self-titled - no. 1 - (Page 43)

CONE TOASTER To find Black Dice’s practice space in south Williamsburg, you must walk beyond the flora and fauna of Bedford Avenue’s vintage boutiques, wine shops and skinny-jean patrons and into the depths of a Hasidic community. Signs turn to Hebrew, conversations hush as you stroll past, and windows are crossed with bars (less a crime deterrent; more a cage for children to rattle around in). Past another block, the neighborhood turns to rusted barbed wire and the brick walls of dead factories. Eric Copeland, the antagonistic 29-year-old singer-turnedsound-manipulator for the Brooklyn’s group, wrenches open a defaced metal door and welcomes me to the band’s new subbasement practice space, down the hall from neighbors TV on the Radio. The subterranean air is a mix of decades-dense dust and ash from a million cigarettes and joints. One wall bears a giant Pink Floyd poster, the other a barricade of speakers that makes the tiny room feel tighter. This is where Black Dice hones its noise. Copeland tells me that he spends five to six hours a day down here, working out musical ideas. “I treat it like a job,” he says. As a teen in Maine in the mid-’90s, Copeland was similarly industrious, making hundreds of -track tapes in his room. “I would write songs and record all the time,” he says. Copeland is slight and soft-spoken, a black cap covering his unkempt blonde hair and makinghim seem perpetually boyish, yet his pale blue eyes and high cheekbones make him seem feline as well. In person, it’s much easier to picture Copeland as the introverted teen alone in his bedroom than as Black Dice’s predatory, violent lead singer. Eric’s older brother, Bjorn, attended the Rhode Island School of Design when Eric was still a teen, and when Bjorn would return home, the brothers would play together. “It was this naive, pop-sounding stuff, stuff like Beat Happening,” Bjorn recalls. “The songs seemed really happy in this manic sort of way, but I never really understood how to assemble those types of songs, even though they’re the most basic thing in the world.” At RISD the older Copeland witnessed house-party shows by the likes of Lightning Bolt, Arab on Radar, Forcefield and Landed. The bands’ extreme sonics resonated with him and changed his approach. “Playing really fucked-up sounding and loud, you could just smash on your shit, jump from pedal to pedal,” says Bjorn. “It felt more visceral than thinking about how to be happy or what notes to really play.” Bjorn soon formed his own group with fellow RISD classmate Sebastian Blanck on bass, Lightning Bolt bassist Brian Gibson on drums and 17-year-old Eric doing vocals. The four-piece played its first show at a 1997 house party. “[The show was] something that seemed totally normal gone totally wrong,” says Brooklyn musician Hisham Bharoocha, who at the time was singing in Lightning Bolt. In Eric’s estimation, the group’s debut was amateurish and forgettable except for the events that transpired later in the evening. “I turned around at one point, and everyone was gone,” remembers Eric, whose friend had told him the cops were coming. “I saw this broken window. There were two bodies [lying] on the ground.” Two partygoers had plunged through a window to the ground below. One of them was pronounced dead at the scene, and the RISD community was shaken up. “People became aware of reality really quick after that,” Bharoocha recalls. It was an ominous debut for the band. When Gibson left the group to focus on Lightning Bolt, Bharoocha was asked to step in on drums, solidifying the lineup alongside Blanck and the Copeland brothers. But they still needed a name. "We wanted to make something that sounded tough ’cause we were skinny dudes playing noisy hardcore punk,” Bharoocha says, remembering that he had heard about a Brooklyn gang called Black Dice. “It sounded so tough.” "If you were there, you were a target,” remembers Rob Carmichael, who runs the Catsup Plate label, part of the ’90s tape counterculture that included Shrimper and Union Pole. Carmichael witnessed an early Black Dice show in 1998 at Swarthmore College, where he was a student at the time. “The band began throwing elbows at each other and at audience members, and the crowd pressed itself against the back walls of the club in order to get away from the mayhem,” he says of the 10-minute set. “I was terrified and thrilled at the same time. Eric hurtled the microphone full force into the crowd, yanking back on the cord to make a whip-crack effect. [One time] my friend Ben took a microphone blow to the chest, which left a horrible purple welt for days.” The aggression became a staple of Black Dice’s first few years as the band played hardcore bills in basements and student centers across the US. “We knew we weren’t a hardcore band, but those were the only avenues that would book us,” says Bjorn. “Everybody fucked with us. Soon as we showed up some place, it was, ‘Faggot this; faggot that.’” OUR RECORD SOUNDED LIKE A BUNCH OF LINES AND SQUIGGLES COMPARED TO THEIR RECORD, WHICH WAS A BUNCH OF TUNES. OUR SHIT SOUNDED LIKE ABSTRACT SHAPES.” 3

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self-titled - no. 1 Contents Spiritualized No Age Les Savy Fav The Teenagers Booka Shade Michael Gira Ellen Allien Magik Markers Jens Lekman Yeasayer Daptone Records Tipping Point Boris Fiery Furnaces Black Dice Black Mountain The Black Lips

self-titled - no. 1

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