Black Dice
Broken Ear Record

Genre: Free Punk Electronica

New York, 2005.

Eric Copeland, Bjorn Copeland, Aaron Warren aka Black Dice. The Big Apple has been the center of gravity for experimentation for about forty years. It doesn't matter if it’s music, cinema, art. Experimentation is the key word. To fully understand the greatness of this new record: already notorious authors of the now famous "Beaches & Canyons," they abandon the new age abstractionism of those sounds to fully focus on a new conception of analog-digital electronica and on the tribal rhythmic variations of the beat. Pop of the future?

Inside this spasmodic Babel, decidedly irrational-joke melodies and filtered voices trembling and elegantly unrecognizable emerge here and there. An elephant and the antihistamine. The manipulation of sound is now symbiotic with the pursuit of disorienting and colorful effects: as if a child were action painting with Lego and drinking purple milk (!). Dusty mixers, sequencers adapted to old synthesizers, delay without feedback, deconstructed guitars, cybernetic loops, and dizzying explosions of acid art-noise-core are the new frontier of music as a concept. Confused?

Black Dice are so damn refined that sometimes I wish I didn’t listen to them! "Smiling Off" (remixed no less than three times by DFA): aborigines watching an alien TV projecting themselves, comfortably and virtually dancing to the rhythm of a slot machine, "Heavy Manners" played lazily as if apathy were to be made a philosophy of life. "Aba" is a paradoxically sugary de-ambient that winks at Cluster's "Zuckerzeit," and occasionally features industrial dance meta-song à la Throbbing Gristle in a million colors. The album closes with "Motorcycle", a sort of digression into country folk of unknown setting.

Shamanic, crazy, fun. The little gems of this masterpiece, like candies, are savored, not swallowed forcefully.