Storm Static Sleep: A Pathway Through Post Rock

by Jack Chuter

Ilavsky points out that Constellation didn’t start out with the intention of depicting this upsurge in instrumental rock at the time. The label certainly didn’t see itself as affiliated with post-rock. In fact, his objections to adopting post-rock as a descriptor are assertive and acutely deliberated. I’ve heard one of his reasons cited by many others: that ‘post-rock’ is a lazy journalistic substitute for a thorough and meaningful engagement with the music itself. In the late 90s, reviews of Constellation releases consisted of unnecessary prefaces about the label’s place within post-rock, with little room spared to talk about the record in question (which, quite frequently, would have little to do with post-rock whatsoever). However, Ilavsky had another concern over the term’s political utility. “This process of trying to find the space between genres – and importantly for us, in a non-academic and non-virtuosic context – was absolutely what we understood to be the promise of punk rock; not as a genre, but as a spirit and as an approach. So what’s at stake in displacing the term ‘punk’ with the term ‘post-’? This was pre-9/11, during the alter-globalisation movement and an engaged political perspective on globalisation and its discontents. That was the air we were breathing in Montreal, and we were all fellow travellers with much more committed full-time activists. We saw what we were doing, economically and culturally, as being very much in common cause with those sorts ...