Storm Static Sleep: A Pathway Through Post Rock

by Jack Chuter

Primarily, it was Tortoise and Bark Psychosis that would bridge the ‘post-rock’ coined by Simon Reynolds and ‘post-rock’ the musical genre. People couldn’t get their head around post-rock as a limitless plain of possibility. Besides, if music reviewers were charged with capturing the abstraction of sound in a box of comprehensible descriptors and reference points, what use was a term that alluded to the vast unknown beyond rock’s borders? Quickly enough, the plain started to shrink; the common musical traits of post-rock were identified and a genre started to materialise, loading the term with a set of static and unambiguous connotations. To be ruthlessly dilutive, post-rock would initially come to denote the collision between Tortoise and Bark Psychosis: a largely instrumental music with vast dynamic and spatial breadth, flecked with the democratic virtuosity of jazz. Funnily enough, the visceral energy of rock was also an essential component. Perhaps because audiences could comprehend the meaning of ‘rock’ more readily than ‘post’, the former was a much stronger presence than the latter. Post-rock was starting to crank into reverse, returning to the very genre from which it was supposed to escape.