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Tuesday 14 January 2014

Millions Now Living Will Never Die...



...was the title of a Tortoise album back in 1996, which is unbelievably nearly twenty years ago now. Walter mentioned it on Sunday at his blog. The whole album's good but the other songs all have to live in the shadow of the twenty-one minute opener Djed, which takes it's cues from dub, ambient, jazz and kraut and makes something new. Post-rock they called it- always seemed like a silly name to me. Hypnotic and relentless, full of lovely little touches on the organ, music to drift along in, swimming with the tide, even the middle to end section of noises and static and faint pulses. When it's over the only thing to do is play it all the way through again, until you've lost forty minutes of your time, daydreaming.

Djed

My home computer is operating at tortoise speed quite often at the moment. I sometimes think it'd be quicker to write these out on paper and deliver them to your door by hand.

3 comments:

Echorich said...

I've dabbled in Tortoise from time to time. I have to agree that Djed is go to track for the band.
Post-Rock is a pretty unconvincing tag for the genre. Its spirit is freeform, but it is music that is meticulously produced...just look at the time and energy spent by Mark Hollis on the last two Talk Talk albums - works that took as much time to post produce as they did to create.
There are a lot of band that should probably fly under this iffy banner - Boards of Canada, Radiohead, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Sigur Rós, Baths... but each really has their fingers in multiple styles...so maybe Post Rock means music that doesn't really fit any strict genre.

Walter said...

@ Echorich: you found the right words to this kind of post rock. Maybe arty and planed but definitive a music you can lose your mind when you listen to it. And I mean Mark Hollis as well...

Hazard said...

Charles Darwin would approve!