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 artworked 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 uptempo math-rocker before steadily accelerating into a wall of fuzzy atonal sqwonk.
Label: Thrill Jockey – Thrill 210
Format: Vinyl, LP, Limited Edition, Reissue, Opaque Red, Gatefold
Country: US
Released: 20 Jan 2016
Genre: Electronic, Rock
Style: Post Rock, Experimental
Tracklist
A1 High Class Slim Came Floatin' In
A2 Prepare Your Coffin
A3 Northern Something
A4 Gigantes
A5 Penumbra
B1 Yinxianghechengqi
B2 The Fall Of Seven Diamonds Plus One
B3 Minors
B4 Monument Six One Thousand
B5 De Chelly
B6 Charteroak Foundation