BEACONS OF ANCESTORSHIP

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 very limited supply will be
available on clear vinyl.
A characteristic Tortoise album is one that traverses
an encyclopaedia 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, multipart
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.