Tortoise - Touch [International Anthem]

Format: Classic black LP in thick reverse-board jacket with IARC OBI strip and printed poly-lined inner sleeve. Lacquer cut by Daniel K at SST; US copies pressed at New Orleans Record Press and rest-of-world copies pressed at Pallas.
CAT: IARC0036

The songs on Touch—Tortoise’s first new music in nine years—are dramas without words. They are elaborately constructed and carefully mixed to heighten a familiar sensation: a sharply cinematic unease. Close your eyes and you might see cars zipping down unlit country roads, or nighttime cityscapes with bells tolling in the distance, or some abandoned warehouse where spies stalk each other between towering stacks of crates.

The making of Touch is an entirely different film: an endearing story about musicians adapting to life’s circumstances.

Tortoise functions as a collective; the five multi-instrumentalists make records by committee, soliciting opinions on creative decisions big and small. All ideas are considered, and for most of the band’s influential three decades, the process was straightforward: each musician brings in songs or sketches, and as the group takes them in, they trade ideas about structure, instrumentation, distinct grooves, or—more often, because this is Tortoise—odd metrical subdivisions that might stretch the piece’s initial conception.

These discussions always happened in real time, face-to-face. Until Touch. As guitarist and keyboardist Jeff Parker explains, over the last decade the band members spread out geographically, making pre-production sessions, if not impossible, then at least more complicated.

“It's the first record we’ve made that’s not Chicago-centric,” says Parker. “Two of us are in Chicago. Two of us are out here in LA and John McEntire is in Portland. We recorded in various places. But the weird thing is, it’s somehow the most cohesive session we’ve had.”

McEntire, who plays drums, percussion and keyboards, and also handles mixing, never doubted that the recording would come out okay. His worry was losing the free-wheeling developmental sessions beforehand, which, he says, have yielded some of the group’s most inspired moments. “We don't work remotely, unfortunately. We need to be all in the same room. For me the trial and error stage is so important. I didn't want to lose that.”

Percussionist and multi-instrumentalist John Herndon explains why: the path to a ‘final’ version of a Tortoise piece isn’t straight. “It’s re-writing, arranging, editing, orchestrating, and placing everything in a sonic space that works, all at the same time.”

There was consensus on that; each musician has stories of songs transformed by the collaborative dynamic. Percussionist and keyboardist Dan Bitney recalls a session working on one of his compositions. He wasn’t happy with it, and vowed to come up with a counter-melody. “Somebody immediately asked: ‘Does it need a melody? Why does it need a melody?’ And I thought, ‘Of course!’ That kind of thinking opens your eyes.”

In planning for the new record, the band reached a geographical compromise: they would work in studios in Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago. They scheduled sessions months apart so that everyone could live with the material and refine it. The idea was to move some of the wild chase of ideas from group work to individual work, relying on the band’s deep and iconoclastic sonic lexicon, and the trust built up over decades of playing together.

“It's just how it is, humans adapt,” says Herndon. To keep making music as a group, everyone had to be flexible. “If you're used to working in one way and it changes, you have to adapt. That's what we were trying to do—activate our adaptive capability.”

Still, it wasn’t easy. “I’m gonna be honest, we had our doubts,” McEntire remembers of the early sessions. He notes that it took four years from the start to the completion of Touch, adding, “It took a really, really long time for the music to coalesce. There were moments of ‘what are we doing?’”

Douglas McCombs, guitarist and bassist, believes those doubts would have been there even without the geographical challenges. “At its best there's a flow—everyone's just throwing out ideas and inspired. It doesn't feel like work. At its worst, when we don't know what to do, it's torturous.”

Herndon points to early versions of “Vexations,” which ended up as the album opener, as one of those slow processes. “We just couldn't crack the arrangement.” During one of the long breaks between sessions, he asked for the individual track files and re-worked the song in his garage: new drums and a middle section. “I sent it out saying, ‘I don't know if this is anything, but here you go.’ And they were stoked.”

He clarifies that all Tortoise records benefit from such experimentation. It's an essential part of their identity: “Sometimes an edit opens up space for something else. We like asking, ‘What comes next?’ We're comfortable not knowing, and letting an idea go through many permutations.”

That exploration takes time, and can result in nothing. McCombs says that even though the method changed with Touch, they still needed the same patient mindset. “When I get frustrated, I remember that patience is what makes this band work.”

Asked for an example, he doesn’t hesitate: “It happens a lot with drummers. Someone says, ‘John, play this.’ And he says, ‘No, I hear Herndon there.’ McEntire hears Herndon, and Herndon hears Bitney… until they arrive at a consensus. Sometimes half a song is played by one, and the other half by another. That’s how it works.”

**

When it all clicks, Tortoise is a rare force. Whether delivering a straightforward rock pulse, or impossibly counting polyrhythms, the band challenges what is understood as rock music and the moods it can evoke. That’s why they are so revered among musicians across so many genres.

Their indescribable soundscapes have become more intense and influential over time. Early work—the 1993 debut and Millions Now Living Will Never Die (1996), which opens with a twenty-one minute suite—contrasted the harmonic density of krautrock with the opacity of musique concrète, threaded through with stinging electric guitars. Later breakthroughs, TNT (1998) and Standards (2001), broadened their palette: instead of focusing on single, declarative melodies, they built hypnotic wordless narratives out of layered textures and interlocking rhythms.

Each step in their discography reaffirms one truth: arranging and orchestration decisions define the breadth of the canvas and the density of their precise soundscapes. There might be multiple drummers on a track, supported by acoustic percussion, or electronic flashes. There might be several melodic sheet parts, sometimes holding swaths of color, other times creating interweaving Steve Reich-like harmonic grids. There might be several guitars, each with its own effects profile. There might be multiple synths: lines that zigzag, asymmetrical arpeggios, drones suspended like clouds in a landscape.

And there might be noise, of all kinds. The working method of Touch sacrificed some spontaneity but pushed the textural exploration of noise in its varied forms. The group released remixes of the single “Oganesson”; those spare versions reveal how they employ noise, space, layering, and dissonance to create drama.

McEntire believes those small details are essential: “Because we don't have a singer, we need some other vocabulary to generate interest. We use dynamics, texture, orchestration.”

Given the complexity of the music, each sound begins as a studio decision and then becomes a logistical challenge live: all of those parts must be executed by five musicians.