Black Dice - The ritual of chaos

Black Dice is the name of a quartet from Providence, Rhode Island, made up of Bjorn Copeland (guitar), Hisham Bharoocha (drums), Eric Copeland (vocals) and Sebastian Blanck (bass). Having found a stable line-up in the spring of 1997, the band initially presented themselves as a fierce, raucous outfit devoted to harsh experimentation, firmly rooted in the New York noise/no wave scene of the early '80s. To this must be added the contribution of their live sets, so disjointed and violent that they blended unrecognisable song forms with manipulated sound sources. In practice, the whole 20th-century yearning summed up in one rock quartet: chance, the unrepeatable event, chaos and melody.

In 1998 the band moved to New York, where they met Aaron Warren, their future new bassist. It's precisely here that their intentions underwent their ritual initiation: opening up, reworking, deforming, sculpting, using sound sources and samplers to the point of exhaustion, in free associations of timbres and random samples.

After Black Dice, a first 7″ on Troubleman Unlimited, the band throws caution to the wind. The artistic reference points become top-shelf (Aube, Merzbow and the great Japanese noise-makers, from Melt Banana to Boredoms, and European ones, from Chrome to Cows), the experiments embrace past and present of creative rock until the two blur into one another, and their poetic-stylistic creed settles into distortions of volume, range and pitch, and chaotic (yet highly rational, almost cerebral) manipulations of dynamics.

Black Dice proclaim themselves crystal-clear, almost icy poets of primordial chaos: synthetic illusionism, furious evolutions of electroacoustic mass, swamps of primitive acoustic events. John Cage's Zen-like randomness has found one of the most important outlets of the 2000s.

The 7″ on Troubleman Unlimited is thus the first of a series of mini-CDs, EPs and the like (almost a dive back into the era of postwar experimentation, into Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète and Stockhausen's Darmstadt electro-acoustics, into the études that precede the masterpiece): the debut of the Providence band carries above all a raw aftertaste of savage hardcore monstre (only “Rereading” offers a distant hint of what's to come).

Untitled, the 7″ released the same year, is even more furious (bordering on grindcore).

#3 is the springboard for their research. The first eleven tracks are chiaroscuro sketches on watermarked paper — Sonic Youth-era Kill Yr. Idols and post-Pop Tatari Boredoms strung together by a maze of feedback jolts, screams, buzzes, hisses and an epileptic drum pattern (which, however, fails to break through the cliché of chaotic free-form set by its illustrious predecessors). Although already hinting at interesting developments, this noise suite is still disjointed.

The second track is blind fury oozing hard-rock rivulets: a single riff repeated with stubborn insistence, backed by the most granite-hard drumming. But before it ends there's a sucker punch: floating, mystical abrasions, obstinate feedback loops, a rhythm line that jams like a mechanism left to run on its own.

The Dadaist disintegrations of their early maturity are still missing, as is the awareness that will animate their later work; whatever compositional or sonic evolutions are already present – significant as they are – still dig their hands into historical noise and only tweak its rules at the margins. But the foundations of Black Dice's astonishing evolution are all laid down here.

Next come Semen Of The Sun and the volumes in the Chimes In Black Water series, the first signs of collaboration with Michigan's sonic researchers, Nate Young's Wolf Eyes. The following mini-album Cold Hands carries a statement of artistic intent right from its cover image. A portrait, perhaps of a woman, undergoing a Magritte-like metamorphosis: it's the visual counterpart of the monstrous – yet utterly natural – union of primitivism and abstraction, the first mark of Black Dice's art.

A muffled hum and a broken music box set off the title track without any hurry; its center of gravity is a dramatic crescendo of high-voltage machinery (note the use of simple elements made to react in an estranging solution) that swells until it becomes a stretched-out shade, an insistent description of the thousand inlays of an electromagnetic spectrum.

