Post-rock

Post-rock is a subgenre of experimental rock characterized by the exploration of textures and timbres as well as non-rock styles, often with minimal or no vocals, placing less emphasis on conventional song structures or riffs than on atmosphere for musically evocative purposes. Post-rock artists can often combine rock instrumentation and rock stylings with electronics and digital production as a means of enabling the exploration of textures, timbres and different styles. The genre emerged within the indie and underground music scenes of the 1980s and 1990s, but as it abandoned rock conventions, it began to show less musical resemblance to conventional indie rock at the time. The first wave of post-rock derives inspiration from diverse sources including ambient, electronica, jazz, krautrock, psychedelia, dub, and minimalist classical, with these influences also being pivotal for the substyle of ambient pop.

Quotes about post-rock

  • Post-rock means using rock instrumentation for non-rock purposes, using guitars as facilitators of timbres and textures rather than riffs and powerchords. Increasingly, post-rock groups are augmenting the traditional guitar/bass/drums line up with computer technology: the sampler, the sequencer and MIDI. While some post-rock units prefer lo-fi or outmoded technology, others are evolving into cyber rock, becoming virtual.
    • Simon Reynolds in "Shaking the Rock Narcotic", published in The Wire, 1994
  • Post-rock draws its inspiration and impetus from a complex combination of sources. Some of these come from post-rock's own tradition—a series of moments in history when eggheads and bohemians have hijacked elements of rock for non-rock purposes.
    • Simon Reynolds in "Shaking the Rock Narcotic", The Wire
  • Some post-rock artists explicitly and consciously sought to deconstruct rock music; others realised they'd done it after the event; yet more didn't give the process a moment’s thought. A lot of this deconstruction was made possible through the advent of the sampler, ushering in a new genre-bending mindset. Most of the post-rock bands used samplers in some form, but even the ones who didn't were influenced by sampling's possibilities for simultaneous structure and chaos.
    • Jeanette Leech in fearless: The Making of Post-Rock, 2017
  • The point was, actually: take rock up a level.
    • Kirsty Yates of Insides, quoted in Jeanette Leech, fearless: The Making of Post-Rock, 2017
  • While it never solidified as a concise genre, post rock emerged in the early '90s from the work of a few disgruntled artists who did away with the worn out formula of rock & roll for the sake artistic expression and delving into peculiar new musical horizons. Since then, the movement has grown in volume and recognition enough that we might have at least a working definition of this take on music, but not so much to have had a clear heyday and a chance to grow stale, as there are still many musicians, fledgelings and veterans alike, who make great music true to the movement's ideas, which are no less relevant today than they were almost three decades ago.
  • Post-rock, Reynolds suggested, was opposed to notions of 'collective toil' and 'authenticity'; instead, it used musicians for a 'palette of textures' and, in doing so, rejected the ego of rock. Later, Reynolds would go further, claiming post-rock had 'given up the idea of mass success or even indie cult-hood, and accepted the idea of being marginal, forever'.
    • Jeanette Leech in fearless: The Making of Post-Rock, 2017
  • [Radiohead's] Kid A is the return-with-a-vengeance of a phenomenon that had seemingly petered out: post-rock. This highly contested genre dates back to 1993-94, when various smart operators began to notice the glaring and ever-widening gap in sonic vividness between guitar-based music and "sampladelia" (the whole area of digital music that encompasses dance, atmospheric electronics, and hip hop). The result was a loosely connected network of artists engaged in closing that innovation gap [...] What all these phases had in common was their partial or total abandonment of live performance as the model for recording: the willingness for music to be unrealistic, anti- naturalistic, a studio-spun figment.
    • Simon Reynolds in "Revolution in the Head", published in Uncut, 2000
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