Browse by Artist: TORTOISE

Artist:	TORTOISE
Title:	Why Waste Time?
Label:	COMMMONS (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$23.00
Catalog #:	RZCM 46520CD

"Why Waste Time is a brand new Japanese-only CD release from Tortoise. 'Ruba'iyat' and 'Passerine' are both exclusive to this release and have never before been released. 'Gigantes (Mark Ernestus Version)' previously appeared on a 12" vinyl only EP (Thrill 12.34) that is long sold out. 'Ice Ice Gravy' was previously only available as an I-Tunes bonus track. In addition to the 30+ minutes of music there are two live videos of Tortoise performing in 2009 at Fuji Rock Festival in Japan and also a music video for the song 'Prepare Your Coffin'. The track 'Ruba'iyat' is an improvisation performed on the Suzuki Omnichord OM-84 (modified by Ben Houston @ Folktek), and the Folktek 'Luminist Garden' (created by Arius Blaze). It is a one pass duo improvisation, with minimal editing. 'Passerine' is composed entirely from the banks of samples that the band uses for live shows. These include keyboard parts, drum patterns, guitar/bass samples, atmospherics/random noise, and vocal sounds that appear in their original form within the recorded versions of the songs on all of the albums. Here they have been recontextualized, unusual blendings and pairings creating an entirely new composition which bears little or no relation to any of the pieces from which the sounds were sourced."

Artist:	TORTOISE
Title:	TNT
Label:	THRILL JOCKEY
Format:	CD
Price:	$12.00
Catalog #:	THR 050CD

"Tortoise's 3rd full length release, TNT, was written and recorded during a 10-month interval in 1997. This longer-than-usual production schedule was purposefully undertaken by the group in the hopes of crafting an expansive, diverse, yet thematically coherent offering. Clocking in at 65 minutes, it is certainly the most substantial Tortoise release to date. TNT builds upon the spare, instrumental framework of the group's first, self-titled album and the extended edits, melodic adventures, and klangfarben of the subsequent full length release, Millions Now Living Never Die. Further to this, Tortoise's interest in the possibilities offered by the remixing of tracks was realized within the actual production of TNT; individual elements, sections, or sometimes whole compositions mutate within the album's shifting framework. These techniques were suitably realized thanks in part to the use of non-linear digital recording and editing techniques, the first example of such work for the group. In addition, many of the arrangements push the group's standard instrumentation into new territories with the inclusion of strings, woodwinds, and brass."

Artist:	TORTOISE
Title:	Standards
Label:	THRILL JOCKEY
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.00
Catalog #:	THR 089CD

"Standards, the fourth full-length recording from Chicago's Tortoise, boldly announces their return following 1998's TNT. Musically, Standards is perhaps their most concise statement of purpose thus far. The tunes are direct and immediate, yet they maintain the exploratory edge that has always characterized the group's output. The fusion of instrumental sounds (electric, acoustic, and synthesized) is subtle and subversive. Similarly, the group's fluency within the studio environment gives the finished work a quality that alternates between artifice and reality."

Artist:	TORTOISE
Title:	It's All Around You
Label:	THRILL JOCKEY
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.00
Catalog #:	THR 115CD

"It's All Around You finds Tortoise doing what they do best; building and rebuilding upon melodies and rhythms with their own remarkable touch. Written largely in the studio, It's All Around You was crafted over the course of a full year, and allowed Tortoise the use of John McEntire's Soma Electronic Music Studios (whose clients have included Wilco, Stereolab among others) in serving not just as a state-of-the-art recording facility, but as a compositional tool as well. It took months of continuous writing, recording, tinkering, mixing, and perfecting to bring It's All Around You to it's finalized state. The results of this process are clear in the lush, orchestrated tones, intricate melodies, and densely elaborate rhythms that make It's All Around You Tortoise's most adventurous and thoughtful record to date. These songs build deliberately and consistently, amassing music of great detail; exploring their layers is both exciting and infinitely rewarding."

Artist:	TORTOISE
Title:	Beacons Of Ancestorship
Label:	THRILL JOCKEY
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.00
Catalog #:	THR 210CD

" 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. A characteristic Tortoise album is one that traverses an encyclopedia of styles and reference points, a document of where musical intersections and dialogue are occurring at a given moment in time. Beacons Of Ancestorship is no different, with nods to techno, punk, electro, lo-fi noise, cut-up beats, heavily processed synths and mournful, elegiac dirges. We see these ideas working out in compositions like 'High Class Slim Came Floatin' In,' an eight-minute track which playfully references the world of ecstatic 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. There are many moods, styles, and modes in the Tortoise songbook, of course -- often, in the course of a single composition. Consistent throughout, however, is what might be called a pervasive element of group play, or ensemble-mindedness, as opposed to emphasis on a virtuoso soloist or frontman. (Think Robert Altman versus Robert Plant.) In the same sense that the string quartet and all small-ensemble chamber music can be thought of as an intelligent conversation among equals -- violins, viola, and cello taking turns, expressing opinions, joining voices and then coming apart, as also occurs in elevated discourse -- so, too, the calling card of a Tortoise song is the experience of a sound being worked out as a conversation among the individual and interrelated parts -- of an ensemble thinking collectively and in group dynamics through the expression of a multi-layered musical thought."

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