June 13, 2009
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Tortoise - Beacons of Ancestorship

So Tortoise is coming out with a new album on 23 June.  I have kind of mixed feelings about Tortoise ever since I saw them on their tour with Daniel Lanois - they opened and played as his band.  It was almost as if Lanois had never heard Tortoise before, but they did a good audition, and it was politically feasible, so went with it; then, hearing them every night, he was forced to understand that their kind of music was very dry and cerebral, where his is emotional and immediate (live at least).

Almost as if.  At any rate, watching him interact with them on stage reinforced the sense I had developed, watching them, that their music was about as meaningful to me as a pile of calculators programmed to beep the tune to “Secret Agent Man”.  I loved It’s All Around You - at least I did one time on the road from Angel Fire to Taos, NM, when I determined it was my favorite instrumental album since Kind of Blue (!) - and TNT is a classic, so I was rather at sixes and sevens over the ordeal.

Perhaps they’re just best enjoyed in moments of solitary attention.  I remember that the Tortoise crowd’s stance was of awkward, arms-folded, second order reverie, such as would be expected of people who have primarily experienced something alone and unhindered by drink.

This new Tortoise track strikes me as rather an attempt to claw towards immediacy, so we’ll see what comes of the new album.

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Tags: daniel lanois listening music second order tortoise intra-band relationships
January 10, 2009

Brokeback - Morse Code In The Modern Age: Across The Americas

(download “Flat Handed and on the Wing”)

Seriously cool, empty post-genre half-improvised music you might hear in a bowling alley where the pins are sheep jumping over a fence.

People from Tortoise, Calexico, the Chicago Underground Duo, and the first recorded incarnation of Cat Power make the sort of music you would expect, except expect less whee and more aahmm.  And those are some pretty aahmmy groups to start with.

In the end, I suspect that this music doesn’t really matter, unless it matters to you.  It’s just too cool.  It’s the ultimate rejection of the Led Zeppelin kind of grab-you-by-the-nostrils rock music.  Punk was like a military coup which overthrows a corrupt government and then tyranizes.  Tortoise and the rest of this ilk are like a Swedish utopian society that just moves along happily.  You never would recognize it as important, but conceptually it’s very fit.

Recorded at two of my favorite studios, Tucson’s Wavelab and Soma in Chicago.

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Tags: improvisation Cat Power tortoise cool wavelab studio punk