Storm Static Sleep: A Pathway Through Post Rock

by Jack Chuter

manufacturers. In light of such context, the density of Yanqui U.X.O. felt like a weary realisation of the task at hand. The roots of evil ran too deeply and too insidiously. As “09-15-00” exploded over and over again in distorted violas and cymbals and flaming tremolo guitars, it seemed unfathomable that an eruption of such magnitude could go unfelt by the perpetrators of military violence. Alas, Yanqui U.X.O. was the sound of the band stranded in the ocean of inconsequence, and even though drowning was the only possible way out, Godspeed still thrashed for their survival for as long as they could.

Yanqui U.X.O. was produced by Steve Albini. He also went on to produce some colossally immersive works by Mono and Neurosis (which I’ll talk about later in the book), and I ask him how he managed to make these records so enveloping. “It sounds like I’m ducking the question but I’m pretty sure what’s vast or epic about all that music is what the bands have worked so hard at in rehearsal, and the limit of the credit I deserve is that I didn’t blow it when they asked me to record them,” Albini replies modestly. Indeed, he’s listed in the credits of Yanqui U.X.O. as recordist rather than producer, reducing his role to capturing what was already present rather than having an active part in the architecture. “I’ve learned a lot of specific techniques to help in certain situations, but each of those bands is quite different and required a different approach. About the only common thread with all those bands is that they have light and dark contrasts, heavy and light. If you make the light parts sound commanding, then there’s no dynamic range left to make the heavy parts have the appropriate impact, so you have to be willing to let the quiet parts be quiet or unassuming, at the risk of the listener having to do some of the work by paying attention. The payoff for that is that when the audience is paying attention, they’re rewarded and the impact of the band’s music isn’t softened.”

It was around the release of Godspeed’s subsequent full-length in 2015 – Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress – that I saw them play live for the first time. The unique, democratic energy flow between the band and their sound had never been so apparent. A low drone started rising through the floor before the band had even taken the stage, creeping upward to tickle the acknowledgement of the audience’s subconscious, and then further up to engulf their idle conversation. Slowly the sound materialised, and only once it was a huge, omnipresent hum shuddering through the space did the band members appear, with each instrument promptly sucked into the drone like a black hole swallowing stars. Strings and guitars were forcefully calibrated to the monotony. There was no member to whom the others were subservient; instead, the group were under the command of their own sound, stepping into an entity that had materialised even before they did.

“The commitment to placing your individual instrument within the larger sound and really subsuming individual ideas of identity – and certainly individual ideas of personality and virtuosity – is something that I think is very important to what Godspeed does,” Ilavky says. “When you think about what they’ve managed to pull off versus, let’s say, Pink Floyd at their best, there’s maybe something more bombastic and indulgent about some of our big heroes of prog rock. Godspeed gets that criticism and it’s fair enough – to some ears and eyes, they’re also bombastic or heavy-handed. But I do feel like one reason Godspeed connects with so many listeners is that they very deliberately subsume showmanship and personality and quite literally keep their heads down in every sense. I think of them as an orchestral punk-rock band, in the sense that I feel their values have much more to do with music-making as honest labour, music as oppositional and utopic, but not escapist or hypocritical, and music as something that can save your fucking life – so you’d better protect it from co-optation and preserve a space for it to stand on its own and stand for itself.” For me – and I share this thought with Ilavsky too – there is a certain gulf between the likes of Godspeed and Pink Floyd. In fact, this is also where I initially perceived the distinction between ‘rock’ and ‘post-rock’ to exist. Both bands are huge in sound, but with Godspeed the energy flow is reversed; their creation crashes on...

A year later, the project found its true purpose. Efrim Menuck’s dog Wanda died while Godspeed were out on tour in the late 90s. His wanted to write a piece of music about it, but Godspeed wasn’t the appropriate forum for expressing something so personal and relatively fleeting. “I would say that Godspeed often feels like a very large, very impressive sea freighter, whereas Mt. Zion is more like a little motor boat,” he told Pop Matters in 2014. “It has much less internal inertia so it can move much more easily. If the ship named Godspeed sees an iceberg ahead, more often than not, it can’t stop in time.” The imagery seemed to baffle the interviewer for a moment. “I know…” Menuck continued. “That was a really tortured analogy. There are fewer people involved in Mt. Zion than Godspeed, which often makes it easier. Godspeed’s also even more of a democracy than Mt. Zion as well, so there are a lot more opinions. It can be hard.”

