The June Curated Issue - El Ten Eleven - ‘Every Direction Is North’
- runoutrecordclub
- Jun 4
- 5 min read
There’s a particular kind of album that never truly disappears. It doesn’t dominate decade-end lists, it doesn’t become meme culture nostalgia, and it rarely receives the canonisation afforded to more commercially visible records. Instead, it survives differently—through recommendation, through headphones on late-night walks, through algorithmic rediscovery, through the strange durability of mood.
El Ten Eleven’s ‘Every Direction Is North’ is one of those records.
Released in 2007, the Los Angeles duo’s second album arrived during a fascinating moment for instrumental music. Post-rock had already reached a kind of emotional saturation point. Bands like Explosions in the Sky and Mogwai had turned the genre into something almost cinematic—music designed for emotional collapse, widescreen catharsis, and existential weather systems.
El Ten Eleven chose another path entirely.
Where their peers often dealt in crescendos, despair, and grandeur, ‘Every Direction Is North’ was built on movement. Groove. Repetition. Momentum. It wasn’t trying to soundtrack the end of the world—it was trying to soundtrack motion through it.
And nearly twenty years later, it still sounds startlingly fresh.
The mythology of El Ten Eleven has always been part of the appeal.
Two musicians:
Kristian Dunn on double-neck bass/guitar hybrid, looping systems, and effects
Tim Fogarty on acoustic and electronic drums
No vocalist. No guitarist in the traditional sense. No backing tracks.
Yet somehow, the music feels enormous.
What separated El Ten Eleven from many loop-based acts of the 2000s was that they never sounded clinical. Looping often risks sterility—music becoming mathematics instead of feeling. But Dunn and Fogarty approached repetition like jazz musicians approach rhythm: elastic, conversational, alive.
You can hear tiny fluctuations everywhere:
Slight rhythmic pushes
Loops entering imperfectly
Drum accents change emotional emphasis
Melodies mutating subtly over time
The result is music that feels simultaneously human and machine-like—a balance many artists chase, but few achieve.
It’s important to clarify something about the album itself.
Earlier discussions of the record often mistakenly blur tracks from El Ten Eleven’s debut album into ‘Every Direction Is North’. In reality, the 2007 record contains a far leaner and more focused ten-track sequence:
“3 Plus 4”
“Every Direction Is North”
“Hot Cakes”
“Estrella”
“Music for Staring at Ceilings”
“Keep”
“Dax Pierson”
“Living on Credit Blues”
“The 49th Day”
“Bye Annie, Bye Joe, Bye Michael, Bye Jake”
That sequencing matters, because ‘Every Direction Is North’ is less fragmented than the band’s debut. It feels like El Ten Eleven discovering confidence—not just in technique, but in identity.
The title itself reportedly came from Kristian Dunn’s wife insisting they were driving north regardless of the actual direction they were travelling. Dunn found the certainty amusing and strangely profound.
That idea—absolute conviction inside uncertainty—perfectly describes the album.
A lot of instrumental rock from the 2000s now feels trapped inside the aesthetics of its time:
Excessive reverb
Emotional maximalism
Film-score ambition
Slow-build clichés
‘Every Direction Is North’ avoided that fate because it borrowed as much from electronic music as rock.
Listen closely, and the album behaves less like a traditional band record and more like minimal techno or downtempo electronica:
Patterns repeat and evolve
Rhythms shift incrementally
Emotional impact emerges through accumulation rather than explosion
This is why the album still works today in environments the band probably never anticipated:
Study playlists
Coding sessions
Design studios
Long-distance train journeys
Algorithmic “focus music” ecosystems
It anticipated modern listening culture before it fully existed.
Track-by-Track Review
1. “3 Plus 4”
The opener is essentially a thesis statement.
A looping bass figure locks into Fogarty’s staggered drumming, creating the sensation of motion before the listener fully understands where the track is headed. There’s math-rock precision here, but unlike many technically minded bands, El Ten Eleven never weaponise complexity.
The groove comes first.
The title itself hints at rhythmic displacement—patterns colliding and resolving against each other. Yet the track never feels academic. It feels kinetic.
