Touch by Tortoise

The songs on Touch, the first new Tortoise music in nine years, are dramas without words. They’re elaborately appointed and carefully mixed to enhance a familiar feeling — a distinctly cinematic uneasiness. Close your eyes and you might see cars swerving around unlit rural roads, or cityscapes at night with bells clanging in the distance, or some abandoned warehouse where spies chase each other between towering stacks of boxes.

The making of Touch is an entirely different kind of film — a heartwarming story of musicians adapting to life circumstances.

Tortoise operates as a collective; the five multi-instrumentalists make records by committee, seeking input on creative decisions large and small. All ideas are considered, and for most of the band’s influential three-decade run, the process has been straightforward: Each musician brings in songs or sketches, and as the group absorbs them, the players exchange ideas about the structure, instrumentation, different grooves or (more frequently, because they’re Tortoise) odd metric divisions that might stretch the initial conception of the song.

These discussions have always happened in real time, face to face. Until Touch. As guitarist and keyboardist Jeff Parker explains, over the last decade, the members of Tortoise scattered geographically, making the pre-production rehearsal sessions if not impossible, at least more complicated.

“It’s the first record we’ve done where everything wasn’t based in Chicago,” says Parker. “Two of us are in Chicago. Two of us are here in Los Angeles and John [McEntire] is in Portland, OR. We recorded in several different places. But the strange thing is, in a way it’s kind of the most cohesive session that we’ve done.”

McEntire, who plays drums, percussion, and keyboards and serves as mixing engineer, had little doubt that the actual recording would be fine. His apprehension was about those more open-ended development sessions leading up to the recording, which, he says, have been known to yield moments of peak Tortoise inspiration. “We don't work remotely, unfortunately. We kind of all have to be in the room together. For me the trial-and-error stage is very important. I didn’t want to lose that.”

The percussionist and multi-instrumentalist John Herndon explains one reason why: The path to a “final” version of a Tortoise tune is not a straight line. “It becomes writing and arranging and editing and orchestrating and sort of getting things into a sonic space that feels good, all at the same time.”

There was consensus about that; each of the musicians has a story about songs being transformed by the collaborative dynamic. Percussionist and keyboardist Dan Bitney recalls a session when they were working on one of his tunes. He wasn’t happy with it and promised to come up with a countermelody. “Right away somebody just asked “Does it need a melody? Like, why does this need a melody? And I’m like, “Yeah!” That’s the kind of thinking that can open your eyes.”

In the initial planning for the new record, the band arrived at what seemed like a reasonable geographic compromise: They’d set up shop at studios in three different areas — Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago. They scheduled sessions with sometimes months in between, so that everyone could sit with the material and refine it further. The plan: To shift some of the wild idea-chasing of those development sessions from group work to individual work, building on Tortoise’s deep and iconoclastic lexicon of sounds — and on the trust between musicians that’s accrued over decades of music-making.

“It’s like, humans adapt,” Herndon says flatly. In order to keep making music as a group, he explains, everyone needed to be flexible then and remain so now. “If you’re used to doing something one way, and then it flips, well, you have to adapt to another way of working. I think that that's what we all were aspiring to do with this, endeavoring to kick in our adaptation skills.”

Still, it wasn’t smooth sailing. “I’m going to be honest, I think that we had some doubts” after the first set of sessions, McEntire recalls. Noting that four years elapsed from the beginning of Touch to its completion, he adds that “it took a long, long time for the music to coalesce. There was some ‘what are we doing?’ questioning going on along the way.”

Douglas McCombs, who plays guitar, bass, and the deep-voiced bass VI guitar that adds a noir luster to “Night Gang” and other Touch songs, believes that questioning would have happened regardless of the geographical challenges. “In the best circumstance, there’s a flow when we’re working on a tune. Everyone’s sparking ideas and inspired. It’s not work.” He adds, “In the worst moments, when we just absolutely don’t know what to do with something, it’s torturous.”

Herdon points to the early versions of “Vexations,” which became the new album’s opening track, as one such slow-torture situation. “We were confounded as to figuring out an arrangement, and things were just stuck,” he recalls. During one of the long lulls between the studio sessions, Herndon says, he got an idea for the tune. “I asked John if I could have the stems [the individual track files] for the song, and then I kind of did a reworking in the garage. Re-did the drums completely and made a breakdown section in the middle. I sent it and was like, ‘I don't know if this is anything, but here.’ And those guys seemed really excited about it.”