Post-rock was now massive in terms of stereo breadth and its emotional themes. Just like the classical orchestra, the music was less a congregation of separate entities and more a monolithic body in itself, moving as one, channelling mass sentiments of collective cultural zeitgeist, human nature and the apocalypse. Post-rock had hit its peak of scale, and we turn now to bands across the globe that strived to attain similar levels of immensity.

With 2014’s Rays of Darkness, Goto found a means of channelling his unpleasant disposition. The album was a curdling of anxiety and aggression, turning the edges of Mono’s predominantly gracious and curvaceous compositions into shapes ravaged by punk and noise. Yet just as Godspeed’s most bleak and disastrous moments carried a faint glint of optimism, the other side of Mono’s double record was like a thin, brittle rope lowered into the mouth of hell. The Last Dawn saw a hopeful smile starting to quiver in the corner of Mono’s lips, not yet embracing a reversal of fortune, but at least welcoming the prospect of it.

As Goto became increasingly acquainted with scoring for classical instrumentation, the sound of Mono transformed accordingly. “I learned everything regarding orchestration by myself,” he tells me. “On our first album, I tried incorporating one cello, then cello and violin on the second, and for the first time, I used a quartet on the third album. I just slowly learned each instrument’s uniqueness, sounds and volumes and eventually used a double quartet on the fourth album.” The fourth album was 2006’s You Are There, and marks the point at which rock and orchestration hit a perfect balance. Effects such as reverb, delay and tremolo picking were used to make the guitars resemble violins and cellos, so that the band could play their new material live even when an orchestra was absent. But the guitars were also treated like classical instruments to be scored for; on “Moonlight” they wove up and down as though in flight, with tremolo used to emulate the continuous flow of the violin. During moments like this, the guitars and strings blended into a formidable whole – both warm and fizzing, turbulent and serene.

The band’s sound was ultimately gravity-adherent, still raw and rough like a rock band. Yet from this point on, Explosions would embark on a similar transformative process to Mono. The sound of the plectrum would disappear; the inner warmth of the guitar tone would be brought forth. The humans behind the music would part-etherealise, only visible as hazy silhouettes behind reverb and billowing drums. Yet where the music of Mono would swell to drown the human beings within, Explosions achieved the reverse, picking out specific characters within sprawling, bird’s eye perspectives and depicting panoramas from the subjective lens of the individual.

In an interview with Guitar World in 2011, guitarist Munaf Rayani discussed the role of each member within Explosions in the Sky. “If Chris [Hrasky, drums] were to break us down, I bet he would say something like, Michael [James] is probably the most proficient among us, so he can run finger-picking guitar lines that will kind of set a path; Mark [Smith] will add feedbacks and delay sounds and screeches and scrawls that will fill out this canopy of trees; and then I might play a melody that kind of jumps out in an anthemic kind of way. Not to say that that’s all each of us plays, but it seems to go that way. Mark’s going to colour it up, Michael is going to carry the line and I’m going to try to hang over it. Chris is the heartbeat, he’s the lifeline. As we all do this together, we arrive at these completed pieces at eight or nine minutes long, and we really don’t know how we got there. But we got there.”

The final track on the record, “Your Hand in Mine”, would lead Explosions into the world of soundtrack work. It was the most memorable, immediately beautiful thing the band had ever put to tape. Sensitive, epic, optimistic. Explosions felt like a chamber quartet stripped of its lofty classical credentials; through the medium of guitar they captured all the elegance of orchestral music, albeit presented within the human scale of rock. After all, wasn’t that what so much cinema tried to achieve? Coaxing the viewer into an immersive fictional world through a doorway of intimate human narrative?

“We have stories that we tell each other and visuals that go along to the songs for ourselves, only as guidelines to get to the next part, or a chord change, or the introduction of a new sound,” Rayani continued. “We try to tell stories to each other, but by no means do we have a definitive narrative to any of them, and that is the beauty of instrumental music — and not just contemporary instrumental music, classical music. I mean, think about all the great pieces that Bach or Chopin or Mozart wrote that are played everywhere. And it adapts itself to that scene, because people like to tell stories to music, and that’s pretty easy to do with instrumental music, of all types. So yeah, there’s no definitive story, just broad strokes to a story.”