“Smile Friends” starts haltingly before breaking loose into a frantic run in which the possessed mass of voice and guitar seems to find a common ground, which nevertheless diverges once more into new sonic storms. “The Raven” is an instrumental piece that imports the Swans' rhythm section in a state of shock, into cacophonous delirium of feedback retching and damned stammering (still that hardcore legacy), almost a kind of Fugazi-esque agony.

“Birthstone”, more and better, is built on a piercing high-pitched noise hysteria, crashing cymbals and distant wails, a subterranean landscape brimming with shocking hallucinations, with almost horror-film hisses (the best Penderecki's soundscapes are a stone's throw from here).

This mini-album is thus a good step forward, even if it never quite follows through on the boldness running through it; but the broad dramatic sweeps of “Birthstone” are already a genuine delight for the eardrums.

In August 2001 a split came out pairing labelmates Black Dice with Erase Errata on the same record.

“Untitled #5.5”, our heroes' track on the first side, opens on concrete hisses and spectral distortions of paranormal lenses, a kind of kinship between Aube's oscilloscope experiments and Throbbing Gristle's grids; after a tribal tom-tom and further gruesome distortions of humanoid little monsters (perhaps the first reception of Residents signals), watery swamp noises close the track in sinister ferment.

The tracks credited to Erase Errata (“The Shade” and “French Canadia”) are two lo-fi skids built on short-circuiting riffs and bass counterpoints with a Beefheart-ish flavor, a worthy continuation of “Other Animals” (2001).

An important piece for understanding the evolution of Black Dice, this very brief record offers both a renewed compositional sensibility and a clever use of noble references, giving rise to little tableaux of moody magma. Four minutes flat of total, intense creative autonomy

Beaches & Canyons, Black Dice's full-length debut, is thus a small miracle: five free-form compositions that stand as both a summary and the definitive fulfilment of their earlier short releases, shot through with real mastery in shaping primal timbres. Far removed from the schizophrenia of their first works, here the style turns austere, programmatic, almost universal: the immensity of the sea, raised to a crossing-over of existence, as a primordial need.

The call-and-response between sound fields that opens "Seabird" meets motorised jubilations and jungles of sound sources. Contours traced by tribal accompaniments and voodoo vocalisations convey the dimension of a tortured journey, of successive shifts that merge the evolutions of living entities.

"Things Will Never Be the Same" opens with synthetic swells and continues with opalescent howls rising high into transfigured crossings; a superb use of production leads to an imperceptible yet inexorable crescendo, and to a detonation accompanied by a tribalism of mystic rapture. It's manic dynamics, a shoegaze of human presences; the unfortunates of "Not Available" who have finally seen the light.

A free-form piece for grinding machines worthy of Red Crayola opens "The Dream Is Going Down"; yet another lament in the mould of the Residents, a dialogue of indecipherable mutterings and liquid timbres of varying viscosity, builds into an accelerando that becomes an extraordinary cathartic dance. Black Dice's art becomes a powerful restructuring of primary sounds.

The prodigious homage to "Not Available" continues with the glacial sounds intoned by the horns of "Endless Happiness"; there follows a swampy musique concrète and a symphony for acoustic filters that frays the brass, leaving it to settle into the in(de)finite, in an overall lysergic effect. The band's extraordinary sensibility becomes a fully-fledged instrument, stretching out, for the rest of the suite, an unfurled sample of the surf. It's the stroke of genius of the record: an ecstatic contemplation of the magical place of the infernal crossing just completed, in spiritual communion with the natural element, the essence of life par excellence, a mysterious universal motion.

On the psychedelic "Big Drop", the Providence boys go back to sounding less ambitious but no less imposing: explosions in tightly packed sequences of feedback and drums, bacchanals of screamed gibberish, cascades of white noise; until everything crashes into the abrupt, dramatic interruption that closes the record, the sudden silence.

With this record, Black Dice prove themselves an ensemble of substantial creative abilities, inventors of contraptions for the ambient psyche, keen and sensitive observers-reworkers of nature's arcane mechanisms. Beaches & Canyons is a construct of grand narrative and poetic sweep, one of the most exhilarating essays in sonic primitivism.

