It’s been six years since their last album The Beacons of Ancestorship but the Chicago five piece have announced a new album The Catastrophist that will drop in January 2016. They’ve shared audio of “Gesceap” in the meantime.
This from the press release:
“The group was commissioned by the City of Chicago to compose a suite of music rooted in its ties to the area’s noted jazz and improvised music communities. Tortoise then performed those five loose themes at a handful of concerts, and “when we finally got around to talking about a new record, the obvious solution to begin with was to take those pieces and see what else we could do with them,” says McEntire. “It turned out that for them to work for Tortoise, they needed a bit more of a rethink in terms of structure. They’re all pretty different in the sense that at first they were just heads and solos. Now, they’re orchestrated and complex.”
