with its perfect synthesis of classic songwriting and classical composition.
The album opens with the gothic drama of "Our Lady Of Sorrows," flowing into the manic exploration of the title track before settling into the dusty western atmosphere of "Faith Restored," showcasing Patrick Flegel's exquisite guitar work. Together, these tracks create a cinematic journey that feels like the soundtrack to the coolest film the late '60s never made. The emotional centerpiece arrives with "Love Remains," a lush and sweeping ballad that introduces Flegel's beautiful voice in all its bruised-heart glory.
Side Two delivers the epic conclusion of "Cat O' Nine Tails III"—a live show closer that completes the suite with devastating effect—before unveiling the absolute showstopper "I Don't Want To Fall In Love Again." Tender and fragile in that distinctly Flegel way, it achieves the rare balance of familiar intimacy and startling uniqueness. The album closes with "Bondage Of The Mind," an ethereal soul shuffle that showcases nine songs from a crucial period in the Cindy Lee evolution.
Different Rooms is a collection of songs and musical motifs we composed, edited, and collaged in the weeks between late 2024 and early 2025. Most of the recorded material was performed during that editing process, except for live performances taken from improvisations we recorded with Jeff Parker and Josh Johnson some time in 2023.
In our typical process, much of our material is collaged and combines moments of live improvisation, field recordings, and in-studio experimentation. This record, however, marks an evolution in our approach to studio production.
Our studios are side-by-side. When we were writing this album, you might have found us tracking viola stacks in one studio while, in the other, we were writing through-composed themes and rearranging the material. Granular synthesis and tape manipulation are key tools we use to create variation and movement in a composition. This process often yields surprising results, capturing the emotion but expressing it in unexpected ways. It feels essential that we embrace a bit of chance.
In contrast to our first album, Recordings from the Åland Islands, we wanted this music to feel very present. Where Recordings was intended to transport you to another place, Different Rooms is meant to meet you where you are. It’s a decidedly urban album. The field recordings were captured on train platforms, in city streets, in rooms at home, and intentionally paint a quotidian sonic image, blurring the line between what you hear in your own environment and what is on the record.
The song cycle is set in palindromic sequence, figuratively, with certain pieces (reflected) by a reprised or recurring motif that is often reimagined with new instrumentation.
The sonic and temporal abstraction between what is performed in real-time versus what is recorded, manipulated, and collaged reinforces our intent to collect the works under the title Different Rooms, which literally expresses the way the material was recorded in different rooms while reminding us that our shared experience of present time is also one that is asynchronous, historied, and complex.
Shintaro Sakamoto's new album ‘Yoo-hoo’, his first release in about three and a half years, reflects his overseas live experiences over the past few years while showcasing a diverse sound incorporating blues, mood songs, 60s soul, surf instrumentals, funk, and more. Furthermore, the lyrics, captured through his unique perspective, are truly one-of-a-kind. The new album, containing ten tracks including the October digital single “To Grandpa” and the November digital single “Is There a Place for You?”, is now complete.
Like the previous work, this album was recorded primarily with members of the Shintaro Sakamoto Band: Yuta Suganuma on drums, AYA on bass & backing vocals, and Toru Nishinai on saxophone & flute. Guest player Mami Kakudo participates on marimba for two tracks. Recording engineer/mastering: Soichiro Nakamura. Artwork: Shintaro Sakamoto.
Antigone is a chilling look at our already-alternate reality, coming from inside Eiko Isibashi’s own head. Her band brings a wide array of sounds and moods, shading pop, funk and jazz, ambient, electronic and musique concrète in a bittersweet latticework. Interlocking her new songs in seamless long-play flow with the compositional ambitions of her acclaimed soundtrack work, Eiko’s expressions are epic and intimate. 2025 will never be the same!<iframe style="border: 0; width: 350px; height: 406px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=507708664/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=none/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="https://eikoishibashi.bandcamp.com/album/antigone">Antigone by Eiko Ishibashi</a></iframe>
The songs on Touch, the first new Tortoise music in nine years, are dramas without words. They’re elaborately appointed and carefully mixed to enhance a familiar feeling — a distinctly cinematic uneasiness. Close your eyes and you might see cars swerving around unlit rural roads, or cityscapes at night with bells clanging in the distance, or some abandoned warehouse where spies chase each other between towering stacks of boxes.
