In the 1990s, Chicago band Tortoise sat near the center of one of the more interesting music scenes in the United States. The group is an instrumental outfit that operates between categories—not quite ...

Tortoise tours six U.S. cities including Lexington then moves to extended overseas dates. Band labels vary, yet members call Tortoise an instrumental rock collective. Five multi-instrumental members ...

It’s usually easy to find a rock star pleased to talk about himself. But John McEntire, drummer, cofounding member, and engineer of the postrock collective Tortoise, seems incredibly uncomfortable ...

Not long after Tortoise wrapped up its tour for 2009’s Beacon of Ancestorship, the post-rock quintet was commissioned by its hometown of Chicago to write music inspired by the city’s jazz and ...

We had to wait nigh-on a decade for new album Touch but it demonstrates that Douglas McCombs and his six-string lieutenant, ...

Author Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life details the foundations of the American D.I.Y. network and the origins of underground indie rock throughout the 1980s. As '70s punk rock rejected ...

More than a decade and five albums deep into a career that began as a side project, Tortoise is finally taking a deep breath and looking back. “A Lazarus Taxon” (Thrill Jockey) is a handsome three-CD, ...

Simply put, Tortoise has spent nearly 30 years making music that defies description. While the Chicago-based instrumental quintet has nodded to dub, rock, jazz, electronica and minimalism throughout ...

Defying expectations has always been something of career strategy for Tortoise, the Chicago band that’s been helping rock ‘n’ roll fans move beyond predictable, four-chord songs since the 1990s. As ...

For some music fans coming of age in 1994, the release of Tortoise's debut album that year was something of a watershed moment. The Chicago instrumentalist collective's heady blend of disjointed time ...