Last year-- slumped over a table at a bar that could pass as the center of Brooklyn's music community-- I asked Black Dice vocalist-turned-knobtwister Eric Copeland what he thought of his band's place in modern noise's renaissance, as well as its knowledge of that genre's past. "I feel like there is an underground that is really aware of this stuff," he said. "We're a little bit behind-- like we're catching up-- but it's kinda nice being ignorant of it. When we approach these ideas, they always feel new to us, even if they may not always sound new." Ignorance is bliss: Just ask the roomful of monkeys at typewriters getting to the ear-poisoning monologue of Hamlet.
Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive to simply say that Miles of Smiles-- Black Dice's contribution to a Tokyo gallery's Poetry of Sex installation, and the A-side to the band's latest 12-inch-- accidentally re-creates the "Music Promenade" section of French composer Luc Ferrari's 30-year-old landmark tape composition, Presque Rien. Both pieces utilize the field-recorded rhythms of a marching band's celebratory processional to swim between worlds alternately mundane and nightmarish-- the aural hallucinations running hot and cold-- but that's where the synchronicity ends.
A blanket of bugs chirps at the start of the track and echoes throughout, and an egg rattle continually pans about as if stolen from Ragnar Grippe's minimal classic, Sand. Along with quoting records they've probably never heard, Black Dice flash a heavy amount of Krautrock tape foolery, taking cues from the meth/'luude interludes of Neu! 2 and echoing the mix of handheld percussion and endless reverberation of Can's kooky "Ethnological Forgery Series". Not content to just dissolve all this history into an ambient puddle, the track's frantic marching band brass section stomps double time for its giddy finale.
The second half of the EP, "Trip Dude Delay", is a final postcard from the edges of Black Dice's familiar, expansive Beaches and Canyons sound. Having parted ways with drummer Hisham Bharoocha, Black Dice will no longer have his thunderous toms, crashing cymbals, and tribal rhythms to tether their drifts. "Trip Dude Delay" has opened Black Dice's live set for roughly two years, and it sounds as if Bjorn Copeland's guitar is a thousand twanging instruments. Sometimes the vocals sound ready to shuffle off this mortal coil, as if the Beach Boys' "Our Prayer" had been cut at Lee Perry's Black Ark. All are subsumed by Bharoocha's malleted cymbal, swelling into a nasty tempest. The captured cymbal frequencies scald at white-noise temperatures and the sub-woofers seep out lava, but it all retains a fine quintessence of dust and pumice.
As oceanic as the middle section is-- overwhelming the senses in its unbridled noise-- its enormous natural forces and minute details remain intact, each droplet discerned in the tidal wave. As it cools, it reveals an isle full of noises, sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. It lounges like Martin Denny's tiki hut, a place where tropical thumb pianos coo with the washed-out vocal harmonies, serenely slurping back out to sea after nearly 15 minutes out of joint. Less musique concrète than a chunk of asphalt, Miles of Smiles moves in a delirious stagger. Eyes heavy lidded, flaunting ragged edges and torn cuffs, it revels in brave new worlds, even if those worlds are only new to them.
