By Jeff Chang

The eve of destruction

Johnny Herndon is looking at one palm, then the other. Some people in the audience are pogo-dancing. He is screaming a very funny song into a microphone, an old new-wave Devo why-we-fight song about a dog who had two bones.

"He picked up one, he licked the other," Herndon shouts. "He ran in circles, and he dropped dead!"

The band onstage – Isotope 217, a prominent node on the no-degrees-of-separation circle of affiliations that is Chicago's indie scene – includes three members of Tortoise (Herndon, Dan Bitney, and Jeff Parker), accomplished cornetist Rob Mazurek, and bassist Matt Lux. They usually don't inspire this kind of mild frenzy.

But right about now, 230 miles north of and 12 hours away from the opening of the presidential inauguration ceremonies and protests, in the basement of a red-bricked Greenwich Village beatnik den lined with revolutionary posters depicting Black Power and third world struggles, they are rocking the fuck out. Or post-rocking. Whatever.

Guitarist Parker, the quiet jazzster who usually dispenses mind-bending notes from a position of repose, is grimacing as he leans over and pounds his strings: Brrr-nrrr-nrrr-nrrrrrnt!

"Freedom of choice! Is what you got!" Herndon bellows into the mic. "Freedom from choice! Is what you want!"

Behind the drum kit, Bitney brakes the slam, whipping the band back like a "Theme de Yoyo," signaling a squall of devolution. Mazurek's cornet and Lux's bass blare in free form; Bitney's cymbals flash and burn.

Illusions and fog juice. A false ending. An endless recount. Two unworthy princes wrestling over a supposed birthright. A petty spoiler raging in a corner of his own making. Choices, chads, chaos, addition, subtraction, tension. The bass line pulls out and straightens into an arrow.

Then it's all over in a second: brrr-nrrr-nrrr-nrrrrnt!

De-shelling

Tortoise's Standards also begins with a hot blast of smoke, epic notes from a band that normally warms slowly. "Seneca" is the name of the song, and it bursts through a fast-moving thunder of a drum break into an aggressive reversioning of Al Anderson and Aston Familyman Barrett's introduction to Bob Marley's "Dem Belly Full." Openings into more openings.

Seneca is also the name of one of the six tribes of the Haudenosaunee, or the Iroquois League, whose methods of politics and diplomacy formed the marrow of the U.S. Constitution. On Seneca land, the young Americans signed the Canandaigua Treaty in 1794, one of the nation's first acts of state. Much of that land has long since been flooded by a dam, in capitulation to business interests, and the Haudenosaunee's descendants still fight the U.S. government to enforce their sovereign treaty.

Tortoise once named one of their songs "Whitewater." But their tour van is not sporting "Post-rock the Vote" bumper stickers. And they don't seem flag-waving types. Black Flag, maybe. But the American flag? Forget your sickness and dance.

Untethered by a frontman or by lyrics, their compositions are abstractions, seemingly pulled from the subliminal slipstream. Doug McCombs, who devised "Seneca" 's guitar riff, says he's never heard "Dem Belly Full." And Bitney, Herndon, and Parker have not yet learned most of the new album's song names. That process was also abstracted.

By consensus, John McEntire was entrusted to finish the song naming and liner notes, using a master document of randomized words provided by Autechre. The result was an inscrutable mix of acronyms, conceptual noise, product numbers, and nonsense. Sample line: "CdC: Zen: Dead: GRU: M72750: Salsa: 7: Blowfish: Gorelic: Glock: WISDIM." Of such blather, if outfitted with the proper decoder ring, one perhaps might begin to uncork the secret of Tortoise.

Openings

Begin possibly with record digging. Parker and Herndon's big Champaign score: Bobby Timmons, Ornette Coleman, and Bill Evans. Or begin with music for the autobahn. On Bitney's personal mix tape: Jorge Ben, Raekwon, Curtis Mayfield, Max Romeo, Junior Murvin, '70s disco samba.

