Millions Now Living Will Never Die (CD - 1996)

Tortoise: Dave Pajo (guitar, bass); Doug McCombs (lap steel guitar, bass); John Herndon (electric piano, vibraphone, drums, electronic drums); John McEntire (electric piano, organ, synthesizer, melodica, marimba, drums, samples); Dan Bitney (organ, synthesizer, bass, percussion, electronic drums).

Recorded at Idful Music Corporation, Chicago, Illinois; Soma Electronic Music Studios, Chicago, Illinois in 1995.

At once dimly settled and quietly driving, Tortoise's second album is afloat in contradictions. The group's "songs," all instrumental, are entirely about moods--marrying open-ended, dub-infected grooves with delays and other studio effects, pouring on vibraphone and marimbas, and electronically discombobulating the rhythms to create a sort of chill-out music birthed at the bottom of the ocean. But even their calmest modes offer a propulsiveness missing from much atmospheric music. Call it beat-wise ambient, if you must.

Yet even that simplification doesn't do justice to this album's expansive, anything-goes audio imagery. Multiple, thread-like textures interconnect in Tortoise's pieces, and dilate to become backdrops for the movie scenes of bizarre dreams--ranging from lonesome, psychedelically-charged Sergio Leone westerns to glued whirlpools of Ralph Bakshi's outer worlds, all in dimly lit Technicolor. MILLIONS NOW LIVING is among the first albums designed to soothe your nerves in the 21st century, and to do so without putting you to sleep. minimize