The making of Touch is an entirely different kind of film — a heartwarming story of musicians adapting to life circumstances.
Tortoise operates as a collective; the five multi-instrumentalists make records by committee, seeking input on creative decisions large and small. All ideas are considered, and for most of the band’s influential three-decade run, the process has been straightforward: Each musician brings in songs or sketches, and as the group absorbs them, the players exchange ideas about the structure, instrumentation, different grooves or (more frequently, because they’re Tortoise) odd metric divisions that might stretch the initial conception of the song.
These discussions have always happened in real time, face to face. Until Touch. As guitarist and keyboardist Jeff Parker explains, over the last decade, the members of Tortoise scattered geographically, making the pre-production rehearsal sessions if not impossible, at least more complicated.
“It’s the first record we’ve done where everything wasn’t based in Chicago,” says Parker. “Two of us are in Chicago. Two of us are here in Los Angeles and John [McEntire] is in Portland, OR. We recorded in several different places. But the strange thing is, in a way it’s kind of the most cohesive session that we’ve done.”
McEntire, who plays drums, percussion, and keyboards and serves as mixing engineer, had little doubt that the actual recording would be fine. His apprehension was about those more open-ended development sessions leading up to the recording, which, he says, have been known to yield moments of peak Tortoise inspiration. “We don't work remotely, unfortunately. We kind of all have to be in the room together. For me the trial-and-error stage is very important. I didn’t want to lose that.”
The percussionist and multi-instrumentalist John Herndon explains one reason why: The path to a “final” version of a Tortoise tune is not a straight line. “It becomes writing and arranging and editing and orchestrating and sort of getting things into a sonic space that feels good, all at the same time.”
There was consensus about that; each of the musicians has a story about songs being transformed by the collaborative dynamic. Percussionist and keyboardist Dan Bitney recalls a session when they were working on one of his tunes. He wasn’t happy with it and promised to come up with a countermelody. “Right away somebody just asked “Does it need a melody? Like, why does this need a melody? And I’m like, “Yeah!” That’s the kind of thinking that can open your eyes.”
In the initial planning for the new record, the band arrived at what seemed like a reasonable geographic compromise: They’d set up shop at studios in three different areas — Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago. They scheduled sessions with sometimes months in between, so that everyone could sit with the material and refine it further. The plan: To shift some of the wild idea-chasing of those development sessions from group work to individual work, building on Tortoise’s deep and iconoclastic lexicon of sounds — and on the trust between musicians that’s accrued over decades of music-making.
“It’s like, humans adapt,” Herndon says flatly. In order to keep making music as a group, he explains, everyone needed to be flexible then and remain so now. “If you’re used to doing something one way, and then it flips, well, you have to adapt to another way of working. I think that that's what we all were aspiring to do with this, endeavoring to kick in our adaptation skills.”
Still, it wasn’t smooth sailing. “I’m going to be honest, I think that we had some doubts” after the first set of sessions, McEntire recalls. Noting that four years elapsed from the beginning of Touch to its completion, he adds that “it took a long, long time for the music to coalesce. There was some ‘what are we doing?’ questioning going on along the way.”
Douglas McCombs, who plays guitar, bass, and the deep-voiced bass VI guitar that adds a noir luster to “Night Gang” and other Touch songs, believes that questioning would have happened regardless of the geographical challenges. “In the best circumstance, there’s a flow when we’re working on a tune. Everyone’s sparking ideas and inspired. It’s not work.” He adds, “In the worst moments, when we just absolutely don’t know what to do with something, it’s torturous.”
Herdon points to the early versions of “Vexations,” which became the new album’s opening track, as one such slow-torture situation. “We were confounded as to figuring out an arrangement, and things were just stuck,” he recalls. During one of the long lulls between the studio sessions, Herndon says, he got an idea for the tune. “I asked John if I could have the stems [the individual track files] for the song, and then I kind of did a reworking in the garage. Re-did the drums completely and made a breakdown section in the middle. I sent it and was like, ‘I don't know if this is anything, but here.’ And those guys seemed really excited about it.”
Herndon quickly adds that every Tortoise record has benefitted from similar experimentation. In fact, it’s the key thing, a defining characteristic: “Sometimes doing an edit will leave a space open for something else, and we’re all into that idea of, ‘What happens next?’ It’s this attitude of ‘Let’s make some music together and see what happens.’ We're all comfortable with the not knowing, with letting an idea go through many permutations.”
Along with that is the knowledge that this open-ended exploring can be time-consuming. And might possibly end in futility. McCombs says that though the band’s approach changed with Touch, the players still needed the mindset they’d used in those brainstorming rehearsals. “When I get frustrated or when we seem like we're stalling out a little bit, I just have to remember that patience is one of the things that makes this band work.”
Asked to recall a moment that required patience, McCombs doesn’t hesitate. “It seems to happen a lot with the drummers,” McCombs says. “Somebody will be like, ‘Hey John [McEntire] why don’t you play this?’ And he’ll be like, ‘I don’t wanna play it cause I hear Herndon here.’ It’s like McEntire hears Herdon and Herndon hears Bitney… That happens a lot, and then they’ll come to a consensus. Sometimes half the song will be one drummer and half the song will be another drummer. That’s kind of the way it works.”
**
It must be said: When things click into place, Tortoise is a rare force. Whether cranking out a foursquare rock backbeat or chopping time into polyrhythmic shards that defy counting (and logic), the band challenges accepted notions of what rock music can be, what moods it can evoke — that’s part of the reason the band is revered so widely, among musicians working in many genres.
Tortoise’s indescribable sonic arrays have grown more intense — and more influential — over time. Early works — the 1993 debut and the 1996 Millions Now Living Will Never Die, which opens with a twenty-one-minute suite — contrast the thick harmonic schemes of Krautrock with the similarly impenetrable densities of musique concrete, adding jarring spears of electric guitar as spice accents. The commercial breakthroughs that followed, TNT (1998) and Standards (2001) found Tortoise further expanding its toolkit: Rather than orient each piece around declarative single-line melodies, the musicians let the vast, lush, inviting scenes become a hypnotic wordless narrative, built from overlapping layers and interlocking rhythms.
Each step in the discography underscores a truth about Tortoise: The questions about arrangement and orchestration are foundational, defining the scope of the canvas and the density of the band’s exactingly precise soundscapes. There can, as McCombs notes, be multiple drummers on a track, and their beats can be supported by acoustic percussion or random electronic blippage. Likewise, on any given track, there can be multiple mallet parts, sometimes sustaining gorgeous washes of color, at other times pounding out intricate Steve Reich-style interlocked grids of harmony. There can be multiple guitars, each with its own earthshaking effects profile. (Parker laughs when he says “I’m kind of like the straight man with the guitar sounds.”) There can be multiple synthesizers — darting squiggles of lead lines crashing into asymmetrical arpeggios, or bliss-toned drones hovering in the upper-middle register like a cloud in a landscape painting.
And there can be noise, all kinds of it: While the working method of Touch meant Tortoise sacrificed some spontaneous sparks, it encouraged the musicians to explore the thickening textural possibilities of different flavors of noise (white, pink, etc). The band recently issued a set of remixes for the single “Oganesson.” The more austere, stripped-down interpretations offer telling insights about the deployment of noise as well as the track-by-track assembly process, the ways Tortoise uses open space, textural layers, and dissonances to create drama.
McEntire believes those little devices are essential to the sound. “Because we don't have a singer, we have to have a different vocabulary for creating interest. So we use all the little things, like dynamics, texture, orchestration.”
Given the intricacy of the music, McEntire explains, every little sound starts as a decision in the recording studio, and then, subsequently, becomes a logistical decision for live performance — after all, the many parts have to be executed by the five players.