Or begin with Standards' "Six Pack," the sound of Parker's dubwised Black Flag bass line clashing with Bitney and Herndon's doubly funky-drummer, good-to-go Afrobeat, McCombs's surf-guitar throbble, and McEntire's vibe glimmerings.

Or begin – simply, and closer to the beginning – with "On Noble," a little gem from their debut album. It begins with a gathering rush, like a sea breeze blowing from the depths of the ocean toward the shore. Bundy Brown's bass calls, "Are you ready?" McCombs's bass responds, "Let's do this." They take flight, each tracing a distinctive circle around the other. Then a break, just a little check-in.

"How ya feel?"

"This is great, B!"

The basses plot the next journey, then take off again. By the end, they are finishing each other's sentences like Run-D.M.C. The wind blows up the face of the hills, and you, lucky listener, bask in the warmth of what has felt like one very interesting conversation. That was kind of how Tortoise connected with folks.

"I know this, the first time me and Jeff heard Tortoise, it was at the Empty Bottle," recalls Isotope 217's Lux, a jazz-trained Chicago house producer. "July 4th, 1994. Me and Parker were like, this is fucking burning! This is incredible – I've never heard no rock music like this!"

Three years earlier, guitarist Parker had fled Boston's Berklee College of Music – " I went a little too long, got really bitter," he says – to earn a living as a jazz musician in Chicago. Through his clerk job at Tower Records, the soft-spoken Parker fell in with Lux and a vanguard of eclectic Northsiders. Parker's head was in bebop, his passion was Live Evil Miles, and his curiosity was now being piqued by the indie refugees onstage.

"Yeah, man, they just fucked me up, 'cause I had never really heard stuff like that. Like, these great songs, this weird dark side, but real pretty, man, totally beautiful," he recalls. "Back then it was mostly just two bass guitars and two drummers and Dan playing percussion, and they would augment it a little bit with vibes and melodica and stuff."

"It was this really dark but wide-open and really beautiful sound, man." He pauses and shakes his head wistfully. "I couldn't really explain it."

Circles

Perhaps Tortoise could only have emerged in Chicago, in the Wicker Park neighborhood of the early '90s. Back pre-Missionification, the hood was an off-kilter latticework of European and Mexican first-generation storefronts, bustling cafés, edgy record stores, and typical Windy City diners and dives. The streets burst with creative energy, the record bins were well stocked with jazz, funk, dub, kraut rock, and hip-hop, and countless bars allowed musicians to play whatever they wanted long into the early hours as long as the bar tab was covered.

And in the polygamous, member-sharing orgy that has been Chicago's indie scene since the mid '90s, musicians formed as many bands as they had musical interests. In Lux's words, "People may think they're gonna come see a show tonight, and maybe they feel gypped because it's only one different guy. Two bands, six people, but only one different guy."

In the beginning, you could trace a circle around the city with the bands, their members, and their styles: Rome, Trans Am, Sea and Cake, Eleventh Dream Day, Gastr del Sol, Bastro, Seam, Freakwater. Then the circle became a network: Red Krayola, Papa M, Isotope 217, Chicago Underground Duo, AACM, Brokeback, For Carnation, Directions in Music. Now it's a vast web spreading to the far ends: Anticon, Yo La Tengo, Autechre, U.N.K.L.E., Stereolab, Tom Zé, Nobukazu Takemura. It's a map of a virus culture, and its porosity feels unique.

"In New York you got all these sets, and you got many of the burningest cats in the world," Lux says. "But the jazz cats are all into the same thing, the rock cats are all into the same thing, and I don't think that there's a lot of cross-pollination."

"I'm probably the worst person to ask because I'm from Chicago," he adds. "But I don't see why it shouldn't happen anywhere else."

Passages

Johnny Herndon fled Asheville, a sleepy western Carolina mountain town in the backyard of Billy Graham's Christian study center, the kind of town whose airport has two terminals and one runway and whose taxi services all seem to be run by friendly senior citizens. He left town with his Mohawk and his drum kit and, almost immediately on arriving at O'Hare, found himself in a handful of bands, including the punkish Precious Wax Drippings, the Poster Children, and the funkish Uptighty.

