Bumps
Bumps
Stones Throw Records
By Jose Fritz
Tortoise was a very important band in the genesis of post rock. Mercury Program, Turning Machine and many others were already around in their era, but Tortoise had the all-star cast that really sold it. They were impossible to ignore: John McEntire, John Herndon and others went on to Sea & Cake, Poster Children, Exploding Star Orchestra, and the legend of Tortoise did nothing but grow.
This time McEntire and Herndon, along with Dan Bitney, have no interest in the rock; not the post-rock, the pre-rock or any other kind of rock. I’ll say it again more clearly for the slow readers. This is not a rock record. However this record totally rocks.
Break beat dance music and raves were not the genesis of our American love of beats. It began in the 1940s when innovative jazz drummers like Warren “Baby” Dodds took the empty space between those slow dull quarter notes and invented everything else. Of course we’ve moved from imitating to sampling them today. Why innovate when you can cut and paste, dub and overdub? The mix tape is an art in itself!
Bumps make a hot Brooklyn mix tape out of this conceptual break beat record. The album mixes break beats, squelched hip-hop samples, and turntables moves to present this genre-bending chunk of IDM. The album lands somewhere between the club disco of 1982 and the most engaging experimental trip-hop of today. These are the kind of brain-grabbing beats that usually lie under a white label.
The bump was also a dance fad in the 1970s. The main move of the dance is to lightly “bump" hips on every other quarter note. This usually degenerated into dry humping and much drunken debauchery ensued. I don’t think it would be possible to apply that dance to this record, but it would be really funny to watch that chunky kid with the light saber try it.
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