"Everything was in flux"

Reviewing Tortoise's new album Touch for Buzz recently and reading Louis Pattison's Guardian feature on the band reminded me of Pattison's article "The Untold History Of UK Post-Rock", written last year for Bandcamp.

In it, he traces the term "post-rock" back to a Wire piece by Simon Reynolds from 1994. Reynolds was celebrating the nascent genre's sense of creative freedom and experimentation, in much the same way as he did with regard to the immediate post-punk period in Rip It Up And Start Again.

Pattison argues that by the late 90s, there was a glut of UK bands building on the pioneering work of Bark Psychosis, Slint and Tortoise: "[T]he beauty of this era was there was no consensus about what that 'post' in 'post-rock' meant. Everything was in flux, and exactly how the music of tomorrow would sound was up for grabs." I might add that the disparate nature of 

Fridge's Adem Ilhan and Sam Jeffers make a great point about Radiohead's role in "[taking] the ideas of post-rock and transplant[ing] them into a mainstream context". OK Computer, Kid A and Amnesiac may not be revolutionary records, but they exposed mainstream listeners sucked in by 'Creep' and The Bends to much more complex music that strayed from a strict rock template.

Mogwai were my primary gateway drug, though, with the Glaswegians coming to form a quarter of what I'd identify as post-rock's equivalent of thrash metal's Big Four: Mogwai, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Explosions In The Sky and Sigur Ros. I loved them all, and still do, but there's no doubt that their emergence more narrowly codified what the term meant. As Pattison observes, "the sound seemed to harden into formula, coming to mean a largely instrumental music focused around a particular dynamic: play quiet, then loud, then quiet again. Post-rock as a genre would persist, but some of its initial freedom had been lost."

The purpose of his article is not to lament this loss, but to flag up some overlooked gems from "five particularly fertile years between 1996 and 2001". I'm familiar with Billy Mahonie and to a lesser extent Hood, Fridge and Aereogramme, but really should know Pram, Seefeel and Rothko better, and Philosopher's Stone, Eardrum and Fonn are all new names to check out. The late 90s is often seen as a rather dismal period for music, but Pattison proves that (as ever) plenty of interesting activity was going on beneath the surface.