self-titled - no. 1 - (Page 46)

“I HAD NEVER HEARD VOLUME USED LIKE THAT TO LITERALLY CHANGE THE SHAPE OF A ROOM, THAT SUFFOCATED YOU, THAT MADE YOU TWICE AS STONED AS YOU ALREADY WERE.” The bands were heading in different directions. Come June, that “bunch of tunes”—known now as Sung Tongs—met fervent praise while Black Dice’s abstract shapes, Creature Comforts, encountered outright disdain. And though Black Dice headlined over Animal Collective on the summer tour, the bands’ roles and audience slowly inverted. Full crowds thinned after Animal Collective’s sets. Savaged by the press, Creature Comforts caused Black Dice’s European label, FatCat, to drop the band outright. “It wasn’t fun to have people hate you,” Eric flatly states, the bitterness still evident. “It was just a line in the sand that nobody crossed a silent confrontation.” Galkin remains defiant about Creature Comforts’ hard-fought merits. “I know that album will be rediscovered in twenty years’ time and held up as a holy grail of our era’s psychedelic music,” he says. Tragedies and deaths struck both the Copeland and Warren families later that year, so rather than defend their record, the band members bowed out of their tour with Animal Collective to take care of family matters. It didn’t help that in 00 Black Dice’s swift follow-up, Broken Ear Record, was similarly ignored by both its audience as well as DFA’s parent company, EMI, which barely got behind promoting the record or the subsequent tour. As their contract expired, Black Dice parted ways with DFA, leaving the band free to, in Bjorn’s estimation, “make something kinda messy and gnarly sounding.” Tensions came to a head in March 00. The same week that Black Dice and Animal Collective played a special benefit for New York’s venerated Anthology Film Archives, Black Dice kicked Bharoocha out of the band. That night, Animal Collective was mesmeric while Black Dice, unfettered and now a trio, was downright pulverizing—cruel even. As I sat in the audience that night, the performance made my theater chair quiver, along with my skull and intestines; all the while filmmaker Ken Jacobs’s unnerving magiclantern imagery flickered. On the strength of both sets, anticipation and expectations ran high for the bands’ upcoming records. “For a while, Eric and Dave lived together. Animal Collective and Black Dice would always finish records at the same time, and so we’d have a listening party,” Warren says, recalling that spring night at their apartment with exasperation. “Our record sounded like a fucking bunch of lines and squiggles compared to their record, which was a bunch of tunes. Our shit sounded like abstract shapes.” SCAVENGER Bjorn Copeland ushers me into an immense rundown brick building in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and leads me to his studio. Papers—fashion magazines, multicolored sheets and scabs of pulped handbills and posters peeled off of kiosks—pile up like snowdrifts along the floor, desks and walls. The -year-old is soft-spoken like his brother. As we discuss the band’s latest release, Load Blown (Black Dice’s first album for Animal Collective’s Paw Tracks imprint), Bjorn gazes at a collage in progress. His eyes find a scrap, and he places it onto the unformed piece, its center a vaguely familiar image of a squished strawberry shredded to the point of near-indecipherability. He turns the paper this way and that before discarding it to the

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of self-titled - no. 1

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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