Tortoise

Despite their disdain for the label, the members of Tortoise will always be enshrined as founding fathers of post-rock. Formed in Chicago in 1990, Tortoise has always had the calling card of its tendency to incorporate the more hypnotic sounds of krautrock, dub, jazz, and studio trickery into the American indie underground in which it was forged. Millions Now Living Will Never Die, from 1996, was the apotheosis of the band’s studio wizardry and experimental tendencies—the album that came to define a term as woefully indefinite as “post-rock.” Since then, Tortoise continues to evolve behind its crisp, cerebral 2009 album Beacons Of Ancestorship. The band even recorded a score for Lovely Molly, a film by the director of The Blair Witch Project.

Updated 04/19/2012