Herndon quickly adds that every Tortoise record has benefitted from similar experimentation. In fact, it’s the key thing, a defining characteristic: “Sometimes doing an edit will leave a space open for something else, and we’re all into that idea of, ‘What happens next?’ It’s this attitude of ‘Let’s make some music together and see what happens.’ We're all comfortable with the not knowing, with letting an idea go through many permutations.”

Along with that is the knowledge that this open-ended exploring can be time-consuming. And might possibly end in futility. McCombs says that though the band’s approach changed with Touch, the players still needed the mindset they’d used in those brainstorming rehearsals. “When I get frustrated or when we seem like we're stalling out a little bit, I just have to remember that patience is one of the things that makes this band work.”

Asked to recall a moment that required patience, McCombs doesn’t hesitate. “It seems to happen a lot with the drummers,” McCombs says. “Somebody will be like, ‘Hey John [McEntire] why don’t you play this?’ And he’ll be like, ‘I don’t wanna play it cause I hear Herndon here.’ It’s like McEntire hears Herdon and Herndon hears Bitney… That happens a lot, and then they’ll come to a consensus. Sometimes half the song will be one drummer and half the song will be another drummer. That’s kind of the way it works.”

**

It must be said: When things click into place, Tortoise is a rare force. Whether cranking out a foursquare rock backbeat or chopping time into polyrhythmic shards that defy counting (and logic), the band challenges accepted notions of what rock music can be, what moods it can evoke — that’s part of the reason the band is revered so widely, among musicians working in many genres.

Tortoise’s indescribable sonic arrays have grown more intense — and more influential — over time. Early works — the 1993 debut and the 1996 Millions Now Living Will Never Die, which opens with a twenty-one-minute suite — contrast the thick harmonic schemes of Krautrock with the similarly impenetrable densities of musique concrete, adding jarring spears of electric guitar as spice accents. The commercial breakthroughs that followed, TNT (1998) and Standards (2001) found Tortoise further expanding its toolkit: Rather than orient each piece around declarative single-line melodies, the musicians let the vast, lush, inviting scenes become a hypnotic wordless narrative, built from overlapping layers and interlocking rhythms.

Each step in the discography underscores a truth about Tortoise: The questions about arrangement and orchestration are foundational, defining the scope of the canvas and the density of the band’s exactingly precise soundscapes. There can, as McCombs notes, be multiple drummers on a track, and their beats can be supported by acoustic percussion or random electronic blippage. Likewise, on any given track, there can be multiple mallet parts, sometimes sustaining gorgeous washes of color, at other times pounding out intricate Steve Reich-style interlocked grids of harmony. There can be multiple guitars, each with its own earthshaking effects profile. (Parker laughs when he says “I’m kind of like the straight man with the guitar sounds.”) There can be multiple synthesizers — darting squiggles of lead lines crashing into asymmetrical arpeggios, or bliss-toned drones hovering in the upper-middle register like a cloud in a landscape painting.

And there can be noise, all kinds of it: While the working method of Touch meant Tortoise sacrificed some spontaneous sparks, it encouraged the musicians to explore the thickening textural possibilities of different flavors of noise (white, pink, etc). The band recently issued a set of remixes for the single “Oganesson.” The more austere, stripped-down interpretations offer telling insights about the deployment of noise as well as the track-by-track assembly process, the ways Tortoise uses open space, textural layers, and dissonances to create drama.

McEntire believes those little devices are essential to the sound. “Because we don't have a singer, we have to have a different vocabulary for creating interest. So we use all the little things, like dynamics, texture, orchestration.”

Given the intricacy of the music, McEntire explains, every little sound starts as a decision in the recording studio, and then, subsequently, becomes a logistical decision for live performance — after all, the many parts have to be executed by the five players.

International Anthem is a Chicago-born recording company that produces and promotes progressive media.

Founded in 2014, the IARC label has grown to embody a global community of like-minded artists, musicians, and cultural workers dedicated to craft as a means of discovering truth and celebrating humanity.

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