Doug McCombs had fled Peakin, a downstate Illinois town so small that the top find on a Google search is a list of stores that sell Clif Bars. He enrolled at Loyola University as an art student. "I didn't stay very long," he says. "It was just an excuse to be in Chicago." Soon he was in Eleventh Dream Day.

Herndon and McCombs saw each other often as the Poster Children and Eleventh Dream Day gigged together. Both signed major-label deals. "The late '80s, early '90s was when people started to think that some of the kinds of bands that we were in could be commercially viable," McCombs says. "That was the work ethic that was in place at the time on the scene: you had your one band, and you'd work really, really hard at it."

But as the Pumpkins, Urge Overkill, and even Liz Phair signed and moved on to stardom or at least rabid fandom, Chicagoans began to wonder about the scene's natural limits. "It was a shift in attitude," McCombs says. "For me personally and a lot of other people I knew, it seemed the better way to expand your horizons as a musician was to try and be involved in a few different things and have different groups that explored different ideas."

Herndon and McCombs began recording, enlisting the aide of guitarist Bundy Brown and drummer John McEntire. They cut a droning single at Idful Studios that featured McCombs mumbling unintelligible lyrics. Then they decided that they had become a real group, with a real name (Mosquito, then Tortoise) and a real agenda. "There was a conscious effort to avoid loud guitars," Herndon says. "We were just like, 'If we're gonna do something, let's have it be something other than that.' "

They dropped vocals entirely. ("No one had any lyrics or any desire to sing," Herndon says.) More important, they concentrated their rhythm attack. They dropped their guitars and focused on their basses. They brought in Dan Bitney – another with hardcore punk roots who was fleeing the Madison, Wis., college-town ennui – and attained the polyrhythmic thumpability of a go-go band. Twiddlers McEntire and Brown went to work radically reshaping the sound. Suddenly they had distilled all the strengths of the emerging Northside scene: punkish passion, funky backbeats, DIY studio virtuosity, and a voracious, free-wheeling appetite for dope sounds.

Herndon, for one, was devouring indie hip-hop, discovering Mingus's Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, and digging weekly gigs of 8 Bold Souls and the black radical AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians). "I was like, 'Wow, this has all of that rawness and energy and power of all the stuff I love about punk rock, and it's beautifully complex and deeply rooted in blues, but also branching out to be its own thing.' And that was what really opened my ears," he says.

McCombs, Herndon, and McEntire became roommates, later joined by Jeff Parker, a member of AACM and soon to be a member of Tortoise. The infamous Grand Avenue Tortoise loft in Ukrainian Village, just a few bus stops south of Wicker Park, became a musical hothouse. They studied the drums and sonics of dub and hip-hop. They held turntable-side seminars.

"[McCombs] played me Television, God and Texas, the Minutemen, Beefheart," Parker says. "I turned them on to a lot of the Miles records, Ornette records."

"It was a really cool, intense time living in the loft, 'cause we would just bounce a lot of ideas off each other," he says.

And as the ideas blossomed, they developed a method.

Liberation, true democracy

The Tortoise-istas hate Simon Reynolds's tag "post-rock." To Herndon, "A lot of people were like, 'Oh, you guys are out to destroy rock and roll,' and, 'It's post-rock.' Blah blah blah. And it's like, no! I didn't throw out any of my AC/DC records. I still listen to them, and I still love 'em."

But there is one way they really do seem post-rock. In Lux's words, "To me, the greatest thing about Tortoise was the method of their shit. I had never encountered the method that they used to make music before – really great democracy, but yet structured. Like composition, but with five composers."

"Tortoise doesn't have ego," Bitney adds. "It's obvious it doesn't have a leader."

Doug McCombs, who members say often triggers the songwriting, demurs, "I feel like Tortoise works best when we have a small kernel of an idea that is not well defined at all, when we all have this little thing that we can all hit back and forth until we have something that's greater, something that the group has created."