Perhaps the rough edges of The Rescue inspired the band to rock a little bit harder on 2007’s All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone. Drummer Chris Hrasky felt more prominent here, leading the band in vigorous snare drum gallops and pushing the energy levels toward cyclonic shoegaze during the crescendos. Yet the album also travelled in the opposite direction too, perhaps led by the band’s flirtations with soundtrack work. Strings and pianos flecked the softer sections, dangling gently around the edge of listener consciousness like wind chimes. Again, the titles contained little references to film and literature: “The Birth and Death of the Day” was taken from John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, while the album name was taken from dialogue in John Cassavetes’ 1974 film A Woman Under the Influence. The record’s opening moment was truly “all of a sudden”: a detonation of cymbal and tremolo guitars juddering through the listener without warning. With Explosions and Mono, emotions overwhelmed the body’s ability to control them. This music was about the surges of inner happening that humans were powerless to control: the irrepressible swell of love, the inevitable melancholic breakdown that followed a prolonged period of internalised doubt. Again, there was humbleness. Humans are small and frail, forever naïve and in awe of a world that tosses them upon choppy waves of emotion and chance. But how does post-rock combat the onset of familiarity and acquaintance? Once a listener grows accusto...

Naturally, such acclaim brought with it a tide of press attention. Not all of it was welcome. The role of much of the music press was, and still is, to render bands familiar and comprehensible, uncovering the reasoning that can condense the beautiful and bizarre into an action or thought process. The band were insistent on the fact that their music couldn’t be unpackaged in this way. “I don’t know why I write songs,” Birgisson explained to UK newspaper The Times in 2000. “I don’t know where it comes from and I don’t know why we four are really good at doing it. It happens unconsciously, but reporters want to know why I sing like this, why do I use a bow on my guitar ...

I can only speak the truth. How can I make someone understand things that I don’t understand myself?” Georg Hólm had another way of putting it during a 2005 interview with Sirkus magazine. “Sometimes you can discover new facets in music by talking in a superficial way about it but as soon as you try to get any deeper than that, you’re in trouble. After all, things that are dissected usually need to be dead first.”

Apparently, the ambiguous lyricism of previous records wasn’t a sufficient deterrent for those desperate to uncover some sort of semantic anchorage beneath the music. Sigur Rós had to remove all allusions to semantics altogether. ( ) was an album to be listened to, not rationalised.

In the film Heima, the band performed the song amidst a storm of strobe lights, producing frantic silhouettes upon the back wall that almost appeared to be fighting with each other. It’s since become Sigur Rós’ signature performance closer. The band depart the stage to a distorted noise that gushes like blood from a fatal wound, leaving the audience in no doubt that the night is over. While the tracks are untitled, each has an alternate title used by the band. The finale of ( ) has the tongue-in-cheek title of “Popplagið”, which translates from Icelandic as “the pop song”.

The next track had a similarly dramatic shift around the halfway mark. After hitting the album’s explosive peak in a whirl of piano and strings and distortion, “Sæglópur” slumped into a state of serene exhaustion. The piano fell limp, gently treading upon a melody that felt lost and uncertain, somehow both sad and triumphant. Birgisson and violins swooped overhead like birds in synchronised flight. I saw them play this song live at Isle of Wight’s Bestival in 2012, and a massive group hug broke out in the audience just in front of me. Bodies sighed and came together as the melody rose and fell, consoling each other and sharing the joy simultaneously.

With “Hoppípolla”, there was no such ambiguity. The track title translates as “hopping into puddles”. It’s about enjoyment for its own childish sake, liberated from the demands of meaning and purpose. The piano melody was the most saccharine and memorable thing the group had ever written, riding over lavishly applied strings and a drumbeat that emulated the elated pumping of fists. Birgisson’s voice predominantly stayed within a more familiar, ‘human’ pitch range; if the lyrics weren’t a swirl of Icelandic and Vonlenska, one could easily sing along. I don’t think I could name a more joyous and celebratory piece of music.

Once a band reaches levels of jubilance and idealism that can be co-opted by the utopia of advertising, where else is there to go? We come back to Stuart Braithwaite’s thoughts on ‘epicness’. Strangely, the experientially magnificent is also fleeting and frail. How often can one be overwhelmed by music before the sensation starts to feel insincere? Takk was the music of miracle and life-changing love. To repeat the trick too soon would be to cheapen a splendour whose potency resided in its very rarity. Sigur Rós were one of several post-rock bands, like Explosions in the Sky, who reached a peak of scale around the mid 2000s, leaving them with no choice but to return to a state of moderation.

Almost a decade after Simon Reynolds coined the term – and even with it drifting into a different musical territory entirely in the years since – post-rock still existed within the threat of etherealisation, hiding the evidence of human instigation within the waves of abstract sound.