Black Dice then made Lost Valley, a 3" released in the summer of 2002 – issued as a Christmas treat for the band's fans – a sort of flying saucer of primitive forces that definitively tips the quartet's hand towards a recovery of a whole series of musical models that could not be more different from one another.

Just two tracks, "Lost Valley" and "Head Like A Door", the first of which takes shape as an extended crossover digression, assembling and reprocessing into a fascinating sonic continuum percussive virtuosity worthy of free jazz, electronics of the most modern conception, the percussive rites typical of post-psychedelic outfits like Crash Worship, and an unheard-of dose of African polyrhythms.

Theirs are in any case not patchworks with neither head nor tail, but rather post-psychedelic reabsorptions of invigorating substances. Proof of this lies in the second track, "Head Like A Door": resting at first on broad ill-ambient blankets, it then explodes into inhuman Chrome-style guitar riffs and harsh electronics outbursts worthy of Japanese noise artists.

The following year, Black Dice and Wolf Eyes joined forces for a collaborative album that haphazardly merges the stylistic hallmarks of both collectives: manipulated noise, guitar feedback, vortices of concrete sound, industrial memories captured over time from the bygone 80s, crackles and incomprehensible hums (sometimes gratuitous ones). All packed into seven untitled tracks, out of which metal pokes through, then hardcore, and further unexpected repositionings of the industrial metallurgy of Mnemonists and Throbbing Gristle, composing one long suite, a fresco painted in the colours of 70s kraut-rock and 90s noise rock. What could have been a missing link between two great eras of soundsculpting is lacking above all in decisiveness.

Cone Toaster, the 2003 mini-album, offers a revisiting of the dancefloor in the spirit of Pil, an icy techno that moves above a noxious psychedelia (the title track). The flip side is represented by Yamatsuka Eye (eYe) of Boredoms' remix of "Endless Happiness", one of the triumphs of Beaches & Canyons, here rendered in a pseudo-new-age version (the sound of sea waves alone takes up more than a third of the track).

Briefly setting aside the daring of Beaches & Canyons, Black Dice indulge in frivolous pleasure.

Yet another collaborative work, again a minor one, this time with Animal Collective (in which both bands freely rework a shared source material titled "Wastered"), attests to this transitional period. The joint venture with Animal Collective also serves to launch the Terrestrial Tones project (made up of Eric Copeland and Dave Portner, the noise specialists of their respective congregations), via Blasted, Dead Drunk, and especially the tour de force of "Oboroed" (2005).

The main discussion picks up again with Miles Of Smiles, the second EP in under a year and a half, released just a few months before Creature Comforts. In its drive to tie stylistic evolution to the urgency of forging new artistic ground, it's one of the most fascinating points in Black Dice's artistic trajectory; compared to the previous Cone Toaster, this EP works even better as a bridge between the two full-lengths.

Here, then, are two long tracks, the first of which is an impressionistic humus of nocturnal ambient, of stagnant swamps that keep expanding; the hazy, mysterious, polyrhythmic percussion, softened by surrounding xylophones, gives rise to a "dance of nature," until it erupts into a new din of schizophrenic, layered sounds of trumpets and naturalistic brushstrokes.

The second ("Trip Dude Delay"), built around a floating synth, is one of the rare melodic moments in the band's career, an almost pastoral picture with organ notes lending it a liturgical mood, before it's overwhelmed by a staggering tsunami of screaming noise and distorted swells. It's a post-catastrophe (the Ithaca of every castaway still dazed by the echo of the sirens) that becomes a communion of primitive beauty, a return to a dreamed-of and lost innocence.

In this complex work, brief yet remarkably sublimated artistically (bordering on the baroque), Black Dice's additive synthesis reaches unhoped-for heights.

