The great majority of artists spend their formative years (if not their entire careers) working to shake off the gravitational pull of their predecessors and the many masters and masterpieces that came before them- what literary critic Harold Bloom calls “the anxiety of influence.” Rare indeed is the artist who outgrows their early influences to instead become one of the markers by which other groups are measured.

Almost alone among bands of the last two decades, Tortoise are a group that resists easy metaphors and analogies. Twenty years after founding, the band’s signature and singularly inimitable sound remains truly original - a fluid intersection of dub, dance, jazz, techno, rock, and classical minimalism, with no part overwhelming or dominating the whole. Setting them apart is their boundless intellectual curiosity, their unmistakable compositional voice, and their synthesis of seemingly contradictory sound worlds far from their doorstep.

‘Beacons of Ancestorship’ is Tortoise's sixth full-length album and their first release of new material in five years, since 2004's ‘It's All Around You’, the 2006 career retrospective ’A Lazarus Taxon’, and the covers album with vocalist Will Oldham titled ‘The Brave and the Bold’. There are many moods, styles, and modes in the Tortoise songbook, often, in the course of a single composition and with nods to techno, punk, electro, lo-fi noise, cut-up beats, heavily processed synths, and mournful, elegiac dirges ‘Beacons Of Ancestorship’ is exemplary of this, traversing an encyclopaedia of styles and sounds. We see these ideas working out in compositions like the 8-minute long High Class Slim Came Floatin' In which playfully references the world of 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.

But while their sound travels around the world and back again, the one constant is a pervasive element of group play, or ensemble-mindedness. The calling card of a Tortoise song is the experience of a sound being worked out as a conversation among the individual and interrelated parts - of an ensemble thinking collectively through the expression of a multi-layered musical thought.