With Valtari, the group touched upon a cloud of activity that had been thickening in the skies above the post-rock landscape. There was a strand of ambient music operating between the peripheral consciousness of film score and the poignant melodic underbelly of post-rock. Artists like Eluvium and Hammock were uprooting the anchorage of rhythm and leaving post-rock to drift freely through space, tidally shifting between nascent hope and melancholy. In an interview with Clash, Sigur Rós described Valtari as “an avalanche in slow motion”, a description that also applies to the momentous inevitability of Hammock. Like a marble on an tilting tabletop, tiny harmonies gathered density through gradual accumulations in momentum, gradually turning into gigantic, orchestra-wide waves of major key euphoria. With Eluvium’s record Talk Amongst the Trees, shapeless breaths of guitar drone curled like smoke around pianos and synthesised strings. Melodies emerged and receded into reverberant fog; the vague presence of post-rock / neo-classical melodic sensibility (also celebrated by composers such as Clint Mansell and Ludovico Einaudi) was the only thing preventing the sound from becoming a free-flowing mist of drone.

It’s within this duality that so much post-metal music exists. The blood of the body is poured into the contemplative well of the mind. During its quieter downturns, there’s little separating post-rock from post-metal (aside from a slightly harder edge – guitar downstrokes and firmer, kraut-style beats are more frequent in the latter). It’s during the louder moments that the distinction really proclaims itself. Unlike post-rock, there is never any risk of post-metal etherealising. If anything, it threatens to detonate irreparably. Instead of rising upward into the skies of the high frequencies, dovetailing into delays and fizzing with distortion, post-metal aims its energy downward. Slow, tectonically driven rock music such as doom and sludge metal (St. Vitus, Melvins, even Black Sabbath) are prominent reference points. Vocals are frequently granted a central presence too, dropping the screams of human anguish directly into the earthquake crevice.

Simon Reynolds offered his perspective on post-metal in a 2009 article for Slate, observing that the path from metal to post-metal was not necessarily one of musicality. “The continuity is less sonic but attitudinal: the penchant for morbidity and darkness taken to a sometimes hokey degree; the sombre clothing and the long hair; the harrowed, indecipherably growled vocals; the bombastically verbose lyrics / song titles / band names. It’s that aesthetic rather than a way of riffing or a palette of guitar sounds that ties post-metal back to Judas Priest and Black Sabbath.” While I agree that there is an aesthetic continuity from metal to post-metal, I’d make a case for post-metal’s partial sonic heritage in the riffs of Sabbath, whose density and severity crop up in some of the more doom-centric post-metal outfits (albeit at half the speed).

A short word on Edwardson’s vocals too. They’re absolutely incredible – the more so for how sparingly they’re used. Once or twice on each record, the band wheel him out like a 10ft ogre in chains. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who suspected his voice might have been pitched down in the studio, but after seeing the band play “Eye” live, hearing Edwardson yell “drooooooooown!” while staring out into the crowd, I was vehemently proven wrong. Coupled with the grotesque, rhythmically lopsided riff beneath him, it’s one of the most horrible moments on the entire record.

Human beings were either sucked into the totality of something much bigger (Godspeed You! Black Emperor) or rendered part-mythical (Sigur Rós). Post-metal allowed for the music to be fleshy and real. When post-rock reduced in volume, it often brought with it a momentary alleviation of intensity, either as a pause for breath or to form a point of contrast. When the distortion cut back during the post-millennial music of Neurosis, the band sounded no less anguished. Tears and blood soaked through the fabric of quiet.

Yet it wasn’t until their debut album Celestial, a year later, that Isis started carving their own corner of heavy music. I remember playing the track “Celestial (The Tower)” for a friend of mine during a Music Technology class. As I expected, his jaw fell open at 52 seconds. The slow groove imploded in a unified low F (almost a whole octave below standard tuning), groaning out of tune due to the sheer weight of the note. It was real a white-knuckle heavy moment.

Conceptually, the record partly dealt with the idea of surveillance and privacy invasion, which brought an extra dimension of menace to the way the guitars stooped over the listener’s head.

If Through Silver in Blood initiated the post-metal movement, then Oceanic championed it.