Black Dice's second album, Creature Comforts, markedly more introverted than its predecessor, is striking both for its boldness and for the electro-synth accents that stun the listener from the very first listen. After the ascetic description of the sea, attention shifts to the exploration of hideously deformed bodies.

"Cloud Pleaser," like any self-respecting operatic prelude, anticipates what's to come: a popular sing-song little tune steeped in sinister jackhammer vibrato, it spells out a claustrophobic condition of powerlessness. The following "Treetops" is animated by sound sources (carnival horns and industrial alarms) that converge into a post-atomic saraband.

The interlude "Island" sets the stage for the distorted roars of "Creature," the semantic centerpiece of the record: a striking riot of sub-animal cries with finely descriptive detail and captivating mimicry, whose percussion, less compact, nonetheless never undermines the track's evolving arc.

"Live Loop" is another moment of reflection that leads into the new tour de force, "Skeleton": a dub shattered by three-dimensional sounds and otherworldly delirium, a still life of radiation that warps the timbres and turns them into amphetamine-laced reverbs: Black Dice handle stereo imaging and channels like a butcher on LSD. "Schwip Schwap," the third interlude, is an electro-acoustic jest that ferries us to the closing "Night Flight," a jam of noises orbiting a synth, amid faltering tracked-vehicle rumbles and Gothic-church expansions (the counterpart to the wave noise of Beaches & Canyons, which here dissolves in a reassuring way).

Above all, this Creature Comforts shows greater interpenetration (artifice and nature), greater consideration for the listener, more musical pedagogy; no longer a flow of overwhelming sensations, but a composite, sparkling, and articulate mosaic of naturalistic impressions. Black Dice are already starting to open new doors.

Having established this new engagement with the listener, the Rhode Island band, with Broken Ear Record (recorded without Baroocha, who had in the meantime turned to a solo career), fine-tune a work more in line with their new aspirations. The opening "Snarly Yow," a personal take on r'n'b pulse, almost like Ministry dressed up as Kylie Minogue, with interludes of noise radiation that progressively sterilize the groove, intensifies its apocalyptic, post-Modern Dance Pere Ubu-esque counterpoint.

As the listening continues, one begins to suspect that Black Dice's aim is compactness of form, even as it's put to the test by variation. At times it's a pure display of inventive reworking. In "Heavy Manners," a dazed, looped Hawaiian guitar and a humanoid mumbling are chipped away at by acid gusts from the sampler, which extracts new distorted death-rattles from them. "Twins," a pow-wow with carnivalesque timbres and sporadic hand-clapping, spirals off into a simple metamorphosis of sounds. "ABA" is a brief isolationist parenthesis, with an oscillating synth and clicks marking time.

In other cases, as with "Street Dude," one is plunged into a noise vortex that swallows up a drum'n'bass base and looped chatter. The return of the beat carries things to a new peak of stereophonic dynamics and a second sonic disintegration. The mix of "Smiling Off" is almost Tackhead-style: prodding afro-beat with impertinent chatter of feedback and sampler, a short-circuit of abstract cybernetics, aboriginal invocations. The whole thing fills up with echoes, counterpoint games, atonal blends. Rounding off the collection is the sci-fi ballet of "Motorcycle," with radioactive beats, off-beat possessed vocalizations, and aimless sardonic samples.

A record built on rhythmic schemes and compositional interlocking, organizing alternating-current scores between matter and anti-matter, it skillfully risks both repetitiveness and unpredictability. An enviable range of timbres. The first Black Dice album after a few tracks ("Wastered" and "Endless Happiness") appeared on the second volume of the DFA compilation, from November 2004 (the first, from 2003, is now impossible to find), it also marks an absolute strengthening of their singularity within the roster of James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy.

Manoman, once again a short-form record, serves Black Dice as a way to crystallize ideas and project new horizons.

"Manoman" does exactly that. There's first an off-beat, material polyrhythm that gradually becomes a pattern-vessel for streaks, deformations, multicolored decorations; then the whole thing turns into an acidic trance with hardcore jolts measured in tenths of a second; finally, the polyrhythm breaks apart into beats and intricate interplay.

The remaining tracks, “Gore” and “Toka Toka”, besides sounding like outtakes from Broken Ear Record, are also minimal weaves that vary through additions (sometimes redundant accumulations) of distorted racket and restless radiation. “Gore”, in particular, stylizes the distance between post-punk and industrial in the space of a few minutes.

Not much structure, little intention. Above all, after (already) numerous imitation attempts and various remixes, it seems Black Dice want to remix their own raison d'être, without the real capacity for reworking à-la Black Dice. The drawback of this phase is the possibility that sonic chaos blurs into stylistic confusion.

Drummer Hiram Bharrocha (already a collaborator with major names on the avant-noise scene) then leaves the group and launches a solo career with Full Bloom, under the name Soft Circle, with which he substantially revisits the band's music in light of ethnic wails (but also Teutonic, tribal and pseudo-danceable ones), considerably softening its cacophonous impact while heightening its tonal ornamentation.

With Load Blown the transition to a more accessible format is complete. The wanderings of Broken Ear Record have taken on the almost definitive shape of upright organisms, skillfully assembled and brought to life with clarity.

“Scavenger”, with its interlocking minimal sampledelic figures, saddles a malfunctioning base with congas, Hawaiian guitar phrases and ethereal beats. The polyrhythm of the following “Drool” runs the risk of making Bharoocha's absence felt, but lays out a folk-popular concertina theme over an oscillating ultrasonic swarm, splitting into polyphony, and into a muffled suspension.

Then “Bananas” (a saraband of stereophonic fragments), “Roll Up” (freeze-dried minimal techno), Kokomo (industrial-tronic motorik), “Bottom Feeder” (free speculations on the speed of a sample's repeat, see “Neu! 2"), are fascinating, accommodating tracks, but ones that fail to go beyond the by now familiar supersonic variation.

It's the first Black Dice record to stake almost everything on the suggestion (and accessibility) of sounds. The sense is nonetheless fulfilled: if Creature Comforts and Beaches & Canyons were works of heart and brain, as well as of feeling, here it's all guts and gristle. It's not, truth be told, their specialty. Attention to groove, which sits at the lower level, is at times tangled, too insistent, scrawny and pompous, and it keeps the compositions from taking off.

Meanwhile Black Dice also bring their live shows to Italy (notably the one held on March 8, 2008 at the Unwound in Padova). It's perhaps in this context that their art reveals itself as uncompromising: their aleatory walls of noise strike a borderline compromise between voracious improvisation and calibrated randomness.

Eric Copeland launches his solo career with Hermaphrodite (2007), a surprising attempt at an avant-noise reduction geared toward accessibility, as danceable as it is – even – singable (“Scumpipe”, “Wash Up”, “La Booly Boo”). This record demonstrates the latent lack of seriousness in the latest noise-rock output, far removed from any intellectualism. Hermaphrodite was followed by a companion Ep, Alien In A Garbage Dump (2008), featuring the long title track, and an experimental Cd-r, Rgag (2009). After the two sprawling collages of Strange Days (Post Present Medium, 2010), Copeland delivers, with the 17 minutes of “Spangled” (taken from Waco Taco Combo, 2011), his greatest exercise in chance in the style of the Darmstadt school, a subliminal musicality achieved through samples, loops and cut-ups. “B.Y.O.B.” (2012) is a single made in collaboration with Dj Dog Kick. On Joke in the Hole (DFA, 2013) he employs his usual flow of supernatural, chaotic samples while reinventing himself as a techno and hip-hop producer, unfortunately without the brashness of peak Fatboy Slim.

Meanwhile Black Dice return to the proper album format with Repo, a work that confirms a trend that's ever less visionary and ever more focused on smoothing out sound effects. Unlike Creature Comforts, here the greatest tension comes in the brief sampled interludes; some tracks show now-stale tricks (“Lady TV”, “Glazin”), while others are simply skippable (“Vegetable”, “Ten Inches”).