The songs on Touch, the first new Tortoise music in nine years, are dramas without words. They’re elaborately appointed and carefully mixed to enhance a familiar feeling — a distinctly cinematic uneasiness. Close your eyes and you might see cars swerving around unlit rural roads, or cityscapes at night with bells clanging in the distance, or some abandoned warehouse where spies chase each other between towering stacks of boxes.
The making of Touch is an entirely different kind of film — a heartwarming story of musicians adapting to life circumstances.
Tortoise operates as a collective; the five multi-instrumentalists make records by committee, seeking input on creative decisions large and small. All ideas are considered, and for most of the band’s influential three-decade run, the process has been straightforward: Each musician brings in songs or sketches, and as the group absorbs them, the players exchange ideas about the structure, instrumentation, different grooves or (more frequently, because they’re Tortoise) odd metric divisions that might stretch the initial conception of the song.
These discussions have always happened in real time, face to face. Until Touch. As guitarist and keyboardist Jeff Parker explains, over the last decade, the members of Tortoise scattered geographically, making the pre-production rehearsal sessions if not impossible, at least more complicated.
“It’s the first record we’ve done where everything wasn’t based in Chicago,” says Parker. “Two of us are in Chicago. Two of us are here in Los Angeles and John [McEntire] is in Portland, OR. We recorded in several different places. But the strange thing is, in a way it’s kind of the most cohesive session that we’ve done.”
McEntire, who plays drums, percussion, and keyboards and serves as mixing engineer, had little doubt that the actual recording would be fine. His apprehension was about those more open-ended development sessions leading up to the recording, which, he says, have been known to yield moments of peak Tortoise inspiration. “We don't work remotely, unfortunately. We kind of all have to be in the room together. For me the trial-and-error stage is very important. I didn’t want to lose that.”
The percussionist and multi-instrumentalist John Herndon explains one reason why: The path to a “final” version of a Tortoise tune is not a straight line. “It becomes writing and arranging and editing and orchestrating and sort of getting things into a sonic space that feels good, all at the same time.”
There was consensus about that; each of the musicians has a story about songs being transformed by the collaborative dynamic. Percussionist and keyboardist Dan Bitney recalls a session when they were working on one of his tunes. He wasn’t happy with it and promised to come up with a countermelody. “Right away somebody just asked “Does it need a melody? Like, why does this need a melody? And I’m like, “Yeah!” That’s the kind of thinking that can open your eyes.”
In the initial planning for the new record, the band arrived at what seemed like a reasonable geographic compromise: They’d set up shop at studios in three different areas — Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago. They scheduled sessions with sometimes months in between, so that everyone could sit with the material and refine it further. The plan: To shift some of the wild idea-chasing of those development sessions from group work to individual work, building on Tortoise’s deep and iconoclastic lexicon of sounds — and on the trust between musicians that’s accrued over decades of music-making.
“It’s like, humans adapt,” Herndon says flatly. In order to keep making music as a group, he explains, everyone needed to be flexible then and remain so now. “If you’re used to doing something one way, and then it flips, well, you have to adapt to another way of working. I think that that's what we all were aspiring to do with this, endeavoring to kick in our adaptation skills.”
Still, it wasn’t smooth sailing. “I’m going to be honest, I think that we had some doubts” after the first set of sessions, McEntire recalls. Noting that four years elapsed from the beginning of Touch to its completion, he adds that “it took a long, long time for the music to coalesce. There was some ‘what are we doing?’ questioning going on along the way.”
Douglas McCombs, who plays guitar, bass, and the deep-voiced bass VI guitar that adds a noir luster to “Night Gang” and other Touch songs, believes that questioning would have happened regardless of the geographical challenges. “In the best circumstance, there’s a flow when we’re working on a tune. Everyone’s sparking ideas and inspired. It’s not work.” He adds, “In the worst moments, when we just absolutely don’t know what to do with something, it’s torturous.”
