A conversation with Tortoise percussionist Dan Bitney

CATASTROPHISTS: Dan Bitney of Tortoise (second from right).Andrew Paynter

<a href="http://tortoise.bandcamp.com/album/the-catastrophist">The Catastrophist by Tortoise</a>

Chicago quintet Tortoise raised the bar high for a sophisticated strain of mid-’90s post-rock by blending elements of dub, electronic music, jazz, and krautrock into an instrumental labyrinth of rhythms and melodies. Nearly 24 years have passed since the group released its self-titled Thrill Jockey Records debut. Since then group has maintained its course. With 2016’s The Catastrophist, Tortoise crafts tense ambient soundscapes pointed straight toward the future. Songs such as “Ox Duke,” “Clearing Files,” “Hot Coffee,” and "Gesceap" are unequivocally Tortoise — minimal by design, rich in texture, and driven by the complexity of experience. After all these years the group is still reveling in the possibilities of just how innovative five guys making instrumental music can be. The possibilities seem endless. Percussionist Dan Bitney took a few minutes to talk about punk rock, meeting Iggy Pop, and to offers some insight into the group's inner workings.

I saw on Facebook that you met Iggy Pop at your Miami show.

Yeah! He’s the nicest guy. He has this BBC Radio show and we’d heard he was playing some of Jeff Parker’s solo records, and some of our records. I don’t know how people’s assistants get ahold of other people's assistants, but it worked out. I don’t usually get nervous with anything like that, but I was a little nervous for Iggy. We met Bowie, too, and I don’t think I was half as nervous with him.

Iggy lives in Miami. We played in this beautiful band shell outside, and he said it was his favorite beach because it’s still a little gnarly. He was aware that it was before we were playing, so he kept it short, which, I thought, showed a lot of respect. He was letting us get the stage prepared before we played. We did the meet-and-greet and I thought, “I’m not going to sweat him.” Then I went out to add a friend to the guest list and he was standing there. He was excited about our opener, Tara Jane O’Neil, and he went to the merch table to get some of her records. So I just said, “I’m sorry, can we take a picture?” And he said, “Let’s do it!” He was very accommodating, very nice.

He’s from Ann Arbor, Mich., and you’re from Madison, Wis. — not too far apart. Were you a Stooges fan growing up?

I was aware of them. I grew up with the Beatles and classic rock, and then I heard college radio and punk rock — Minor Threat and stuff like that. I went all in after I heard that. I kind of missed the transitional rock that was leading into punk. I had to find that stuff later. When they reissued that stuff on heavy vinyl was when I finally got the vinyl. It wasn’t that long ago.

I wanted to ask him what turned him on, here with Chuck Berry just dying. With some people you just know, but I wanted to ask him. It must be somewhere in the press, him explaining what turned him on, I should’ve asked. From talking to him yesterday I learned that he discovered Tortoise through listening to Jeff’s records. It wasn’t the other way around.

But anyway, for me, I got into punk and it wasn’t long after that I heard James Blood Ulmer and Ornette Coleman.

I first heard your drumming on an old Santa Cruz skateboard video. I heard the Tar Babies song “Rockhead.”

We were a hardcore band, but a lot of what we were doing comes from James Blood Ulmer. We opened for the Minutemen and heard George Hurley integrating funkier beats. It was before the Red Hot Chili Peppers became what they became, but there was some influence there, too. Really fast funk. “Rockhead.” The intro I did with the roto toms, I was really just channeling some of Prince’s stuff I heard on Lovesexy. Just this hard, one-two beat. I just put a tag on the beginning.

Is there a punk influence to Tortoise’s music?

Yeah, at least two-fifths of the group, myself included, came from the attitude of you can just do it. Jeff went to Berkley. John Herndon came out of punk, too, but he had lessons from an early age. We stayed on an indie label. Anytime I play devil’s advocate and mention a bigger label, I don’t want to say it gets dramatic, but no, it’s not gonna happen.

