Tortoise & The Ex
In The Fishtank 5

Outside the common spirit of the prevailing record labels, Konkurrent has always operated on the instinct of art. That is, art without any programmatic cut. The series "In The Fishtank" is the most fitting example. Take a band, maybe add another one and lock them in a studio for two days.

The results can vary, the only associable matrix remains the truthfulness. A reproduction of the truth. And it is precisely real reproductions, tracks of daily discord and global malaise that The Ex, a very active (and activist) Dutch band with a Post Punk heritage, deal with. To complement this material, there is the abstraction of Tortoise. What happens here is nothing but the perfect balance of the two souls, which intersect until they thin out and gradually reduce the line of demarcation between the diverse heritages. It's as if Tortoise, instead of flirting with Progressive, have been stripping down over the years. Or, if you will, it's as if The Ex were born in the Post Rock era (and this does not exclude that in their twenty-year career they have already, in some ways, passed through it).

"The Lawn Of The Limp" synthesizes the entire process in four minutes, without resorting to the eloquence of words. Words that, instead, are heard in "Pooh Song (Christopher Robin's Nightbear)," the result of the multifaceted orange-colored heritage. Feedback playing hide and seek in random mode ("Central Heating," "Huge Hidden Spaces"), wobbly World suggestions ("Pleasure As Usual") and progressive Punk recovery ("Did You Comb") instead constitute the backbone on which the work stands.

If it is true that for The Ex time seems to have never passed, from here on Tortoise will start to stumble more often, walking on tortuous paths from which they have still not managed to emerge.