TORTOISE

‘Beacons of Ancestorship’ is Tortoise's sixth full-length album and their first release of new material in five years, since 2004's ‘It's All Around You’, the 2006 career retrospective ’A Lazarus Taxon’, and the covers album with vocalist Will Oldham titled ‘The Brave and the Bold’. There are many moods, styles, and modes in the Tortoise songbook, often, in the course of a single composition and with nods to techno, punk, electro, lo-fi noise, cut-up beats, heavily processed synths, and mournful, elegiac dirges ‘Beacons Of Ancestorship’ is exemplary of this, traversing an encyclopaedia of styles and sounds. We see these ideas working out in compositions like the 8-minute long High Class Slim Came Floatin' In which playfully references the world of rave and dance culture with a curiously ambivalent, multi-part suite overlaid with robotic, machine-sounding melodies that stop and start in several different time signatures before the song’s ultimate resolution; and again in Yinxianghechengqi, which begins as a straightforward uptempo math-rocker before steadily accelerating into a wall of fuzzy atonal sqwonk.

Estimated despatch 5-10 days after ordering.