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Tortoise are back! On Thursday (March 27), the Chicago avant-garde band released new material for the first time in almost a decade. “Oganesson” (Listen and download here) is the harbinger of a new album that will soon be released.
The single appears just a few hours before the musicians appeared at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, where you will also play several new pieces in addition to classics from their around 30 years of tensioning catalog of influential post-rock music.
“Oganesson” was recorded by John Mcentire at 64 Sound in Los Angeles, Electrical Audio in Chicago and Flora Recording and Playback in Portland.
Tortoise are their own genre
The band consists of Jeff Parker, Dan Bitney, Douglas McCombs, John Herndon and John Mcentire and has caused a sensation with their mixture of jazz, dub, Kraut rock, minimal music and electronic music since the early 1990s. Many tracks are pure instrumental, almost floating sound landscapes.
Members often change the instruments in the studio and live, which creates organic, flowing band dynamics. “Millions Now Living Will Never Die” (1996) and “TNT” (1998) are considered masterpieces of a fusion genre that tortoise have almost created themselves. In total, the group only recorded seven plates. In 2016 “The Catastrophist” was last published.