About This Item
Beacons of Ancestorship is Tortoise's sixth album, originally released in 2009. This re-issue is pressed on high quality virgin vinyl and presented in an old-style tip-on gatefold jacket with art worked inner sleeve and free download card. 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 up tempo math-rocker before steadily accelerating into a wall of fuzzy atonal sqwonk. Album Tracks 1. High Class Slim Came Floatin' in 2. Prepare Your Coffin 3. Northern Something 4. Gigantes 5. Penumbra 6. Yinxianghechengqi 7. The Fall of Seven Diamonds Plus One 8. Minors 9. Monument Six One Thousand 10. De Chelly 11. Charteroak Foundation