I dragged my dad along to the shows on both occasions. In fact, he’d also come with me to see Neurosis play at the London Forum in late 2006. Despite his minimal interest in music, he made the observation that Isis seemed a much tighter, more polished band than Neurosis, which is absolutely right. Neurosis always seemed on the edge of imploding. They stood relatively still on stage, as if conscious of losing balance as the sound quaked beneath them. Their sound was ugly and lumbering, full of faltering and lethargic steps. In contrast, Isis were always timed to perfection, aerobically active in stage presence, yet never to the extent where mistakes could be made. Turner’s vocals were absolutely furious in the live context too,

After Celestial’s earth and Oceanic’s water, Panopticon was a record of the air.

Later, it emerged that the whole concept had been a hoax. Cult of Luna hadn’t found a diary in their rehearsal space. They’d fabricated the entire thing. When I interviewed Johannes Persson in 2012, I asked him why. “With all respect, doing interviews is not the reason why I went into music,” he replied. “After being in this business for 10 years – doing interviews, reading interviews of myself, seeing people just repeating what I’ve said, reading magazines never putting out a critical question, never motivating the artist to think about why they say stupid things, glorifying stupid behaviours and stupid artists as part of a rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle that is worth taking after – I was so bored with it. Since music ‘journalists’ do not seek the truth but just repeat what you say, I wondered how much I could lie and get away with. And it turned out that I could get away with a whole lot.”

It’s the music of immense self-scrutiny; the product of a remix culture that proclaims nothing is fully formed and everything is infinitely sub-divisible. This approach promises unlimited opportunity, but where is the line? Where does the editing stop? “We’re kind of scared of repeating ourselves,” Wolinski admitted to music website Echoes and Dust in 2014. “Often songs will start with some kind of electronic skeleton, or chord progression, but it’ll get ripped apart and put back together in a million different ways. Ninety-nine percent of the time, we do this with songs until they are broken and we have soaked the small spark of an idea that was hidden inside of it with wet, soggy doubt. The other one percent is what makes it on to our records.”

This is where 65daysofstatic and Storm Static Sleep part ways. There’s validity in the argument that they never belonged here in the first place, but anyway – such is the tenuous understanding of post-rock that all guitar-based instrumental music was at risk of being swallowed up inside it. 2010’s We Were Exploding Anyway was, as so eloquently put by The Quietus, their “ah, fuck it” album. We’ve seen the post-rock and post-metal tags outstaying their welcome in the latter-day music of Mogwai and Pelican respectively. 65daysofstatic’s new record put the hollowness of post-rock to the test; what if the band transformed into a fully-fledged electronic dance band, more indebted to The Prodigy than Mogwai? Would listeners and journalists inanely apply the label even then? Some did. Other writers painted We Were Exploding Anyway as a deliberate evacuation of the post-rock territory. It seemed somewhat patronising. Were 65daysofstatic really so harrowed by the term that they felt the need to flee into a 51-minute voyage through outer space, or was this the album they would have made regardless? Some of the more intricate aspects of the record risked being overlooked for the sake of pitching it as a post-rock protest. The record wasn’t a total abandonment of their previous music, and the twitches of urgency and confusion that defined The Fall of Math could still be felt during the cluster-bomb climax of pieces like “Go Complex”. The clue was in the album title. Maybe 65daysofstati...

“But it’s essentially rock instrumentation playing non-rock songs. That comes from when it was Stereolab and the krautrock kind of stuff. And now suddenly it’s bands like Explosions in the Sky,” he laughs. After spending a year mapping the path of post-rock’s development, it’s surreal to hear someone summarise its journey in the space of a sentence.

Tides From Nebula and Sleepmakeswaves are so slick and balanced that they have a certain intangible, levitating quality, like an astronaut gazing at the world from above. In contrast, Maybeshewill always feel human-sized, prone to naivety and mistake. If Sleepmakeswaves mirror the precise art of cartography, Maybeshewill are a handwritten love note, attractive for its poetic metaphors, but also beautiful in ways that it can’t possibly know about: the evidence of quivering hands in the shapes of certain letters, the implied evidence of self-consciousness and emotional vulnerability. Maybeshewill lose themselves in the moment from time to time. Some of these crescendos may be harmonically rich to the point of saccharine, but so what? Sometimes the screams of passion are loud enough to drown out the counter-voice of moderation and self-preservation. Is that such a bad thing?

