BLACK DICE

Miles of smiles

12”, Fat Cat

The last standing avantgarde-rockband still available for that title moves a few more steps into their own headspace, in two longish tracks that move here and there and back again like the sea, only in more shapes and colours. In other words (choosing those of self-acclaimed music historians), Black Dice have exchanged Pink Floyd for Can. Still experimental and still exceptional, they surf preconceptions like sunny summer waves on self-built boards and dreamed oceans. The main question is: where will the music take you? Required listening – listening required.

Lately, I find myself more and more dissatisfied with the reviews I write and so I have been thinking about ways of getting out of the treadmill, of getting rid of the almost formulaic approach I have developed for the task. Though the repetition and the routine gives me a sense of security and safety (of arriving at the correct conclusions) the plain reason is that I am getting bored with it. With myself. And that is always a terribly bad thing to happen, especially if there is no payment involved. So I try to find ways around my usual manner of thinking and of putting thoughts into words, which is really hard, but worth the sweat. (You may won’t believe me, but I do not post everything on this website that I have written. I have never fallen for that mistake of oh so many egozines.)

There is a big similarity to a band like Black Dice in there. As psychedelic and avantgarde as they are, for a band somewhere somehow still connected to the basic idea of a “rockband”, they have made the search for new ways of playing and sounding a life dogma. The only rule is to break the rule. The only way to go is to find a new way. Within this permanent struggle for creativity and opening new doors to new sounds lies one of the main attraction points towards Black Dice.

“Miles of smiles” has two tracks only and runs up almost half an hour pf playing time. The title track is a disconnected and longwinded collage of various kinds of interplay, even further removed from song- or any other structure than their last record on the same label. And even though that description sounds a little off-putting, the effect is quite the opposite – one of serious and mature attraction towards a hitherto unknown piece of music. The second and final track, "Trip Dude Delays” hints at the core of the music in a variety of ways. I won’t go into the various meanings of the word “dude” here, since you can figure that one out yourself (as I am sure you could do with all the other stuff as well, but reading it is so much better, isn’t it..) but there is also a lot to say about “Dude” and “Delay”. The latter one especially when thinking about the sudden burst of airplane noises appearing from out of nowhere, growing into an enormous fin mixed with guitar sounds in the background and then slowly removing itself, in about half a dozen waves into another blurred and plinking spiel of guitars, warbled drums and undulated rhythms. Some might call them “dub”, but that can only be accounted to listening to too much music in a short period of time.

As a band, Black Dice have moved further into the direction of open band projects and producers of sonic art, taking daytrips into the backwaters of their own minds. Experimentalism paired with the memory of long drunken nights in the rehearsal room. Nowadays Bjorn Copeland adds the adjective “treated” to his signature of “guitar”, giving away the steps the band has taken away from their roots and off into open space. These days they play in galleries (the title track has been composed and recorded for an art-opening at a gallery), where their chaotic and explosive live-shows from the early days would be frowned upon, and take the egomaniac violence of emotional outbursts back in favour of controlled bleeding under laboratory conditions. Big structural plans seem more important than building up a wall of uncontrolled noise and mayhem. Have they grown old?

Not at all and not completely, though, mind you. Listening to “Miles of Smiles” – what a funnily ironic and misleading title for a record, by the way – on full volume will still open gates to flood your hearing with noise and feedback. But then there are also cricket-sounds and carefully sculpted, or rather deconstructed percussive parts that won’t even shock my mother. The mixture makes up the special provocative power of Black Dice. Not out to make friends or fans, but avidly exploring their own path, they have opened doors for a whole slew of likeminded psych-avant-rock-bands (Set Fire To Flames, Animal Collective, amo, carefully lead to the public by labels like Fat Cat Records) who have nothing in common but their uniqueness. Makes me feel like great times ahead.

www.fat-cat.co.uk

06/2004