After touring extensively behind their critical breakthrough, Millions Now Living Will Never Die, Tortoise retreated to the loft, where McEntire had set up the first version of Soma Studio, and began work on TNT. Fragments of songs were recorded directly into the hard drive, and then they sat down to work out how to piece them together.

"None of those songs were songs before they were edited," Herndon says. "They were just like part A, part B, part A, part B, maybe a bridge, but nothing laid." The ProTools software suited Tortoise's nonlinear consensus-making, but process stretched method to its limit, and the album took a year to make.

For Standards, they developed and rehearsed ideas before even stepping into the studio. Then they broke down into Team A and Team B, one group finishing the recording for the day, the other plotting the arrangements for the next song to be recorded. "It was more like, let's make these decisions about this, and let's stick to them," Herndon says.

By way of diversion

During the '60s, radical movements seemed fired by charismatic young leaders: Tom Hayden for SDS, Stokely Carmichael for SNCC, Huey Newton for the Black Panthers. Then, in the '70s, small progressive and communist groups replaced the '70s rock-star radicals with centralized cells of cadres who would steer the masses. But since 1999's Battle of Seattle, a new paradigm has emerged. Last year's protests in Washington, D.C., and at the Republican and Democratic conventions were organized by vast national networks of so-called affinity groups.

These small teams – from everywhere, representing everything – band together in huge numbers to plan protests. They operate strictly by consensus. The process of having dozens of affinity groups agree to a plan can be frustrating, but once settled, the end result can be unstoppable. Power is decentralized, so that even if one affinity group is shut down, the actions can continue. It's akin to the spread of a virus: dropping its dead weight, filling the opponent's holes, moving by evasion and diversion. At the Republican Convention, the media didn't understand why so many protesters seemed to be pushing so many different causes at the same time. But the police couldn't prevent affinity groups from wreaking rush-hour havoc in intersections all across the central city, effectively shutting the place down. At dusk on the second night, Philly's downtown was deserted save for two cop cars, abandoned in the middle of the Ben Franklin Parkway, tires airless, bombed by buckets of yellow and red paint, covered with spray-painted tags reading, "Fuck the Police."

It was like Tortoise's music had just danced through the streets.

Salute

Johnny Herndon's normal speaking voice is a shade above a whisper: "I'm real curious about what people are gonna say about Standards, because it seems real different from the other records."

"It feels like, hmmmm, like a very direct record. Very, like, to the point. And," he pauses, "bombastic, in a way." And the album cover – Jasper Johns's American flags cut into diaphanous dotted triangles and squares, stratified by rigid bars of bloody Republican red – reads Statement with a capital Grand in exactly the way that bleached circles and fish-school swirls bleeding into paper or bored ink doodles on CD-R jackets do not. Johns's flags opened the Whitney's "American Century" exhibit. Standards opens the post-American century.

"For whatever reason, we've never actually talked about why our album has the cover it does – the flag concept," McCombs says. "Each member of the group probably has a different idea anyway."

That "flag concept" was McEntire's idea, McCombs says, "and the other four members of the band adopted that for their own reasons."

The music, of course, unfastens such loaded meanings. Take the lovely "Monica," a song that emerged from sound-checks of the 1999 tour backing Tom Zé. Possibly the height of the Torto-cratic method, both radiant and serrated, it is suffused with all the grit and glory of Detroit, the South Bronx, San Francisco, Kingston, Sao Paulo: omnidirectional memory, time-release entropy, an antimanifesto.

End, then, with Dan Bitney, the maker of the mix tapes to drive by, as the tour van pulls back onto the Interstate, past the Audubon Ballroom, the Motel Lorraine, and the grassy knoll. He's refuting any talk of conspiracy.

"We kinda get tagged with that. Especially talking to Germans, they just imagine we probably have meetings to map out, you know, mathematics, technology, and science. But nah, whatever," he chuckles.

"There's never a big concept really. There's never any type of concept."

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