Herdon points to the early versions of “Vexations,” which became the new album’s opening track, as one such slow-torture situation. “We were confounded as to figuring out an arrangement, and things were just stuck,” he recalls. During one of the long lulls between the studio sessions, Herndon says, he got an idea for the tune. “I asked John if I could have the stems [the individual track files] for the song, and then I kind of did a reworking in the garage. Re-did the drums completely and made a breakdown section in the middle. I sent it and was like, ‘I don't know if this is anything, but here.’ And those guys seemed really excited about it.”
Herndon quickly adds that every Tortoise record has benefitted from similar experimentation. In fact, it’s the key thing, a defining characteristic: “Sometimes doing an edit will leave a space open for something else, and we’re all into that idea of, ‘What happens next?’ It’s this attitude of ‘Let’s make some music together and see what happens.’ We're all comfortable with the not knowing, with letting an idea go through many permutations.”
Along with that is the knowledge that this open-ended exploring can be time-consuming. And might possibly end in futility. McCombs says that though the band’s approach changed with Touch, the players still needed the mindset they’d used in those brainstorming rehearsals. “When I get frustrated or when we seem like we're stalling out a little bit, I just have to remember that patience is one of the things that makes this band work.”
Asked to recall a moment that required patience, McCombs doesn’t hesitate. “It seems to happen a lot with the drummers,” McCombs says. “Somebody will be like, ‘Hey John [McEntire] why don’t you play this?’ And he’ll be like, ‘I don’t wanna play it cause I hear Herndon here.’ It’s like McEntire hears Herdon and Herndon hears Bitney… That happens a lot, and then they’ll come to a consensus. Sometimes half the song will be one drummer and half the song will be another drummer. That’s kind of the way it works.”
**
It must be said: When things click into place, Tortoise is a rare force. Whether cranking out a foursquare rock backbeat or chopping time into polyrhythmic shards that defy counting (and logic), the band challenges accepted notions of what rock music can be, what moods it can evoke — that’s part of the reason the band is revered so widely, among musicians working in many genres.
Tortoise’s indescribable sonic arrays have grown more intense — and more influential — over time. Early works — the 1993 debut and the 1996 Millions Now Living Will Never Die, which opens with a twenty-one-minute suite — contrast the thick harmonic schemes of Krautrock with the similarly impenetrable densities of musique concrete, adding jarring spears of electric guitar as spice accents. The commercial breakthroughs that followed, TNT (1998) and Standards (2001) found Tortoise further expanding its toolkit: Rather than orient each piece around declarative single-line melodies, the musicians let the vast, lush, inviting scenes become a hypnotic wordless narrative, built from overlapping layers and interlocking rhythms.
Each step in the discography underscores a truth about Tortoise: The questions about arrangement and orchestration are foundational, defining the scope of the canvas and the density of the band’s exactingly precise soundscapes. There can, as McCombs notes, be multiple drummers on a track, and their beats can be supported by acoustic percussion or random electronic blippage. Likewise, on any given track, there can be multiple mallet parts, sometimes sustaining gorgeous washes of color, at other times pounding out intricate Steve Reich-style interlocked grids of harmony. There can be multiple guitars, each with its own earthshaking effects profile. (Parker laughs when he says “I’m kind of like the straight man with the guitar sounds.”) There can be multiple synthesizers — darting squiggles of lead lines crashing into asymmetrical arpeggios, or bliss-toned drones hovering in the upper-middle register like a cloud in a landscape painting.
And there can be noise, all kinds of it: While the working method of Touch meant Tortoise sacrificed some spontaneous sparks, it encouraged the musicians to explore the thickening textural possibilities of different flavors of noise (white, pink, etc). The band recently issued a set of remixes for the single “Oganesson.” The more austere, stripped-down interpretations offer telling insights about the deployment of noise as well as the track-by-track assembly process, the ways Tortoise uses open space, textural layers, and dissonances to create drama.
McEntire believes those little devices are essential to the sound. “Because we don't have a singer, we have to have a different vocabulary for creating interest. So we use all the little things, like dynamics, texture, orchestration.”
Given the intricacy of the music, McEntire explains, every little sound starts as a decision in the recording studio, and then, subsequently, becomes a logistical decision for live performance — after all, the many parts have to be executed by the five players.
