Electronic Music Pioneer Carl Stone Remixes Tortoise’s “Night Gang”
Today, Tortoise releases “Night Gang [Carl Stone Remix}” on all digital music platforms. The track, created by electronic and computer music pioneer Carl Stone, reimagines “Night Gang,” the closer from Tortoise’s 2025 album Touch. Listen and purchase “Night Gang [Carl Stone Remix}” here.
Tortoise also shares details of their fourteen-city European tour, which begins on October 31 and includes stops at Pitchfork Festival (London UK), Mira Festival (Barcelona ES), and Le Guess Who? (Utrecht NL). The band also performs in Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Denmark, Belgium, and Italy. The full list of dates and links is below.
Carl Stone’s transformation of Tortoise’s song was created in a hotel in Shanghai during the middle of his September 2026 Chinese tour. Here, “Night Gang” is chopped, scattered, chopped again, and ultimately rendered as an abstraction fit for a free-rhythm dance floor. Stone’s remix ultimately morphs the tune from cowboy sunset hero jam into disjointed danse concrète.
Watch Tortoise’s 2026 tour lineup — featuring Dan Bitney, James Elkington, John Herndon, Douglas McCombs, and John McEntire — perform “I Set My Face to the Hillside” at a Munich show earlier this year, here.
On Touch (released October 2025 via International Anthem & Nonesuch Records), the five longstanding Tortoise band members — Bitney, Herndon, McCombs, McEntire, and Jeff Parker — 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 desert guitar panoramas are all imbued with Tortoise’s now-signature internal logic — equally alluring and confounding, a puzzle to be savored rather than solved.
The stylistic diversity is also a reflection of the band’s operating circumstances while working on the album. With two members in Los Angeles, another in Portland, and just two remaining in the band’s Chicago hometown, their creative process shifted dramatically from when they lived together in a loft space in the late 1990s, honing their sound over endless hours of collective experimentation. Recorded between the three cities — Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago — Touch is the result of an intentional effort by these five musicians to reconnect, recenter, and reinvigorate their sound for what is perhaps the group’s most diverse release to date.
(Read more about Tortoise, their ground-breaking sound “informed by everything from jungle to Krautrock and musique concréte,” and the creation of Touch in a feature at The Guardian.)
TORTOISE LIVE DATES
Oct 31, 2026 — Birmingham, UK — The Crossing — tickets
Nov 1, 2026 — Glasgow, UK — Queen Margaret Union — tickets
Nov 3, 2026 — Dublin, IE — Button Factory — tickets
Nov 4, 2026 — London, UK — Pitchfork Festival @ Hackney Church — tickets
Nov 5, 2026 — Utrecht, NL — Le Guess Who — tickets
Nov 6, 2026 — Barcelona, ES — MIRA Festival — tickets
Nov 7, 2026 — Valencia, ES — Sala Moon Valencia — tickets
Nov 8, 2026 — Madrid, ES — Sala But — tickets
Nov 9, 2026 — Reutlingen, DE — Franz.K — tickets
Nov 10, 2026 — Vicenza, IT — Teatro comunale Città di Vicenza — tickets
Nov 12, 2026 — Aarhus, DK — VoxHall — tickets
Nov 13, 2026 — Weissenhäuser Strand, DE — Rolling Stone Beach — tickets
Nov 14, 2026 — Groningen, NL — Rockit — tickets
Nov 15, 2026 — Antwerp, BE — Arenberg — tickets
ABOUT TORTOISE
Photo by Todd Weaver
Tortoise is widely considered one of the most influential music groups of the last 40 years, with a wide-reaching impact on the contemporary music scene. Pitchfork says: “Imagine a graphic showing all the bands the five members of Tortoise were in before they came together and then all the bands they went on to play with after. At the top of the funnel you have groups ranging from dreamy psych-rock to earthy post-punk crunch, including Eleventh Dream Day, Bastro, Slint, and the Poster Children; on the ‘post-Tortoise’ end are groups focusing on electro-jazz and twangy instrumental rock like Isotope 217, Chicago Underground, and Brokeback. In this graphic, Tortoise is the choke point, the one project that has elements of all these sounds but is never defined by nor committed to any of them. Instead, Tortoise floats free, a planchette moving over a Ouija board guided by 10 sets of fingers, where everyone watches the arrow float in one direction but no one is quite sure how it gets there or who is doing the pushing.”
The band, which originally formed in Chicago in 1990, comprises Jeff Parker, Dan Bitney, Douglas McCombs, John Herndon, and John McEntire. Initially hailed as pace-setters of an emergent, cinematic instrumental evolution of alternative rock, the Chicago Tribune called Tortoise’s sound “mood music that refuses to be shoved into the background, as inviting as it is challenging.” Releasing just seven albums since 1990 — including classics like 1996’s Millions Now Living Will Never Die, 1998’s TNT, and 2001’s Standards —Tortoise has steadily and intuitively evolved across its life, creating genreless music that is as timeless as it is ahead of the curve. The band’s legacy goes beyond its recorded output, as well. Per the New York Times: “While Tortoise’s albums have experimented with the editing and overdubbing possibilities of the studio, the band thrives performing in real time.” Rolling Stone deems Tortoise “a live marvel,” while Pitchfork further says the band’s performances reveal that “at heart, they’re a supremely fun band, wide open to all sorts of sonic possibilities.”
ABOUT CARL STONE
Photo by Akira Saito
Carl Stone is one of the pioneers of live computer music, and has used computers in live performance since 1986. He has been hailed by the Village Voice as “the king of sampling.” and “one of the best composers living in (the USA) today.” RELIX has written that “Stone makes music that can hit your ear holes like a DMT flash.” He was born in California and now divides his time between LA and Japan. He studied composition at the California Institute of the Arts with Morton Subotnick and James Tenney and has composed electro-acoustic music almost exclusively since 1972. His works have been performed in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America and the Near East. In addition to his schedule of performance, composition and touring, he is the emeritus professor in the Department of Media Engineering at Chukyo University in Japan. Read Stone’s full bio here.