Tortoise

Tortoise: Dan Bitney, John Herndon, John McEntire, Douglas McCombs, Bundy K. Brown.
Recorded at Idful Music Corporation, Chicago, Illinois, from November 29 to December 5, 1993.
Unless you go back to their '70s influences (everything from dub to fusion to Eno), very little prefigured the arrival of Chicago's Tortoise. They helped create and virtually define what became known as post-rock, venturing beyond pop/rock song-structure and forsaking lyrics altogether in search of a newer, more expansive style. This self-titled debut finds the band embryonic but undeniably accomplished.
The dub influence on Tortoise's largely rhythm-based tracks is at its strongest here, and the interplay of bass, drums, percussion and marimba forms the nucleus of the sound. The Steve Reich and Ennio Morricone-influenced modes the band would later explore are faintly suggested. Instead, the aesthetic balances a spacey propulsiveness with an inexplicable density in a combination that marks TORTOISE as the band's most urgent document.