In 2015, the likes of ArcTanGent festival in England and dunk!festival in Belgium signify a colossal moment in the post-rock narrative. The term has now crystallised to the extent where these festivals advertise themselves as showcasing post-rock, and listeners know exactly what to expect when they arrive. Attending ArcTanGent in 2014 was one of the best festival experiences of my life. I knew that post-rock had spawned online communities of like-minded listeners who share large overlaps in music taste. If someone proclaimed to love Mono, you could take a guess that they were probably into Explosions in the Sky and Sigur Rós too. It’s a shame that the term has all but evicted the likes of Seefeel and Pram, bands which led Simon Reynolds to see post-rock as an “open plain of possibility” back in the 90s. Yet post-rock’s tangible meaning has brought with it a sense of devotion and community, and to experience the congregative energy of post-rock in the context of a festival was an absolute delight.

At ArcTanGent festival, the band had legendary status. Attendees were well aware that, without the release of Spiderland in 1991, half of the festival lineup probably wouldn’t even exist.

one thing was vibrantly clear on the basis of ArcTanGent: if someone liked post-rock, they really, really liked post-rock.

Yet unlike fans of hardcore and black metal, you wouldn’t necessarily recognise a post-rock listener if you saw one. Fandom wasn’t to be denoted by fashion. Post-rock listeners would be civilians hidden in plain sight, broadcasting their interest almost exclusively through online discussion groups and the occasional band t-shirt. Perhaps this was to do with the shifting identity of post-rock – coupled with the fact that the scene has materialised in a predominantly immaterial age – but the lack of associated accessories is probably linked to the fact that post-rock had developed a strict focus on the music, largely divorced from political or societal concerns. Post-rock listeners were often musicians themselves; online discussion forums became rife with talk about reverb and delay FX pedals, the self-promotion of solo projects, and passionate declarations of guitar and equipment preferences. It was to be the music of the introvert: listeners who preferred to retreat into their own headphones and listen to post-rock on walks and public transport.

Despite God Is An Astronaut being an odd fit in the genre, their fanbase is the stuff of post-rock cliché: international, obsessive, audiophilic, technologically savvy. “People in England don’t realise how big they are,” declares Joshi. “We get so many messages through Bandcamp saying ‘I’ve got all of your albums and I love you’. We don’t get that through any other Bandcamp. They play places like Russia and there are queues around the block to see them. They’ve got such die-hard fans. When I released the last album, I must have shipped 700 just directly from mail order and the post office were going crazy. I was just wheeling down a trolley with all of the LP mailers piled up. And then you got a free download code … the amount of people emailing me going, ‘the free download code is only an mp3 – we want a wav’. Really crazy audiophile nutters. I had to figure out a way to get them higher quality downloads to keep them all happy. It’s wonderful.”

For ArcTanGent and Incubate, the post-rock emphasis subsided significantly in 2015. It’s difficult to ascertain why. The popularity of the genre hasn’t diminished – if anything, it’s only become stronger. My theory (and I’ve touched on it before) is that the hyperbolic quality of post-rock makes it difficult to stomach over and over again. Epicness is a fragile thing; familiarity kills it. If post-rock obtains its sense of scale through contrast with the music around it, having a number of post-rock bands back-to-back acts as a desensitiser. Through repeated exposure to the supposed extremes of misery and grandeur, the spectrum shifts. Post-rock begins to sound blunted and ‘normal’, its potency robbed through experiential familiarity. Perhaps the curators of both festivals realised this.

With Swans, music dictates the passing of time rather than vice versa; transitions occur when, musically, they feel right.

I’ve spoken frequently about listening to post-rock being a process of surrender, or acknowledging the triviality of perceiver and performer amidst the soundscape that swallows them. I also think it’s healthy to surrender the connotative baggage of the term ‘post-rock’ when listening to music that supposedly falls under the heading. Post-rock offers a fantastic way for a music fan to navigate the saturated landscape of sound and consistently discover good music. Without it, I never would have come across the likes of This Will Destroy You, God Is An Astronaut, Mono, Tortoise, Maybeshewill or Disco Inferno. That said, treat post-rock with scepticism. The semantic development of the term has been driven as much by misunderstanding and error as it has by careful reasoning. How else would it be able to house artists as disparate Pram and Jakob? I see a lot of attempts to succinctly define post-rock, and arguments over whether a band qualifies as a member of the genre or not. I urge the reader to abandon this desire to articulate post-rock, and even let go of the impulse to make sense of it. Avoid using the term as a frame of reference when listening to new music, even if it was post-rock that got you there. Don’t let it curb your ability to be naïve and fresh-eared when listening to new sounds for the first time. Use post-rock as a map with which to plot a scenic route through sound, and when you stop to engage with a point of interest, put the map away again.