TORTOISE Beacons Of Ancestorship (2009 UK 11-track CD album - A characteristic Tortoise album is one that traverses an encyclopaedia of styles and reference points, a document of where musical intersections and dialogue are occurring at a given moment in time. 'Beacons Of Ancestorship' is no different, with nods to techno, punk, electro, lo-fi noise, cut-up beats, heavily processed synths, and mournful, elegiac dirges. We see these ideas working out in compositions like 'High Class Slim Came Floatin' In', an eight-minute track which playfully references the world of ecstatic 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. Presented in a 4-panel mini-LP style card picture sleeve)