Tues Oct 4, Chop Suey,
8 pm, $10 adv, all ages.
To properly describe Black Dice’s music, we’d have to bring William S. Burroughs back to life, get him rehooked on junk, and give him a young Moroccan stud—and a tight deadline. Then maybe we could get an aptly delirious verbal death-grip on the slippery, demonic sounds that Black Dice conjure. Alas, you’ll have to settle for my undrunk/undrugged take on the otherworldly strangeness of these Brooklyn sorcerers.
In this time when every musical niche is lousy with earnest bands and solo artists angling for a minuscule sliver of radio/press/myspace.com attention, it becomes increasingly difficult for said bands/artists to bust through the morass of mediocrity clogging the portals. As you read this sentence, many talented musicians are creating masterpieces that will never be heard by you. Tragic.
Black Dice could’ve been one of those overlooked bands. But thanks to the acumen of key people at the Troubleman Unlimited and DFA labels, Black Dice’s sui generis sounds now circulate through some of the world’s biggest retailers. With the new Broken Ear Record, Black Dice prove once and for all they are the DFA band most likely to arouse the FDA’s suspicion. It’s as if E. Elias Merhige’s Begotten were screening at Suburban Multiplex USA.
How did Black Dice ascend to the underground’s upper sphere? A breakthrough occurred for the trio between 2001’s Cold Hands, an earthbound EP rooted in the Providence noise scene whence they sprang, and 2002’s Beaches & Canyons, an oceanic wellspring of transcendental trippiness. And, lo, many thousands of hipsters did dig Black Dice’s transformations of the music of the spheres into equilibrium-upsetting anti-compositions. The band’s “sound manipulator” Eric Copeland attributes this sea change simply to “time.” Coy bastard.
On Beaches & Canyons and 2004’s Creature Comforts, Black Dice combine Kraut-rock’s restless experimentation with Nurse with Wound’s structure-flouting surrealism, leveraging abstract-expressionist sound design that takes several listens to perceive. They also appear to be attempting to evoke the natural world (birds, animals, bodies of water, etc.) in what is arguably the world’s most urban setting. But Copeland disagrees. “I don’t feel like we have any agenda along those lines,” he says. “At the end of the day, it’s still just music that sounds moving and exciting to us.”
Broken Ear Record signals a strong rhythmic direction for Black Dice, reminiscent of their Cone Toaster 12-inch. But don’t expect to hear anything off Broken Ear pistoning around typical dance clubs. The disc kicks off with “Snarly Yow,” whose chunky, brittle electro-funk rhythm sounds like strips of bark being torn from a tree. The piece then morphs into one of the weirdest techno tracks ever, with every tone contoured to flambé your synapses.
Broken Ear‘s first single, “Smiling Off,” is laughably radio-unfriendly, full of Doppler effected buzz-saw synths, enigmatic hiccupping, three-legged horseshoe clip-clopping, faux Native-American chants, and tweaked Farfisa riffs. It eventually morphs into—new genre alert!—alien doo-wop techno.
Further out on the rhythmic precipice, “Motorcycle” rides African highlife guitar and canine yelps, as it evolves into a hybrid of square-dance and Burundi-drum music. For contrast, “Street Dude” offers a caustic soup of frazzled electronics, toy-robot rhythms, looped muttering, and Gang of Four–like friction-spark guitar.
As always, Black Dice’s use of vocals—mostly eerie chants and ephemeral phonemes—on Broken Ear is extraordinary. They’re layered in the mix as another disorienting texture. They seemingly are meant to communicate something ineffable (or even effable).
“There’s a lot of pressure on the vocals sometimes,” Copeland says, “as they act as the most expressive ingredient, the most human among some definitely nonhuman sounds. But they don’t have a strict role; some songs, they can just be source sounds; some can be texture, some almost clogged words. Whatever we feel works.”
Black Dice’s press bio alludes to the darkness and troubles that surrounded the making of Creature Comforts and their subsequent tour. Bjorn Copeland said, “It got hard to be alienating people every single night. We wanted something that people could connect to more readily.” But Broken Ear still sounds pretty alienating (in the best way). So, is Broken Ear Black Dice’s concession to accessibility?
“Alienating?” Eric Copeland replies incredulously. “Some of it’s a little alien, maybe! I don’t care too much about accessibility. When those concerns start to dominate, I feel like I’m thinking about other people when I should be concentrating on what we’re doing.”
Whatever they’re doing, it’s uniquely challenging—and worth breaking your ears for.
