Thrill Jockey 20th Anniversary LP repress / Beacons of Ancestorship is Tortoise's sixth full-length album released in June of 2009. Having sold through multiple vinyl pressings upon release it has been unavailable for a few years. We are happy to bring it back as part of our 20th Anniversary. Pressed on high quality virgin vinyl and presented in an old-style tip-on gatefold jacket with artworked inner sleeve and MP3 download coupon. A characteristic Tortoise album is one that traverses an encyclopedia of styles and reference points, a document of where musical intersections and dialogue are occurring at a given moment in time. Beacons of Ancestorship is no different, with nods to techno, punk, electro, lo-fi noise, cut-up beats, heavily processed synths, and mournful, elegiac dirges. We see these ideas working out in compositions like "High Class Slim Came Floatin' In," an eight-minute track which playfully references the world of ecstatic rave and dance culture with a curiously ambivalent, multi-part suite overlaid with robotic, machine-sounding melodies that stop and start in several different time signatures before the song's ultimate resolution, and again in "Yinxianghechengqi," which begins as a straightforward uptempo math-rocker before steadily accelerating into a wall of fuzzy atonal sqwonk.