Tortoise

Beacons Of Ancestorship

Image of Tortoise - Beacons Of Ancestorship
Record Label
Thrill Jockey

About this item

"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 encyclopaedia 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.

Tracklisting
1. High Class Slim Came Floatin' In
2. Prepare Your Coffin
3. Northern Something
4. Gigantes
5. Penumbra
6. Yinxianghechengqi
7. Fall of Seven Diamonds Plus One
8. Minors
9. Monument Six One Thousand
10. De Chelly
11. Charteroak Foundation

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