Tortoise

Tortoise's Doug McCombs talks to Andrew P Street about...  

...high pressure day jobs.
"I had a really rough weekend at work, so I'm kind of tired. When I'm not on tour I work weekends at this bar in Chicago on Saturdays and Sundays, and the weather is getting really nice now so the activity at the bar has really stepped up lately. It's been kind of rough."

...why it's taken over five years for the band to come back to Australia.
"When the opportunity arose to play the Melbourne Jazz festival, we were like, 'Yeah. Yes, we haven't been to Australia in five years.' I mean it seems ridiculous we should have been down there sooner than that, but we jumped at the opportunity. Hopefully we will be able to come more often. Sometimes it's just like logistically and financially prohibitive for us to come down to Australia. But I'd come down twice a year if I could."

...the advantages of Tortoise's hard-to-categorise sound.
"Our band is in kind of a strange position where we get people from different sectors of the musical community asking us to do stuff. We have jazz festivals asking us to do stuff, quite often we have rock festivals, we get asked to do avant-garde projects - and some of the jam band community has embraced our band a little bit. We get requests from them a lot."

...using the classic cinema sound effect the "Wilhelm Scream" in ‘Yinxianghechengi'.
"I never really thought about it, but I guess, in a certain way, there's kind of a sense of humour running through that whole song. We just thought 'wow, this is part of recording history.' This scream is why people get into recording to begin with. There's a certain history and tradition to that particular sound and we were like it would be awesome to put it in one of our songs."