Their signature style regains strength on “La Cucaracha”, on “Chicken Shit” (as digital as it is polyrhythmic) and on “Ultra Vomit Craze”, theoretically their first hit.

It's the band's “urban” record, which however forgets one simple fact: they had already described urbanity in the past, running it through a digital filter and reinventing a monstrous prehistory; here they simply wander around in that same “urbanity”, limiting themselves to holding forth with biting wit.

On their first record not produced by their trusty label Paw Tracks, Mr. Impossible (2012), a playful copy of their trans-natural sound aesthetic takes center stage.

One of the most exciting entities of the 2000s, Black Dice have ended up basking in their own sonic games, believing themselves to be new masters of all-encompassing sound painting, but in reality stumbling upon an unsettling limit: the short-circuit of an acoustic microcosm that tends to implode in on itself. Theirs nonetheless remains an inquiry with few precedents, standing alongside the other great experimenters of the decade (Animal Collective, whose “Spirits They’re Gone” can genuinely rival the sacred monster Beaches & Canyons), and has already spawned several thrilling experiences, from Fuck Buttons to Gang Gang Dance, from Sightings to Wolf Eyes. If on one hand there's a credible continuation of the Residents's irreverent anthropology, as updated as it is revised and corrected (in light of new techniques, the age of terrorism and the economic crisis), on the other Black Dice seem to pulverize it as a kind of propitiatory sacrifice for a new idea of sound poetry, an excursus through space-time that crosses out-of-sync passages, deformed timbres, malfunctioning machinery, corrupted humanity, robotic wails, sea surges and strangled heartbeats. If nature is actually one colossal dissonance, Black Dice have found a credible key to describing it.

Eric Copeland continues his career with the typical prolificacy of a producer. Masterbater (2013) is a mini-release containing just the 11 minutes of “Masterbater”, the most ambitious work of his recent period (actually another more or less random collage of electronic backing tracks). The Eps Ms Pretzel (2014) and Logo My Ego (2014) contain more expressive fancies (the Afro-techno pastiche “Ms Pretzel”, the big-beat of “SXIXO”) but also robotic rave drifts. New subliminal folk-ancestral hallucinations permeate the techno of Jesus Freak (2015): “Elephant”, “Multiball”, “Jamaican Nighbor”. The degeneration inherent in Black Bubblegum (2016), his pop album, recalls that of the late-period Residents.

Black Dice, meanwhile, resurface with a rather commercial 45, “Big Deal/Last Laugh” (2016).

Copeland still has Brooklyn Banks (2016), Courtesy Professionalism Respect (2017), Goofballs (2017), Trogg Modal vol. 1 (2018) and vol. 2 (2019) left in the tank. The dense run of mediocre albums continues with Dumb It Down (2020).

Natty Light (2019), a collection of early singles from the hardcore years, precedes Mod Prog Sic (2021), Black Dice's first full-length in almost a decade. As with the latest Copeland, the core outfit here settles for music fit for alternative raves, starting with a “Bad Bet” built on one of their typical queasy, exotic sonatas. “Downward Arrow” and “Swinging” are mildly tedious robotic dances (“Big Chip” leans on a hip-hop beat). “Tuned Out” scatters a few crumbs of their old analog-digital soundsculpting — sub-human voices and post-tribal rhythms — but in a trivial, watered-down form, increasingly beholden to a mash-up of 1950s dance tunes (mambo, limbo, etc.). Better is “White Sugar”, where old-school big-beat is enriched by warped polyrhythms and grotesque vocal masquerades. The less obvious tracks are the shortest ones: the swing of “Plasma” and the samba of “Jocko”. But this is, above all, a collection of modest homemade creations that certainly doesn't stand out amid the Bandcamp self-release morass — a morass they themselves had predicted twenty years earlier.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google