Gig played on 25/7/06

They were once called Mosquito. Really. The band whose album is tonight being honoured by inclusion in the latest "Don't Look Back" series first named themselves not after the stolid but stately, long-lived and legendarily wise reptile, but after a blood-sucking, fatal disease-carrying insect with a seriously irritating whine.

Whatever the hell founder members Doug McCombs and John Herndon were thinking back in the day, mercifully, they saw reason before they hit the recording studio. "Millions Now Living Will Never Die" was not Tortoise's debut album, but it is their most definitive, establishing the blueprint for a complex, subtly nuanced blend of Krautrock, space jazz and experimental electronica which - when it was first released ten years ago - earned them the dubious honour of being dubbed the first "post-rock" band.

The digital rumble of thunder that opens "Djed" ushers in not a storm tonight, but the gentle flickering of insistent, Can-like rhythms and a flurry of glitchy textures, underpinned at around the ten-minute mark (Tortoise necessarily favour the marathon over the sprint) by a deliciously watery harpsichord motif and increasingly urgent vibes. It plays out with sequenced, juddering spasms and synthesised whooshes that mimic the sound of cars passing each other at high speed on a wet autobahn. As intros go, it's pretty cool, although it doesn't register as an intro because, although Tortoise pause politely to register our applause in between, the album's six instrumentals segue into one another and we're soon plunged into the winnowing, pellucid loveliness of "Glass Museum" quicker than you can say "quasi-classical".

Guitarist Dave Pajo is of course missing from this line-up, whose five members play in respected experimental outfits The Chicago Underground Trio, The Sea And Cake and Isotope 217, among others, but it's Tortoise whose silvery, avant-garde prints we best recognise. Sinking into their elegant and emotional, yet sumptuously solipsistic atmospherics tonight, beneath the obvious Neu!-like reverberations and Steve Reich's pristine minimalism, there are other ghosts working: Eno and Cluster; Bernard Hermann and Ennio Morricone (a fellow "Don't Look Back" contributor this year); the dub chambers of Studio One; Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis; Jean Jacques Perrey; Rachel's and Gastr Del Sol; and Chicago's legendary Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM).

History blurs by in both directions and prompts several questions: wither Radiohead today, without Tortoise? Why is Krautrock the music that will never die? How come post-rock has never been left behind in the fashion race? More to the point, why did Tortoise ditch these monumentally moving, polymorphously pleasurable, superbly suggestive pieces for the protracted and cerebral, prog-funk noodling of later albums? Who knows. However, one thing is certain - "Millions Now Living…." is the sound of a bench being marked. Again.

by Sharon O'Connell