The Blueprint Nobody Heard
In the summer of 1990, four musicians from Louisville, Kentucky, aged nineteen to twenty-one, drove to Chicago to record with engineer Brian Paulson at River North Recorders. They tracked everything live over two weekends: one to record, one to mix. Paulson and the band tried adding effects during mixdown and rejected them all, leaving the sound bare. Vocals were overdubbed in no more than two takes, using two microphones (one for whispering, one for shouting). The day after the sessions ended, singer Brian McMahan checked himself into a psychiatric facility. Slint broke up before Spiderland came out on Touch and Go Records in 1991. There were no tours, no interviews, no photo shoots. The album sold around 5,000 copies that year and received almost no press. It then kept selling several thousand copies annually for the rest of the decade, passed hand to hand like a secret, its whispering-to-screaming dynamics and skeletal guitar interplay turning up in the DNA of nearly every band that followed.
Naming the Thing
The word “post-rock” arrived three years later. English music journalist Simon Reynolds used it in a review of Bark Psychosis’s Hex for Mojo in March 1994, then developed the concept in a May 1994 essay for The Wire. His definition was precise: “using rock instrumentation for non-rock purposes, using guitars as facilitators of timbre and textures rather than riffs and power chords.” The term described what Talk Talk had already done. Their 1988 album Spirit of Eden was assembled in near-total darkness at Wessex Studios in London, windows blacked out, clocks removed from the walls, the only light coming from oil projectors and a strobe. Singer Mark Hollis and producer Tim Friese-Greene recorded hours of improvisation from a rotating cast of musicians, then cut the results into nearly 800 fragments and reassembled them. EMI’s executives were barred from the sessions. Their follow-up, Laughing Stock (1991), used the same method at the same studio with engineer Phill Brown, who later said the process involved “divorce, breakdown. It was intense.”
Two Schools
Post-rock split almost immediately into two distinct strains. In Chicago, Tortoise built the cerebral wing. Bassist Doug McCombs and drummer John Herndon originally wanted to be a freelance rhythm section modeled on Sly and Robbie. By 1994, the group had five members living together in a warehouse loft, mixing dub, jazz, minimalism, and krautrock into instrumental pieces with no guitar heroics. Their second album, Millions Now Living Will Never Die (1996), opened with “Djed,” a twenty-one-minute track that went through fifteen stages of mixing and editing. John McEntire, who engineered and mixed the record at Idful Music Corporation, became the scene’s in-house producer, recording Stereolab, The Sea and Cake, and Trans Am.
The other school wanted volume. In Glasgow, Mogwai formed in 1995 and built their debut, Mogwai Young Team (1997), around extremes of quiet and loud. They had written only three of its songs before entering MCM Studios. The production budget was negligible: Chemikal Underground label co-founder Paul Savage produced for free, and the band spent roughly two thousand pounds on a compressor. The closing track, “Mogwai Fear Satan,” ran sixteen minutes, beginning with a three-chord guitar figure and building into a distortion storm. Where Tortoise was cool and polyrhythmic, Mogwai was emotional and blunt. Stuart Braithwaite sold T-shirts reading “Blur Are Shite” at their gigs, a declaration of war against Britpop’s dominance of British music press.
Montreal and the Collective Model
Godspeed You! Black Emperor formed in Montreal in 1994 when Efrim Menuck, Mike Moya, and Mauro Pezzente were offered a supporting slot for a local band called Steak 72. The group swelled, at one point reaching fifteen members before trimming to ten for their debut recording. In spring 1997, they recorded F# A# Infinity at Hotel2Tango, a studio Menuck had set up in Mile End (the name derived from the postal code H2T, rendered in NATO phonetic alphabet). They used a rented sixteen-track tape deck and supplemented the music with field recordings. Constellation Records pressed 500 vinyl copies with hand-drawn back covers in silver ink. Each jacket included a penny crushed on Montreal railroad tracks, tucked into a manila envelope alongside a blueprint graphic.
The album’s pieces ran twenty minutes or longer, layering strings, tape loops, and spoken-word samples into slow accumulations of dread and beauty. Constellation became the hub of a broader Montreal collective that included Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra (Menuck’s side project with fellow Godspeed members Sophie Trudeau and Thierry Amar) and Do Make Say Think.
Iceland, Texas, Tokyo
Post-rock kept mutating as it traveled. In Reykjavik, Sigur Ros formed in 1994. Singer Jonsi Birgisson developed a technique of bowing his electric guitar with a cello bow, creating sustained, keening tones that no pick or finger could produce. He also sang in Vonlenska (Hopelandic), a made-up phonetic language with no grammar or vocabulary, functioning purely as texture. Their 1999 album Agaetis Byrjun replaced post-rock’s usual tension with something closer to glacial hymns, recorded with producer Ken Thomas using a double string octet alongside the core band.
In Austin, Texas, Explosions in the Sky formed in 1999 and refined the crescendo into a formula so effective it crossed into film. Director Peter Berg hired them to score the 2004 film Friday Night Lights, set in West Texas near the band members’ hometown of Midland. Their track “Your Hand in Mine,” originally from The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place (2003), became shorthand for emotional catharsis in soundtracks and television. In Tokyo, Mono pushed the dynamic range further, pairing with orchestras and recording pieces that treated the quiet-loud arc as a kind of secular liturgy.
The Crescendo Problem
By the mid-2000s, critics had a word for what post-rock had become: “crescendocore.” The formula was recognizable: start quiet, add layers, build for eight minutes, erupt into distortion, fade. The term was dismissive, and not entirely unfair. But the best bands kept finding ways around the template. Godspeed’s 2012 return, ‘Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!, after a decade-long hiatus, was angrier and more direct than anything they had made before. Sigur Ros scored television and film. Mogwai composed the soundtrack for the French television series Les Revenants in 2013. The genre survived its own cliches by expanding beyond them, moving into scoring, installation art, and hybrid forms that Simon Reynolds could never have predicted from a Mojo review column.
Essential Listening
- Slint – Spiderland (1991)
- Talk Talk – Laughing Stock (1991)
- Bark Psychosis – Hex (1994)
- Tortoise – Millions Now Living Will Never Die (1996)
- Godspeed You! Black Emperor – F# A# Infinity (1997)
- Mogwai – Mogwai Young Team (1997)
- Sigur Ros – Agaetis Byrjun (1999)
- Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven (2000)
- Explosions in the Sky – The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place (2003)
- Talk Talk – Spirit of Eden (1988)
- Mono – Hymn to the Immortal Wind (2009)
- Do Make Say Think – Winter Hymn Country Hymn Secret Hymn (2003)