self-titled - no. 1 - (Page 44)

Crowds began to anticipate a fight at every show, and the physical confrontations took their toll.“I bled a lot for a long time; I threw up a lot,” Eric admits.“There was a tour where I broke my arm, the third show. And we had twenty-five shows left.” Just playing for 0-minute bursts was taxing as well. Bjorn remembers “crawling around on wet floors and getting electrocuted, having your hands all bloody, people throwing stuff at you.” Worst of all, it began to feel like a shtick for the band.“We played this show at ABC No Rio,” Eric recalls of the seedy punk venue in New York City’s Lower East Side.“I kicked somebody in the balls, and everyone thought it was funny. The next time we played there, there was something in the flier about it, and I went, ‘That’s lame.’ I didn’t want that to be the thing.” Black Dice received a slightly better reception at New York University, where Eric had enrolled. A sophomore at the school Dave Portner set up a show for the band in the basement of NYU’s student center.“All their equipment was broken,” Portner says. “I couldn’t figure out what they were going for really, but I liked that they seemed to not give a shit.” Another NYU student, a Colorado-born, California-raised hardcore fan named Aaron Warren, caught the same show.“It was so simple, really fast and harsh sounding. I was totally into it,” he tells me.“Eric was swinging a mic around like a mace. Sebastian was the most violent, kicking and swinging his bass around. I was standing in the front and said,‘Fuck this!’ and moved to the back. I didn’t want to get hit.” Not once did it cross Warren’s mind that he would become Black Dice’s next bass player. STREET DUDE Standing on a desolate corner of warehouses in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, one chilly dark evening in September, a crack of light suddenly appears. Aaron Warren emerges and leads me into his warm studio where the -year-old is putting the finishing touches on a video for Black Dice’s song “Kokomo.” Commercials peddling breakfast cereal, cat food, fabric freshener and TimeLife box sets are chopped with other vaguely familiar images in this head-swimming video montage.“We just used ridiculous bull shit, literally just trash found on the street,”Warren titters. His long black hair tangled and eyes puffy, Warren speaks with a cadence jittery from too much caffeine; he’s been putting in -hour days at his day job (which involves editing video content for Bruce Springsteen). Add in nightly band practice and late sessions working on video imagery, and he estimates that he gets at most three hours of sleep each night. For Warren, Black Dice’s upcoming US tour will actually be a vacation.“I wasn’t planning on being in a band,”Warren swears. He roomed with Bharoocha and the older Copeland after the two graduated from RISD and relocated to New York, but even when his roommates brought up the possibility, he never thought it would happen. Nevertheless, Blanck left Black Dice in , and Warren found himself filling the void on bass. The ejaculatory 0-minute blowouts transformed into extended sets with Bjorn and Bharoocha setting the tone on guitar and drums, and the rest of the group followed suit, improvising live.“This repetitive trance would start happening,” Portner describes.“I started realizing that these guys had it together.” Portner had recently produced an album as Avey Tare and Panda Bear called Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished and a mutual friend suggested that he record Black Dice on an -track at his mother’s house in rural Maryland.“In retrospect, I probably wasn’t the best person,” Portner says with a laugh.“I had never recorded a live band.”The resulting EP Cold Hands (Catsup , Plate), revealed that sonic changes were afoot, the terse hardcore noises now spreading like an airborne incident. Soon after the EP’s release, Black Dice took Avey Tare, Panda Bear and Geologist on the road with them in May 00.“We started to get a lot of momentum,” says Warren.“We’d show up, and people weren’t sure what to expect.” Rather than roam through the crowd and pick fights, the band members emphasized bracing and prolonged volumes. Portner planted himself in front of the speakers night after night in awe of the band.“It was so visceral, what I wanted rock to be but wasn’t,” he says.“It verged on noise and electronic music [but] totally scary and heavy.” Carmichael says he felt the change was only natural for Black Dice.“You felt your internal organs vibrating, but it really felt like a logical extension of the crowd violence,” he says.“The band wasn’t throwing punches, but they were still affecting the crowd on a bodily level.” Painter Richard Phillips stumbled across the band in Brooklyn one night later that year.“When I saw Black Dice, it was a complete paradigm shift,” Phillips says.“It was just an all-out assault.” Inspired, Phillips blasted Black Dice’s music as he finished a series of paintings of President George W. Bush and female ejaculation for a show he brazenly called “America.” He asked the band to collaborate with him for the show’s opening reception at the Chelsea Piers on September , 00.“For me, it was to end the glad-handing social aspect of openings,” Phillips says.“I wanted to take the whole idea of discussion and interaction completely out of it. The sound would annihilate that potential. It would be about being in the space with them and these paintings at a certain point in time.” Blasting out patrons and artists alike, Black Dice performed at 0 decibels within the studio’s confines. Ears bled from blocks away, and the night became legendary. It made instant devotees of such attendees as Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore and Arto Lindsay. “It was really a breaking point, a real outpouring of energy and intensity,” Phillips says, reflecting on the date.“What could’ve been a better expression of that time? It was more prophetic than we could’ve ever imagined.”

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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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