Fourteen new pieces of organic beat music cut from the original sessions in New York, Chicago, London and Los Angeles, featuring Brandee Younger, Tomeka Reid, Dezron Douglas, Joel Ross, Shabaka Hutchings, Junius Paul, Nubya Garcia, Daniel Casimir, Ashley Henry, Josh Johnson, Jeff Parker, Anna Butters, Carlos Niño and Miguel-Atwood Ferguson.

Recent collaborations in London with Nubya Garcia, Joe Armon-Jones, Soweto Kinch, Ashley Henry, Daniel Casimir and Kamaal Williams… remixed live the next weekend by LeFtO, Ben LaMar Gay, Quiet Dawn, Earl Jeffers & Don Leisure of the Darkhouse Family, and later by Emma-Jean Thackray and Lexus Blondin… finally chopped-up and re-assembled back at Makaya’s home studio in Chicago, into two continuous side-long suites.

‘With Touch, the Tortoise bandmembers — Jeff Parker, Dan Bitney, Douglas McCombs, John Herndon, and John McEntire — harness their collectivist songwriting approach, a slightly anarchistic but resolutely egalitarian process where ideas triumph over ego towards an abstracted muscularity. While there are still excursions into the dusky, elegantly gnarled jazz ambience that flourished on landmark works like Millions Now Living Will Never Die and TNT, Touch is perhaps most remarkable for Tortoise’s unapologetic embrace of grand gesture. Aerodynamically re-engineered Krautrock, hand-cranked techno rave-ups, and pointillist spaghetti western fanfares are all imbued with Tortoise’s now-signature internal logic — equally alluring and confounding, a puzzle to be savored rather than solved.’