An Interview with Tortoise's Doug McCombs by Jesse Fahnestock Tortoise are an odd bunch. With every record they change their approach, sucking in new sounds and styles, spitting them out through an ever stranger assortment of instruments, sequencers and effects boxes. Yet they always sound like Tortoise. It's a testament to this achievement that so many other bands have taken their methods to heart, and ending up sounding like...Tortoise. Talking with guitarist Doug McCombs you don't get the feeling that uniqueness, or much else, comes easy to Tortoise. Looking distracted, at times even pained, and fidgeting with a roll-up as if it were hiding ancient secrets from him, he has the air of a chemist who's much more comfortable in the lab. Nonetheless, he's eager to explain what makes Tortoise crawl.

"We're all real conscious of avoiding musical clichés," he says by way of explaining the band's restless muse. "[We're] trying to push ourselves to do some things that we haven't tried before. Even on our previous recordings, we were trying to push elements forward that you wouldn't expect. That was one way for us to try to avoid cliché." If the mellow grooves of Tortoise surprised their indie-punk contemporaries, they hardly prepared anyone for follow-up LP Millions Now Living Will Never Die, and in particular its signature track, "Djed." With its fractured beats and warped scratching, it was a bridge spanning their punk past and the future of DJ culture. Many young indie rockers never looked back.

"I can totally understand that," McCombs laughs. "[Punk] is where we all came from, and then we got into other things later. We all pretty much were into punk rock since we were young." "That's exactly how I think of what we do - trying to reference all the things we're into. Back in the '80s, for us, it was a pretty natural leap to go from listening to punk rock, to some of the more adventurous music that came out of punk rock, to more avant garde music and jazz. It was all trying to be adventurous in one way or another." Ahh, jazz. Once anathema to burly, tatooed midwesterners, it now finds its biggest champions in McCombs and Tortoise. But where the jazz on Tortoise and Millions... was locked into almost mechanical grooves, new LP TNT has a looser, freer sound.

"I think we wanted it to be looser, to flow," McCombs agrees. The inspiration? Not what you'd expect. "The main thing that put us in that direction was a growing interest we all had in different kinds of Latin music," McCombs says. Turn away for a second, and Tortoise are rummaging around in a different set of record bins. They're doing it with their heads down, too, ensconced in a world where they can experiment, learn and unlearn at their own pace. It seems that they've gone to great lengths to seal themselves off from distractions, that they'd make music by themselves in the Andes if they could find a hillside studio near an all-night diner.

"I can speak for everyone in the group when I say we're playing music out of the love of music," McCombs says. "We don't have any business goals." "Yet you're a pretty successful band these days," I noted. "Any success that comes out of it is nice, but I am positive that all of us would be doing this if we weren't making a living at it," McCombs counters. Their autonomy has allowed Tortoise to experiment, to write their own rules, and to lead rather than follow. But it's also made them seem distant and isolated at times. Is their music concerned with human interaction? "We definitely feed off an audience's reaction," McCombs says. "But it doesn't have to be a big audience. We played to probably the fewest people we played to in a couple of years the other night in Salt Lake City, and we all had a really good time - the audience liked it."

Music that communicates, in the absence of lyrics, usually has to work on an emotional level. But Tortoise play with a reserve that can, at the very least, mask the emotion in their music. It's a dilemma McCombs seems to recognize. "I think we're as expressive an emotional as we're capable of being," he offers. "Writing and playing this music, it means something to us. Obviously it's not as immediately emotional as something more aggressive, like bebop, where someone's just up there blowing, putting everything into it. It's more restrained in some ways. I think it's more subtle, but there's a lot of emotion there."

He's right. It's subtle, but their more mathematical designs mask a kind of soul which makes Tortoise worth keeping. Otherwise, for all its experimental intensity, Tortoise's music would eventually fade into the background at dinner parties. But catch one of these shows, listen to TNT 50 more times, and that never happens. Check Out Our Reviews of Tortoise's Millions Now Living Will Never Die, and TNT click, baby! Copyright© 1998, 1999 Big Shot Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved.