Brooklyn’s Black Dice will release their third album for DFA Records, entitled Broken Ear Record. Their titles have always been telltale signs for their recording states of mind. Open space and seeking a surfer’s paradise informed the sprawling topography and ebb and tide of 2002’s breakout effort, Beaches and Canyons, while last year’s dense noise foliage of Creature Comforts was by turns animalistic, unpredictable. For Broken Ear Record, the title conjures numerous images and sensations. Think tinnitus - easy for neophytes and noise veterans alike that have caught their live performances - think punctured ear drums and the destabilized loss of balance that follows it; think sensory failure, shattering, and a new openness emergent from the shrapnel. Broken Ear Record is all of these conceits, and none of the above. “Oh, Broken Ear Record was just a phrase that one of us misheard,” sound-manipulator and sometimes singer Eric Copeland explains, “The title fit without standing for something.”
There was a time when Black Dice was known more for breaking things in their live shows including themselves. Back when they were known as the Providence, Rhode Island post-hardcore noise band, they’ve been in New York six years now, aligned with both the local School of Design and friends/classmates like Lightning Bolt and Forcefield, those early shows as sonically evinced on old Gravity, Vermin Scum, and Troubleman singles have been elevated to the realm of lore. “It was scary, the shit that would happen at those early shows,” guitarist Bjorn Copeland says. “People got legitimately hurt. There’s this fucked air --this dark climate-- that’s always been around us, from the very start. Seeing brother Eric covered in blood at the end of a show, that colors things in a very specific way.”
Such confrontational carnage at their live gigs led Black Dice to pull back from the brink of destruction, and instead focus their energies on honing the unfettered noises that were growing in-between the songs in their sets. With the entrance of Aaron Warren into the band, Black Dice evolved, and began to play the transitional sounds instead of the songs themselves. Eschewing their past, they focused instead on pure sound in its most acerbic and head-messing state. They still strive to reach that state in their unofficial mantra, which jokingly goes: “That doesn’t sound fucked enough,” always seeking to go further beyond in their songs. Which is not to say that the band have forgotten about the salad days. In fact, Bjorn hears in Broken Ear Record “a rough rawness that is reminiscent of our old stuff.”
The year leading up to the creation of Broken Ear Record was a rough one for the band. They parted ways with their longtime drummer, Hisham Bharoocha, shortly before the release of Creature Comforts and soon after parted ways with their UK label, Fat Cat. Their tour with sonic brethren Animal Collective went well, until family deaths made the band call a halt to any further touring. It would seem that the ‘dark climate’ around them had not quite dispersed. Bjorn laughs at the notion, but still calls last year “just a string of shit that happened.”
Protection - we do a lot of it these days. Sun cream for our skin, sunglasses for our eyes, condoms for you know where - but do you remember to protect your hearing?
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