Tortoise
Millions Now Living Will Never Die...

From one coast to another of an imaginary musical stylistic continent, every note, from the first to the last, seems to have been gathered like sand, pollen, snow, smoke rings hanging in the wind and carried towards an elsewhere, in this journey gently enveloping the listener... elsewhere: this place corresponds to the definition of what comes after, in a temporal sense, what goes beyond, in a creative sense, representing an inevitable point of no return: post-rock.

That is to say, the result of an excavation work in the decades-long history of rock and pop, and the highlighting of its remnants in a virtual museum where the formal structures themselves appear hardly recognizable because they are wrapped in a diffused light, blue-green, which makes what was appear as what could have been, and as what could become. This work, which actually constitutes the cornerstone of the post-rock genre through the lens of electronics, inlays a sequence of environments dissolved into each other, where now with a more ambient imprint (with a sense of oceanic liquidity), now with effects more difficult to enclose in a "focused" definition, the deconstructed and then reconstructed basic structures of a traditional rock song are staged according to unusual criteria, but precisely, through infinite ambient transfigurations, deliberately dilated and blurred in their contours.

It is useless to focus the discourse on the definition of a genre which by its nature represents a canon so abstract and evanescent that it risks dissolving the moment one attempts to delineate it, also because (so it seems) the intent of John Herndon, John McEntire (Gastr Del Sol, ex Bastro), Douglas McCombs, Dan Britney (Tar Babies), Bundy K. Brown (ex Bastro) and from this album (the second, after the self-titled debut in 1994) David Pajo (co-founder of Slint, now replacing Brown) is another: to amaze the listener with truly new sounds, with the freshness of totally disorienting ideas, with the talent and creative genius that can trace precursors in the "Kraut Rock" of Can and the "cosmic" Rock of Tangerine Dream and Steve Reich, which however are complementary, and creatively surpassed in the synthesis work.

The Tortoise don't play songs, they paint pictures, now soft and calm (the splendid and atmospheric "Along The Banks Of The River") now livelier and more rhythmic (the epic initial ride, as well as the monumental track "Djed"), between breakbeats that surface at times from the liquid sonic surface, only to disappear again (like dolphins from the surface of the sea), up to the poly-instrumental intertwining of "Glass Museum" (electro-glitch, xylophones, analog keyboards, bass, drums...) assembling retro electro pulses à la Neu! and Faust, the latest and brilliant insights of Aphex Twin's "Ambient Works", (who in turn traces a daring trajectory from Erik Satìe to Brian Eno), wave footprints, certain jazz, repeated loops and environmental noises in the manner of "Music Concréte", and everything else enclosed in such a perimeter, which is Rock, in forms chosen from time to time, overcoming the pseudo-dichotomy with electronics as if it never existed (and perhaps it really didn't).

A changing, enveloping, infinite sound, immersed in the future, with the irreplaceable scent of the past. A living sound, proliferating in its brilliant intuitions, that thanks to the grand creativity of its authors will never die.