Louisville Post-Rock

You're asking about a family tree, not a genre. One small city, maybe forty teenagers, who played in each other's hardcore bands from 1985 on and then slowed everything down — clean guitars, odd meters, half-spoken vocals, the loud part withheld until it hurts.

Every name here appears on somebody else's record.

Louisville, mid-80s. Squirrel Bait — teenagers including David Grubbs, Brian McMahan, Britt Walford — put out two records on Homestead and broke up by 1988.

Grubbs went to Bastro, then Gastr del Sol. McMahan and Walford formed Slint, cut Tweez with Steve Albini, then Spiderland for Touch and Go in 1991.

That record redirected a decade. Rodan followed on Chicago's Quarterstick in 1994, and when they split the pieces went everywhere: Shipping News formed in autumn 1996 when Rodan's Jason Noble and Jeff Mueller wrote music for the NPR program This American Life; Mueller also co-founded June of 44, and their debut came out on Quarterstick in June 1995.

Tara Jane O'Neil went solo. Noble built Rachel's as a chamber group.

Touch and Go/Quarterstick carried most of it; Initial Records held the local hardcore end.

Who: Brian McMahan, Britt Walford, David Pajo, Jason Noble, Jeff Mueller, Tara Jane O'Neil, Kevin Coultas, David Grubbs, Will Oldham around the edges. Rooms over actual venues — basements, the Rocket House, Lucky Anchor.

What: two guitars in competing tunings playing interlocking parts rather than chords, bass carrying melody, drums that stop the song dead. Vocals spoken, muttered, then screamed once.

Songs run eight to fourteen minutes and withhold the payoff. How: nobody auditioned.

You got in by already being in somebody's band, and by recording with Albini, Bob Weston or Brian Paulson, who kept the room sound in.