Storm Static Sleep: A Pathway Through Post Rock

by Jack Chuter

A crucial transition in post-rock was starting to take place. When Simon Reynolds stopped reaffirming the definition of post-rock and bringing new bands into the fold, the term started to drift away from his jurisdiction, becoming the property of music journalism as a whole. What was previously an academic observation of a sudden happening within British and American music started to pull in a new wave of bands, many of whom took the loud / quiet model of Slint and splayed it across the landscapes of minimalist classical, shoegaze and drone. What did the ‘post’ in ‘post-rock’ mean by this point? Sometimes I think that ‘post’ could have denoted the sheer girth of the music’s stereo spread, as if it were transcending some strict dimensional limits imposed upon the soundscape of rock. In fact, the semantics of the term were becoming less important. Just as no post-rock listener relates the word “Mogwai” back to the strange furry creature in Spielberg’s Gremlins anymore, post-rock itself was starting to gut its conceptual origins. Essentially, the energy flow was reversed: the music was now loading post-rock with meaning, rather than post-rock imposing academic significance upon the music. We enter a stage where post-rock truly becomes a vessel upon the tides of music history, shunted forward by its re-application by journalists and listeners (seldom the bands themselves), gathering new connotations and offloading those that grow stale and redundant.