Stuff is just corporate now. People don’t even mind. We did a Calvin Klein commercial. It wasn’t that much money. It was a fragrance thing with “Tin Cans and Twine.” The amount of times we heard someone shout “Calvin Klein!” I would’ve just gave the money back. It wasn’t like a new car. It was like a vacation, or something. Now you just expect it to happen. You’re doing great if you cross-market with a car commercial. We’ll be at a festival and I’ll hear a band and think “Oh, it’s that Dodge Neon commercial!” So in that sense, the D.I.Y. stuff carries through with us. There was a creativity that came out of that era, if not the genre itself. Like PIL, for instance. Some of that is just weird and creative, but I’m always careful, being an older person, not to think that it was great in other regards. I got beat up so many times for being a weirdo in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Now you can wear your Ramones T-shirt, and you won’t be called a name and punched in the face. Culturally, we have come a ways. But it made us who we are. We toured before cell phones. We found shit that turned us on just from college radio.

Having to be an ambassador to the Chicago post-rock scene, or post-rock in general in the ‘90s, I got weary about painting this utopian picture. It’s not like you go there and drink the water and suddenly you’re playing with Jim O’Rourke.

A lot of early Thrill Jockey and early post-rock was a gateway for many people to discover more experimental areas of music. Krautrock, Neu, Michael Rother ... Do you think that same Krautrock vibe resonates with The Catastrophist?

Millions Now Living Will Never Die shows more of the obvious Krautrock sound with “Djed” and that whole section. I don’t think we’ve come close to that kind of rhythmic stuff … Maybe “High Class Slim” from Beacons of Ancestorship. I don’t see a direct connection from my angle. But I wasn’t even turned on to that kind of stuff in the old days. We’d do press and people asked about Can and all of this stuff. I’d only heard Tago Mago, and here I was repping this German music form with a derogatory name. It’s hard for me to put a direct line to it. I know we were listening to a lot of that music. It’s definitely in the ether with our band, but no more than analog or deeply ethnic jams.

Is there a song on The Catastrophist that you think of as the album’s thesis?

“Gesceap” is the weirdest and most original composition on the record. It’s the Terry Riley rock song. When the record was commissioned by the City of Chicago, that was the most realized piece. We worked with these great horn players and pushed them to the breaking point of their breath control. If you couldn’t circular breath, you’re going to have to sit down after playing this eight-minute piece with no rests in it. That’s one of my favorites, and one of the weirder songs.

We have three drummers in this band. In that song there is what I describe as the Motown beat. And then there’s the half-time in the choruses. We tried for a week to just get a rhythm. I’d be in there for a day and John McEntire would be in there for a day trying to figure out how to tie them together. It was during a weird time when John Herndon was moving to Los Angeles — different people are at different levels of involvement on the record at different times. I remember him stopping in one day and me saying, “You’re the drummer out of all of us who’s going to take these two parts and almost work it like a DJ with a crossfader. You’ll have the articulation to be able to blend these two parts into the song. And just due to bad planning that ended up being the only song where he’s playing drums on the whole record.

So then we go to learn the songs for the tour. This is the first record where we can play pretty much every song. That wasn’t by design. We didn’t come at it thinking we need to make more, simple tunes. Which you can say in general; these aren’t as complex as something like, say, “Glass Museum,” where you have pretty much have to memorize pie to know when the change is coming.

For this project, as with a lot of our projects, each person brings in their own idea. Mine ended up being the last tune on The Catastrophist, “At Odds With Logic.” It starts with … It’s not a shuffle, but a slower blues — I hesitate to say that. But it’s in there. And I’m playing a staccato bass that’s in a different, dotted triplet that feels weird, and it ends up with a metal ending section — real heavy. Then I had to pull the intro — that was double-time — that I stole from Morricone. I had this schizophrenic tune that had three sections that were all different genres of music. I was a week into the tune thinking, “This is shit. This is total crap!” It sounded OK when it was just horns. We have versions where Nicole Mitchell, Greg Ward and Ed Wilkerson Jr. are all blowing, and it’s like funk. Once we recorded it, and Jeff added distortion on his guitar, I thought, “This is going somewhere else, and it’s not good. Then one day McEntire comes in and says, “What if we just ditch that whole first section?” And I said “Oh, you just saved this song!” That’s an insight into working in this band. You feel pressure, and when I bring stuff I hope that people are going to have good ideas that will save my half-baked ideas.

With Tara Jane O’Neil. $15-$18. 8 p.m. Thurs., March 23. Terminal West, 887 West Marietta St. N.W., Studio C. 404-876-5566. www.terminalwestatl.com.

On Fri. March 24. Tortoise plays The Mill & Mine in Knoxville, Tenn. for this year's Big Ears Festival. Midnight.