self-titled - no. 1 - (Page 47)

hardwood floor. “I like things off balance,” he says with a smile, his ginger beard and long surfer locks catching the autumn sun. In the group’s years as a trio, Black Dice’s sound has edged closer to Bjorn’s visual discipline, which involves taking everyday ephemera and re-contextualizing it in a way that eschews being clever or forced. “We have a hard time not fucking with stuff,” Bjorn notes of their aesthetic. “You get to this point where all of a sudden, you haven’t heard it, it doesn’t look familiar, and that’s what’s more exciting.” Bjorn unfurls a recent work: a long sheet of bubble-wrap, each individual bubble stuffed with colored yarn. It resembles an Indian blanket, perhaps as woven by a UPS delivery guy. “No sound is too ridiculous to be considered,” Warren says. “If we want to use a bicycle horn, if there’s a way to make it sound interesting, then it’s on the table.” Detractors who only hear caustic, obtuse, pretentious noise in Black Dice might be shocked by the band’s perception of its music, which Bjorn describes as “casual and jokey, light-hearted and funny.” The collage-art book Gore, which the band members crafted in 00 with the help of longtime ally Jason Frank Rothenberg, teases out some of those subliminal tendencies in their sound. For their hardcore background, their studio-art training, the acclaimed art-gallery concerts, the guys remain decidedly grounded, eschewing “intellectual” claims about their art and music. Bjorn grows defensive at the notion that what Black Dice does is “fucking ‘smart guy’ music.” The band members avoid artistic talk entirely, instead peppering their answers with exuberant descriptors such as “cool,” “stoked,” “gnarly” and “psyched,” holdovers from their days as ski instructors, surfers and skaters. As we discuss the rhythm-driven structures of songs on Load Blown, the band members reiterate that they don’t think of it as difficult music. Instead, they cite Michael Jackson, Duran Duran, Jay-Z and Tom Petty. “The logic is the same the way someone would organize Led Zeppelin or a dance track,” Bjorn says. “It’s based on pretty accessible music as far as this stuff is structured.” By far their most user-friendly album, Load Blown resembles a jigsaw puzzle—the songs are scrambled, fragmentary, but self-contained, interlocking, even fun. A love of ebullient music such as Jamaican rocksteady and African highlife is evident in the atypical guitar lines and rhythmic nuances that are teased out, tweaked, and then woven back into the texture. Noisy as it is on its exterior, the loops and lattices of found sound reveal the craft underneath. Live, the band’s blend of feedback, reverb and delay exists wholly outside genre tags such as rock, noise, electronic;it’s unadulterated psychedelia at its most pulverizing and fullyarticulated. “I know the language so well, the way they play,” Bharoocha reminisces. “Their personalities are fully in their music. Black Dice is just their life in public.” Portner admits that Animal Collective continues to admire Black Dice’s singular path. “They’ve always been a huge influence on us musically. I feel they’ve always been pushing forward. The records are constantly surprising and mind- blowing to me.” Black Dice’s music remains cloistered and esoteric, but it’s not abstract and removed in the same way as contemporary art. Load Blown resembles the art you might happen upon amid the urban squalor of New York City. It’s in the chipped paint of metal beams on the subway, the starbursts of broken bottles, the torn advertisements, the ludicrous sound collage of cell-phone conversations, trunk-shaking bass and metal-on-metal truck brakes that assault city dwellers daily. In the mess, something takes shape. Considering the art book and videos, I ask Warren if the band might ever evolve away from being just a “rock band.” Would the guys ever consider creating art installations for something like the Whitney Biennial, as fellow RISD alums Forcefield did in 00? Even though Black Dice has collaborated with artists including Phillips and Doug Aitken, Warren downplays the notion. “At the heart of it, it’s pretty simple,” he says. “We’re a band—some dudes that go to a practice space. We’ll show up, have some brews, smoke some joints, listen to a bunch of Michael Jackson. And then we’ll play some weird music for an hour.”

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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