‘Indescribable’ band Tortoise is bigger overseas than at home. Come hear why

With just two of the six North American cities checked off on a brief autumn tour, Douglas McCombs says he and his bandmates in Tortoise are beginning to be at ease with compositions making up the band’s first album of new music in nine years, “Touch.”

“We’re excited because now we’re past the point of fear and more to the point of just being able to enjoy playing the songs.”

The mood may shift slightly the night Tortoise plays the Singletary Center for the Arts this week. The Lexington prelude will have McCombs and company in the band’s home turf of Chicago for a concert with the Chicago Philharmonic.

“That,” McCombs remarked, “is another level of fear.”

Such a sentiment might hold true for that one performance. But for the better part of its 35-year career, Tortoise has proven to be stylistically fearless in ways that have won the band an international fan base.

Its predominantly instrumental music blends together elements of rock, electronics, prog, jazz and maybe a half-dozen other contemporary genres in a way that is truly democratic. Its five members, all multi-instrumentalists who maintain active careers of their own outside the band, pass around compositions, grooves and melodies. The resulting music is then juiced up with improvisation and then rinsed with a variety of post-production studio enhancements.

What category do you file such a mix under? If you consult a variety of critical write-ups, the answer is “post rock” — a commonly used but still impossibly vague label. Peruse the bio material accompanying “Touch” and the tag used is the more outrageously head-scratching “post everything.” Ask McCombs, however, and the reply is far simpler.

“I understand a lot of touchstones for different types of music and ways to describe them make sense to people. I don’t really object to the term ‘post rock’ because a lot of people might have a vague idea of what that means, but we never use that term to describe our music. I always just say we’re an instrumental rock band.

“But that can be a lot of different things to a lot of different people, too. We’re not the Ventures, you know what I mean? But there are aspects of The Ventures in what we do. So, like, whatever. I don’t know. I don’t know what else to call it.”

Enforcing McCombs’ latter observation is a “Touch” tune called “A Title Comes.” It’s a work that balances the coolness of a melody stoked by vibraphone-colored calm with an inviting sense of compositional warmth.

“If you were to describe yourself as an instrumental rock band and then play someone that song, they might look at you questionably,” McCombs said. “But that’s what we’re trying to achieve. We’re trying to make people question what exactly is going on and what is interesting about this music or if it is interesting at all. That’s just part of the whole thing for us. In the end, it always sounds like us to me.”

“The reason this band has stayed together as long as it has is because we have all grown to understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Any single idea that happens within Tortoise has enough room for us explore. Sometimes some of us don’t have an idea of what to do with a piece of music. The great thing then is someone else will step up and say, ‘I think I know what we can do with that.’ That’s what the group sound is.

“When people ask what Tortoise sounds like or how could you describe Tortoise’s sound ... well, we can’t describe it. I can’t describe Tortoise’s sound, but I can tell you that the thing that makes it is the five people involved. That’s the group sound.”

While that group sound has been a favorite among critics and indie music fans in this country for decades, Tortoise’s popularity is perhaps greater overseas. Such a claim is underscored by the band’s current tour itinerary. Lexington is one of only six U.S. cities Tortoise plays on a fall tour before jumping the Atlantic for three late November concerts in England. A pair of European tours are planned for January and April with a run of Australian shows set for May.

But Chicago is where everything began for Tortoise, even though McCombs and Dan Bitney are the only members still residing there (Jeff Parker and John Herndon are in Los Angeles, John McEntire in Portland, Ore.)

“In the late ’80s, it seemed people interested in underground music, underground rock bands, punk rock — whatever you want to call it — started to become interested in a lot of jazz — specifically, post bebop, ’60s jazz — and then moved into free improvised music. Then that started to cross-fertilize with a lot of the underground rock scene in Chicago going into the ’90s. It ended up being a hotbed for that stuff.

“Chicago has always been a place where people gravitate to. There’s the improvising scene and also the composer/jazz scene situation. All of that always has been side by side with the sort of left of center rock scene in Chicago, so it’s lot of people playing with each other. It’s always been a really vibrant community, and still is. It’s still happening.”

Tortoise’s music, though, remains as unpredictable as it is undefinable — especially, for the musicians. Compositional ideas are swapped, enhanced and overhauled from one member to the next. In short, a Tortoise tune may have a defined starting point. Where it ends up, however, is somewhere altogether unplanned.

“I don’t really go into any Tortoise record with preconceived notions. You can’t really squeeze any particular song into a box. You have to let it develop in the group. A lot of times, there’s not really a way to know what the end result of any particular piece of music is going to be because it goes through so many iterations. It goes through five different people’s hands and five different people’s ideas about what we could possibly do with the music.

“It’s kind of pointless to project any kind of end result. It more like, ‘How do we take this thing and make it interesting?’ That’s really the most important part for us.”

Tortoise/Movie Jail/Jungle Boogie

When: Nov. 12 at 7:30 p.m.

Where: Singletary Center for the Arts, 405 Rose St.

Tickets: $23 (students), $39 (public)

Online: finearts.uky.edu/singletary-center/events