CATASTROPHIST

Simply put, Tortoise has spent nearly 25 years making music that defies description.
While the Chicago-based instrumental quintet has nodded to dub, rock, jazz, electronica
and minimalism throughout its revered and influential six-album discography, the
resulting sounds have always been distinctly, even stubbornly, their own.
It's a fact that remains true on The Catastrophist, Tortoise's first studio album in nearly
seven years. And it's an album where moody, synth-swept jams like the opening title
track cozy up next to hypnotic, bass-and-beat missives like "Shake Hands With Danger"
and a downright strange cover of David Essex's 1973 radio smash "Rock On" sung by
U.S. Maple's Todd Rittman. Also included is the bittersweet, honest-to-goodness soul
ballad "Yonder Blue," sung by Yo La Tengo's Georgia Hubley. "We'd finished the track
and decided it would be good to have vocals on it," recalls McEntire. "Robert Wyatt
was our first choice, but he had just retired and politely said no. We were discussing
asking Georgia to do something, but not that track in particular. Then we realized it
would totally work." Throughout, the songs transcend expectations as often as they
delight the eardrums.
Tortoise, comprised of multi-instrumentalists Dan Bitney, John Herndon, Doug
McCombs, John McEntire and Jeff Parker, has always thrived on sudden bursts of
inspiration. And for The Catastrophist, the spark came in 2010 when the group was
commissioned by the City of Chicago to compose a suite of music rooted in its ties to
the area's noted jazz and improvised music communities.
Tortoise then performed those five loose themes at a handful of concerts, and "when
we finally got around to talking about a new record, the obvious solution to begin with
was to take those pieces and see what else we could do with them," says McEntire, at
whose Soma Studios the band recorded the new album. "It turned out that for them
to work for Tortoise, they needed a bit more of a rethink in terms of structure. They're
all pretty different in the sense that at first they were just heads and solos. Now, they're
orchestrated and complex."
As ever, Tortoise has conjured sounds on The Catastrophist that aren't being purveyed
anywhere else in music today. There's a deeply intuitive interplay between the
group members that comes only from two decades of experimentation, revision and
improvisation. And at a time when our brains are constantly bombarded by myriad
distractions, The Catastrophist reminds us that there's something much greater out
there. All we have to do is listen.