‘You guys would freak out if you drove down Grand Avenue now,” says Tortoise multi-instrumentalist Dan Bitney. These days, this major Chicago thoroughfare is looking pretty bougie. “Expensive flower stores, bakeries, cafes. Back when we were there, it was empty streets, motorcycle gangs.” He shakes his head at his expat bandmates. “It’s a different world, you know?”
At the dawn of the 1990s, Chicago was down on its luck. A long depression and a declining manufacturing sector had left parts of the city a ghost town – not great conditions if you wanted to open an expensive flower store, but a pretty great place to start a band. It was 1991 when bassist Doug McCombs and drummer John Herndon moved into a 40,000 sq ft warehouse space off Grand Avenue. The pair had started Tortoise the year before, initially conceiving the project as a freelance rhythm section in the vein of reggae duo Sly and Robbie. “The idea was we’d play with our friends – like session musicians, except not getting paid,” says McCombs.
“We’d play for a frozen burrito,” adds Herndon, laughing.
Their loft home became a rehearsal space, and they started inviting other musicians to join them, building a soundproof room for sessions. “You could be blasting and someone could be having a nap next door,” says Herndon.
“But, to be soundproof, it also had to be air-proof,” adds McCombs. “It was like a sauna.”
From this hothouse, incredible sounds emerged. Tortoise’s early records proposed a radical new way of making music: informed by the ethics and mindset of indie rock, but technologically advanced, with ears wide open. In 1996, they released the elegant, oceanic Millions Now Living Will Never Die, which had myriad influences swirling in its depths: dub reggae and Krautrock, musique concrète and classical minimalism, all flowing into one.
Tortoise were innovators, but their music also reflected the city around them. As well as cheap rents, Chicago had a diverse cultural infrastructure – from rock venues and dance clubs to more august institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago and the avant garde contemporary community AACM. “It was really diverse,” agrees McCombs. “There were a lot of people into those different types of music, all cross-pollinating.”
Gradually, the lineup that has sustained Tortoise for the past 25 years took shape. John McEntire, a percussion major from the prestigious music conservatory Oberlin College, brought marimba, vibraphone and a knowledge of cutting-edge production techniques. Jeff Parker, a Berklee-educated jazz guitarist with a beautifully languorous style, joined the group shortly before the recording of 1997’s TNT.
They also took influences from dance music. In parallel to Tortoise, Herndon was moonlighting as part of Deadly Dragon Sound System, a DJ collective that would spin dub and dancehall vinyl at Chicago venue the Empty Bottle. He recalls the band’s first trip to London, where a friend introduced them to jungle via pirate radio. “I was immediately attracted to it – it seemed so insane,” says Herndon. “The crazy editing, this dude on the mic yelling things – I’d never heard anything like it.”
Everything Tortoise heard, they folded into their music – a forward-thinking approach that saw them heralded as US emissaries of a new sound: post-rock. It’s a genre name the group never warmed to, but grudgingly recognise. “In some ideal utopian world, you wouldn’t describe music in those terms,” says McCombs, with a grimace. “But that’s not the way human minds work. People want a frame of reference.”
These days, only McCombs and Bitney remain in Chicago; Parker and John Herndon are in Los Angeles, while McEntire lives in Portland. Herndon left for family-related reasons. (His sons have followed in his footsteps: Hollis is viral rapper 2hollis, who has 4.1m monthly Spotify listeners where Tortoise have 115k, , and Angus is in hardcore band Start Today.) But the slow creep of gentrification also played a role. “Everything was starting to be corporate-sponsored or arts-funded and, if you weren’t in cahoots with the right people, you weren’t making money,” says McEntire, who left for California in 2018. “It was getting harder to make a living in the community without making compromises that I was at odds with.”
Next month, Tortoise release their first album in nine years, Touch. That gap is attributable to several factors – distance, competing schedules, the lack of a consistent place to record (traditionally, Tortoise recorded at McEntire’s Soma Electronic Music Studios, but he scaled it back after his move to Portland). They began recording in 2021, bouncing files back and forth. “But we discovered we’re not really remote collaborators,” said McEntire. Instead, everyone worked on demos at home, then met up to chisel away at them in Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago, crammed in whenever schedules allowed. “It wasn’t until the last session that we were able to put everything into one big batch and see it all together, even though it wasn’t finished,” says McEntire. “Something came into focus – although I couldn’t tell you why, exactly.”
