THE ART OF LISTENING
Tortoise and their new album, It’s All Around You

The (Tortoise) records could really serve two different purposes, like there were almost two different levels that you could listen to the music...

-Doug McCombs

Glacial Chicago. The radiator threatens to dislodge and serves as errant metronome to the album playing. It’s All Around You by Tortoise is euphonious out of the el train and plane sounds through the windows. A jazz professor told me the best way to listen to music was to have it in the background while doing something mindless--wash dishes, cleaning house--everything except listen. Is that the best way? I ask John McEntire, and he disagrees, “...but I don’t necessarily think what I do here is a good way to listen to it, either. You know...listening to little bits of it over and over, for hours and hours.” We laugh. We’re sitting in his recording studio, Soma. “Probably somewhere in the middle is the best way.” I’m reminded of how a repeatedly said word unhinges from its definition and becomes a sound. And, eventually, that tautophony will reestablish the word’s meaning. It’s All Around You is on its first playing days in my house. Its predecessors, Standards, TNT, and Millions Now Living Will Never Die have already infiltrated. “Infiltrated” is McEntire’s word for what I understand music does in his head. He’s in his studio about sixteen hours a day, everyday. What motivates him to be there that long, I ask. “Well, at the moment, it’s really financial…(laughs) but the underlying layer is making interesting music.”

Upon the release of Millions, so were eager music genealogists--dimestore & well-seasoned alike--ascribing hyphenated words to what they‘ve created. Standards was said to be their “most concise statement of purpose thus far.” This being last thing on their minds.

With Standards, we were already into our fourth album. I think there was sort of a subconscious feeling about having to make statements. You know, where this band of people sort of think they know what we do and so therefore we’re going to try to either, refute that or endorse those ideas. Hence, these ideas about making statements and I think that with the new record it’s become much less important. It’s more about getting the feeling of the whole thing to be consistent with what we want to put across.

-John McEntire

After a year in the studio, It’s All Around You is the layering of five aesthetics distilled throughout, culminating in an articulate whole. Its phrasing seamless and, with this being the fifth album, ostensibly innate.

I think what we do from album to album…everything morphs in tiny increments so if you don’t see a major change in our compositional ideas or progression from one album to next you’ll see it from say, the second album to the fourth or the third album to the fifth. It’s a slowly evolving thing. Each time we make new steps in that progression we find new things we’re able to do, or new conceptual ideas or techniques we can use to make a piece of music go forward. And it’s all really gray—there aren’t blacks and whites. It’s all very subtle.

-Doug McCombs

Less like a doctrine, more like an earnest resolution, McCombs says on the phone, after I clumsily wax academic: “There are times when a single focused vision could be really beneficial to certain types of work, but as far as Tortoise specifically goes, the most important part of what we do is that collaborative process...what the other guys add to it are things that I never thought of. That’s what we sort of look for, that surprise.” Earlier we had talked about traveling, how it can lead to moments when your life suddenly gets put into context. These moments he said, “...can be a lot more rewarding because they sneak up on you--a moment where.... this exact moment is perfect--where I’m standing and what I’m seeing and then it‘s gone, you know...” Let’s say he’s standing on a street corner, looking at a bridge and got a perspective he never thought of until then. And in the studio, five musicians give each other perspectives on their music they never thought of. Except there, the moment keeps repeating, the result is stunningly euphonic.

Standards, TNT & Millions Now Living Will Never Die are available on Thrill Jockey. It’s All Around You will be released in April 2004.