How is a genre defined? Technically, you
can talk about rhythmic and melodic patterns, instrumentation and periods of time. Rock, for example, was formally born in the 1950s, but its supposed origins can be traced all the way back to the first decades of the Century –with the ghoulish Robert Johnson. It’s a style that has been declared dead several times in the last forty years, regurgitated by thousands of bands in an infinity of movements and revivals, and even left behind in terms of generology, or the way we classify noise.
These two words tell us about a state in present time where rock has already happened and has been left behind; but it is curious that in the end, that same anti-definition keeps marking and accusing it of belonging to the same blood group. For that, post rock is and is not at the same time. We owe the term to Mojo Magazine and The Wire critic Simon Reynolds, who defined it in 1994 as music that “uses rock instrumentation for nonrock purposes, using guitars as facilitators of timbre and textures rather than riffs and power chords”. Reynolds’ words may seem somewhat clear, but upon analyzing the possibilities and implications that the definition carries, it can be very easy to get lost in its ambiguity. We would have to meticulously outline the musical context where he is placing the words “timbre” and “texture”, since they would not mean the same thing in the U.S. in the early 90s than they would in the U.K. in the late 1960s.
We enter a music store (wether real or virtual) and we find the names we have given to certain configurations of systematized sound, “music”, as we know it. It’s our desperate human need to name and identify all things that has led us to establish the great pillars that gradually began to branch out, reaching ridiculous and pretentious derivations. There are hundreds of subgenres in rock, and even a genre that originates in it while trying to The bands that populate this subgenre –or new genre- usually negate their direct relamark a definitive distance: post rock. 221