That final session was a homecoming of sorts, taking place at Electrical Audio – the Chicago studio founded by their late friend, the musician and audio engineer Steve Albini. Like Albini, Tortoise emerged from an 80s underground rock community characterised by DIY self-reliance. McEntire reveals that Albini recorded the first album he ever played on, Diablo Guapo by noise-rockers Bastro (“I don’t think I ever knew that,” remarks Parker). He attests to Albini’s generosity. “Even before I had really established myself as a producer, I could come at him with some sort of technical question and he would write me back, like, a two-page email. That was a hallmark of his character.”
Notoriously, Albini expounded a distinctly no-frills analogue recording approach. McEntire, meanwhile, was an early adopter of digital-editing software Pro Tools, using it to splice together fin de siècle experimental landmarks like Tortoise’s TNT, and The Fawn by another of his bands, the Sea and Cake. “Foundationally, where we came from is extremely similar, even though we diverged in our methodology,” says McEntire of Albini. “He remained a pretty strict documentarian. And my process became kind of the opposite of that.”
Tortoise’s music still thrives on this cut-and-paste approach. A sense of playful hybridity runs through Touch – from the sci-fi spaghetti western soundscaping of Vexations to the pulsating man-machine techno of Elka. It also extends to the album’s cover art, a collage by the artist Paw Grabowski that foregrounds a metal scorpion sculpted by McEntire’s father, a mechanic and welder. “Why he made it, I have no idea,” says McEntire. “He made exactly two sculptures in his life. He always had like a dozen little projects going at any given time, but … totally random.”
Even when scattered across the US, Tortoise retain an umbilical link to Chicago. Following seven albums for Thrill Jockey, Touch marks the band’s first studio album for another label, the Chicago-based jazz outfit International Anthem. Discussing the move, McCombs looks pained. Thrill Jockey founder Bettina Richards “is a very old friend of mine, so it was a really hard decision to make. Ultimately, it just felt like we needed to try something different.”
Parker has the deepest relationship with International Anthem, home to a string of his solo and ensemble records as well as collaborations with label staples such as drummer and producer Makaya McCraven. He developed a close friendship with the label’s founders, Scottie McNiece and David Allen, in the process. “Those guys are a generation younger than us. They came up listening to Tortoise – had a kind of reverence for our band. One day, Scottie was like, ‘Man, I would really like to work a Tortoise record.’” Parker and the band met him in LA. “And it felt good,” says Parker. “It’s been cool working with musicians who came up listening to things I’ve been involved with, and are conceptually very simpatico.”
It’s a mark of Tortoise’s enduring influence that their music is being discovered by younger generations. McEntire enthuses about British band Squid, who enlisted him to mix their albums O Monolith and Cowards. “At university, we’d often nerd out over the crisp and singular style of John’s mixing – particularly the drums in Tortoise’s Djed,” says Squid’s Ollie Judge. “He’s a hero – and now a friend, which is still very surreal.”
Parker, meanwhile, has a fan in former Black Midi frontman Geordie Greep, who contacted him before his Los Angeles show in May. “I was not familiar with his music,” says Parker. “But I put together a trio to open for him, playing this crazy, improvised electro-acoustic music. Geordie and his band really dug it, and the audience was there with us the whole time.”
An early Tortoise concept, McEntire explains, was that its music would be “malleable” – designed to be remixed, recontextualised or deconstructed. The group will test this idea again in November when they play a home town show with the Chicago Philharmonic. Parker, assisted by some of Tortoise’s friends – among them, Sean O’Hagan of the High Llamas, Nate Walcott of Bright Eyes and Brian Wilson’s former musical director, Paul Von Mertens – are in the process of arranging Touch and other back catalogue highlights.
You could say that this attitude – an openness to chance, a drive to look at their music from a fresh angle – is what’s sustained Tortoise all these years. But they probably wouldn’t overthink it. “Eighty-five percent of Tortoise records are made with four of us sitting on a couch listening to shit, throwing out ideas to John,” says McCombs. “Sometimes, it turns into something we like to listen to,” says McEntire. “It’s whatever the music dictates.”
• Touch is released via International Anthem on 24 October
