Tortoise take rock into the instrumental dubscape­and the Victoriaville Festival into the indie underworld

by CHRIS YURKIW

John Herndon has been left home alone in Chicago to hold down the Tortoise fort all by himself­all his bandmates are off doing stuff with the other groups they play in. Multi-instrumentalist and producer John McEntire is touring with the Sea and Cake, bassist Doug McCombs is doing the same with Eleventh Dream Day and second bassist and sometime guitarist Dave Pajo has moved back to Kentucky.

We won't even get into where the other two Tortoises are, or how the band's members are also related to a web of other Midwest outfits, current or defunct, like the Tar Babies, Poster Children, Red Red Meat, Red Crayola, 5ive Style and the For Carnation. Yeah, it's a tight corner of the Chicago scene--so tight that Herndon truly is home alone, because most of his bandmates are also his roommates in a loft that serves as Tortoise's living and practice space. So I get to talk to Tortoise's drummer. Um, great.

But Tortoise is not your typical rock band and Herndon is no typical keeper of the backbeat: he also programs sequencers, plays electric piano and even taps the vibraphone. All of Tortoise's members play multiple instruments and switch between them with the same ease with which they hop between bands. In fact, at various points in their dance with dubbed-out instrumental rock, every one of them is a drummer, a percussionist or a bassist. With a rhythm section that big and amorphous, the dreaded drummer interview gets flipped on its head.

If there's a recognizable face in this beast called Tortoise it's most likely that of John McEntire, in the past mainly a drummer himself (My Dad Is Dead, Bastro) but now lead sampler, sequencer and synthesizer of Tortoise, as well as a producer of some of the most notable "post-rock" Stateside, including Trans Am, Run On, Tortoise itself and Britstars Stereolab. But Tortoise was founded before it found a name by Herndon and bassist McCombs, and if what their instrumental noodling led to was an atypical rock band, their story of malaise with rock was not atypical at all.

"Playing with the Poster Children really drove that point home for me," says Herndon of the former grunge-pop band which was the culmination of a string of punkier trials. "By the end of it I was like, 'Damn, I do not want to hear another loud fucking guitar as long as I live.' And it wasn't just the loud guitars, but the whole style that I wasn't getting off on.

"The initial reason for getting together [with McCombs] was that we wanted to play in a band that had no guitars, and we also wanted to pay tribute to some of our other influences. Doug was really into the Minutemen, and I was really into a lot of dub, a lot of On-U Sound stuff like Dub Syndicate, African Head Charge and King Tubby. And we were trying to get there with just bass and drums."

Tortoise didn't fully take shape until John McEntire and Bundy K. Brown crossed the line from the skronk of Gastr Del Sol to the plunk of Tortoise, dubbed and congealed around 1992. But just a couple of years after the group's self-titled debut album on the fledgling Thrill Jockey label, folks started to notice a smattering of kindred bands that were taking rock's rough format as a base but then taking it off into textured instrumentals, vocal-less drone and electronic cross-breeding.

"That darn Simon Reynolds," says Herndon, referring to the British critic who first put forward that what spurred the artists in this diverse movement he called "post-rock" was perhaps aesthetic, but more likely commercial and a result of the co-option of indie culture by the mainstream. At the same time others laughed, having heard one too many "death of rock" rumours. Said one Chicago fanzine writer of Tortoise: "My dad knew some guys from Chicago who played this kind of shit, too, but they were called Murph and the Magic Tones."

The one thing that's undeniable, though, is that Tortoise is one of the few American rock bands to embrace the influence of black music, namely dub reggae. Formed in the echo chambers of Jamaican studios in the mid-'70s and highly influential on the music of the early '80s, dub has now returned as a kind of nexus of post-rock, the electronica remix and Brian Eno's concept of the recording studio as instrument.

"I think it's all because of British dance music," says Herndon. "Groups like The Orb, because there's a large West Indian population in London and that has a huge influence on the music that's created there. That's why there was the reggae influence in British punk and ska. Now, dub influences dance music, getting sampled--and labels are reissuing a lot of the old dub stuff."

The dub throb is most evident on Tortoise's debut, whereas last year's Millions Now Living Will Never Die saw the group move toward a little more melody, guitar and jazz vibe. Most recently they've added a sixth member in guitarist Jeff Parker, whom Herndon describes as a "full-on jazzbo," and are working on a third long-player which Herndon says will indeed be long, although not necessarily made up of epic 20-minute pieces like "Djed" from Millions.

But at the bottom of all the soundscapes and samplers, Tortoise is a rock band: they play rock clubs and release their records on an indie rock label but somehow still get rock fans excited about texture. Tortoise doesn't really fit in with the new music crew at the Victoriaville Festival, where they debut in Quebec this weekend, but that's the whole point of post-rock or musique actuelle or Victo itself. Following up on last year's appearance of Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, Victo is dedicating a whole day this year to the avant-indie rock crossover crowd (including Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo with drummer William Hooker and Gastr Del Sol). Coming out of the populist tradition of rock, this is one challenging day that won't be a hard sell. *

Tortoise play le Festival international de musique actuelle de Victoriaville (May 15-19) this Monday, May 19 at le Colisée des Bois-Francs, Victoriaville. 9pm. $22. Tickets at Admission (790-1245) and info at (819) 752-7912