Tortoise - Standards - VINYL LP

Paco Peña - Art of Paco Pena [COMPACT DISCS] date 01/23/1995

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.

Iconic and foundational bands in the history of alternative music certainly include Bauhaus, Love And Rockets, and Violent Femmes. San Francisco born artist Darwin Meiners was a fan of all three. A chance meeting 13 years ago with David J (Bauhaus, Love & Rockets) grew into a friendship, and Darwin not only became a bandmate, but David J's manager. After reaching out to Victor DeLorenzo through e-mail, Darwin met the Violent Femmes drummer after the Femmes' Coachella set in 2013. Soon after the three collaborated on Darwin's 2014 Souvenir.As the pandemic took hold, Darwin was looking for a new project to occupy the lock-down time and approached Victor, who was keen to proceed and suggested that David join as well. The musical trust established between these three was immediate and Night Crickets were born.