Tortoise
Beacons of Ancestorship
Thrill Jockey
/
2009
Includes Instant Download
CD
15.99
thrill210cd
LP
28.49
thrill210lp / Includes Download Code
Gatefold sleeve, printed inner
Incl. VAT plus shipping / Orders from outside the EU are exempt from VAT
Tracklist
1High Class Slim Came Floatin' In 8:15
2Prepare Your Coffin 3:38
3Northern Something 2:25
4Gigantes 6:22
5Penumbra 1:08
6Yinxianghechengqi 3:38
7The Fall Of Seven Diamonds Plus One 3:40
8Minors 4:24
9Monument Six One Thousand 3:22
10De Chelly 1:47
11Charteroak Foundation 5:07

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 uptempo math-rocker before steadily accelerating into a wall of fuzzy atonal sqwonk.