Debut album from NYC sound manipulation specialists, back in print on vinyl w/ download. Black Dice is an explosive, radical, and viciously unique rock & roll band. Based out of Brooklyn, NY, the trio is fiercely independent, doggedly disciplined, and uncompromisingly DIY in approach. Brothers Eric and Bjorn Copeland and Aaron Warren have spent over a decade recording, touring, and unleashing their bizarre musical doctrine on audiences the world over.
By the time Beaches and Canyons made its reticent, mosaic-laden appearance in record stores in late September, the album had already assumed the proportions of a full-blown phenomenon. Promotional copies of the Black Dice recording, to be the inaugural full-length for New York-based DFA, circulated throughout the summer. Critics clamored of a new direction for a band already distinguished by its reputation for confrontational noise, visual experimentation, and violent concert tendencies. Veneration is never a foregone conclusion, and the promo sparked a windfall of opinions: fans of hardcore and psyche, respectively but not exclusively, arranged polemical extremes, debating the merit of a record that is, foremost, synthetic – merging technique, genre, and definition in an approach of general disregard of all aforementioned items.
The record was subject to a fairly typified form of underground hype, balanced largely on the swollen feet of New York’s post-punk fixation and the viable success of other mainstays in the Brooklyn-Providence hardcore contingency. To a considerable extent, everyone seemed to have an angle on the record, with the exception of Black Dice themselves, who seemed content to allow the record to speak for itself in distended pitches, modulating atmospherics and, above all, bombast. Encouragingly less interested in social impact than some of its audience, the album’s ethos became a tacit, almost moot point – a portrait of improvisational evolution, framed against the reference of previous recordings and relative to a sound ever-emerging in live context. Beaches and Canyons, in short, is brilliant in its own right. But it is a finite revelation, acknowledging a continued trajectory in performance (recent concerts carry many of the album’s elements, primarily sound collage and tribal syncopation, to an extreme) and studio material (the band just recorded the first side for a 12” project with Boredoms). Tellingly, the album concludes in mid-climax, without even a hint of resolution, a sound that can only ascend and expand, arrival absconded.