2. “Every Direction Is North”
The title track is among the album’s emotional high points.
There’s a floating quality to the melody, something simultaneously optimistic and disoriented. The loops cycle with near-meditative consistency while Fogarty’s drumming introduces subtle emotional pivots underneath.
This is where El Ten Eleven’s genius becomes obvious: they understand that repetition is emotional.
Every return of the melodic phrase feels slightly different—not because the notes change dramatically, but because the listener changes while hearing them.
3. “Hot Cakes”
One of the record’s most immediate tracks.
Short, punchy, and rhythmically playful, it carries a near-danceable energy that separates El Ten Eleven from more solemn post-rock contemporaries.
There’s funk hidden beneath the distortion here.
The band never fully embraced the “jam band” identity some instrumental acts drifted toward, but tracks like “Hot Cakes” reveal how deeply groove informs their writing.
4. “Estrella”
This is where the album starts widening emotionally.
The melodies become warmer, more spacious. The track drifts rather than drives, creating one of the album’s most cinematic moments without resorting to obvious post-rock crescendos.
It feels like movement through an open landscape—expansive without becoming melodramatic.
5. “Music for Staring at Ceilings”
One of the most accurately titled instrumental tracks of the era.
Minimal, reflective, and suspended in place, the song functions almost like an interlude. But it’s crucial sequencing-wise: it resets the album’s pacing before the heavier rhythmic sections that follow.
There’s a quiet confidence in how little the band feels compelled to do here.
6. “Keep”
Arguably, the album’s hidden centrepiece.
The rhythm section becomes more aggressive, flirting with electronic and even trip-hop structures. Dunn’s loops stack gradually until the track achieves a hypnotic density.
This is El Ten Eleven at their most immersive.
Not dramatic. Not explosive. Just deeply absorbing.
7. “Dax Pierson”
Named after the experimental musician and Subtle member injured in a tour accident, the track carries emotional weight beneath its restrained structure.
It’s one of the album’s quieter pieces, but also one of its most human.
The melody feels almost fragile—carefully assembled rather than forcefully delivered.
8. “Living on Credit Blues”
The closest the album comes to aggression.
Distorted bass lines grind against propulsive drums, giving the track a rougher edge than most of the record. Yet even here, the band prioritises groove over heaviness.
It’s tension without collapse.
9. “The 49th Day”
A slow-burning standout.
This track captures the band’s ability to create emotional resonance through patience. Tiny rhythmic changes accumulate until the music feels larger than the sum of its parts.
There’s a subtle melancholy here—less explicit than traditional post-rock sadness, but perhaps more affecting because of its restraint.
10. “Bye Annie, Bye Joe, Bye Michael, Bye Jake”
A stunning closer.
At over seven minutes, it’s the album’s longest track, but it never drags. Instead, it unfolds gradually like memory itself—cyclical, repetitive, emotionally unresolved.
The title references multiple personal losses surrounding the album’s creation, and you can feel that emotional weight without the band ever stating it directly.
The song doesn’t end triumphantly. It simply continues until it disappears.
Which is precisely why it lingers.
The long-term importance of ‘Every Direction Is North’ lies in how quietly influential it became.
It helped establish a template for instrumental music that was:
Technical but approachable
Emotional without melodrama
Loop-based without feeling synthetic
Complex without alienating listeners
You can hear echoes of this album in:
Modern math-rock
Lo-fi instrumental scenes
Chill electronic crossover acts
YouTube-era “focus music” culture
Ambient indie playlists
El Ten Eleven essentially predicted a world in which instrumental music would become integrated into everyday life rather than treated as a niche experiment.
Most importantly, ‘Every Direction Is North’ understands something many records don’t:
Atmosphere ages better than trend.
The album doesn’t chase novelty. It doesn’t overload itself with production tricks designed to sound futuristic. Instead, it focuses on:
Texture
Rhythm
Space
Movement
That restraint is why the album still feels contemporary nearly two decades later.
It isn’t trying to impress you.
It’s trying to pull you into motion.
And once it does, it rarely lets go.
Sit back, enjoy, and let the soundscapes wash over you.
RRC
Comments