Playing With TNT

06/23/1998 3:00 AM, Yahoo! Music
Mara Schwartz

"We didn't feel like we had to do anything conventionally," Tortoise drummer/ keyboardist/ marimba-ist John McEntire says. "It was never an issue that there wasn't a vocalist, or that there were two bass players. We just started doing it and carried on."

Not that anyone's exactly accusing McEntire of mainstream kowtowing, whether with Tortoise or any of the three other art-heavy projects he's involved with: Gastr Del Sol, the Sea And Cake and Red Krayola. And McEntire's not the only one in the Chicago-based instrumental collective with an illustrious musical résumé--the six Tortoise members have been or currently are in a varied batch of well-known outfits, from Eleventh Dream Day to Poster Children to the New Horizons Ensemble to Slint.

With the group coming from such wide-ranging places, it's no wonder that Tortoise's sound melds together such seeming disparities as indie rock, jazz, reggae and easy-listening into a stylistically sprawling, hard-to-classify blend. Rock critics, scrambling to describe Tortoise as part of some sort of genre, coined the vaguely defined genre "post-rock" just for them, though they've since augmented the term to include other all-instrumental groups like Don Caballero. The whole thing mildly bemuses the decidedly non-compartmentalist McEntire.

"The thing about that particular term," he says, "is that it's used in so many different situations it really doesn't have much meaning. People apply it to music that doesn't sound anything alike or have any common reference points at all. It's this catch-all that the media has invented."

Another classification Tortoise tends to get saddled with is that of a side-project, since all members were already established recording artists at the time of the band's inception. If that's the case, then the project's certainly taken on a strong life of its own, since Tortoise has been selling out some fairly expansive venues on its tour promoting the new TNT (Thrill Jockey). McEntire stresses that Tortoise is its own, freestanding entity.

"All of us have been very serious about this from the beginning," he says, "but it had the appearance of being a project rather than something that we were really focused on--just because we all tended to be involved in a lot of different things. That has more to do with people's perceptions of it than our own attitudes toward it."

He continues, "There's a very strong tendency for people to associate one person with one thing for perpetuity, but the context we come from is, in some ways, the antithesis of that. We're interested in exploring lots of different ideas and working methods and collaborations, and pushing ourselves in lots of different directions simultaneously."

The original plan was for Tortoise to be formed around a dual rhythm section (two bass players, two drummers), but that plan started expanding out instrumentally after Tortoise's self-titled 1994 debut. "It had to evolve from there," says McEntire, "because we get bored really easily." So, in following this self-defined pattern, McEntire admits that the next Tortoise album really has no reason to sound anything like the last Tortoise album.

"We won't really know 'til we get there," he says. "It could be anything. Vocals even. Bagpipes. Who knows?"