Pitchfork's Paul Thompson began his review of Hype Williams' 2011 album One Nation by struggling to discover exactly who was behind the music. Were they called Inga Copeland and Roy Blunt? Or perhaps Karen Glass and Roy Nnawuchi? For their debut full-length on Hyperdub, the duo present themselves as Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland. Just don't bank on those being their real names, or any kind of indication of a settled moniker for future releases. Notions of a fluctuating self are a crucial part of the world in which Blunt/Copeland choose to operate, although Black Is Beautiful throws up greater thematic ties than their previous work, with the pair gently reeling in its tendency to shape shift its sound into oblivion. There's still a crude, sun-warped skew to their vision. But releasing this album as Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland makes it feel like a layer of mystery has been removed, and that's mirrored in the subtle erosion of their musical identity crisis.
Despite the lurch toward refinement, there are still acres of ambiguity to get lost in here. Blunt/Copeland don't even pose questions without answers. It's more like getting asked a question that trails off halfway through the conversation, never to return to its original intent. The lack of traditional track titles, aside from the opening "(Venice Dreamway)", positions this as a singular work that doesn't lend itself well to being broken down into its various parts. Outside of that opening cut, which begins by slowing down the coughing intro of Black Sabbath's "Sweet Leaf" to an asthmatic wheeze, each track is numbered from 2-15. It's often reminiscent of the dream-pop stencils A.R. Kane sketched out in the late 1980s, especially when they let dub templates delicately seesaw between the dreamy and the discordant. Black Is Beautiful shares the same kind of chimerical idealization of pop as A.R. Kane’s 69, where everything is set up to shoot into the heavens.
Only three tracks of the 15 make it over the three-minute mark, causing the record to feel like a wander through the fragments of Blunt and Copeland's collective psyches. At times it can be frustrating-- their reimagining of Donnie & Joe Emerson's "Baby" is such a gracefully poised sci-fi torch song that it would surely benefit from being stretched out over a greater expanse of time. "11" sparks a similar feeling. Elsewhere, they have a keen sense of how to turn lo-fi tools to their advantage, with the in-the-red vocal cooing on "5" matched by the same kind of boxed-in musical ambition Ariel Pink displayed on Worn Copy. There's a playfulness at work here too, with atom-sized chunks of sound deployed in the shorter tracks, shards of dialogue from sources unknown left to loop into infinity, and plenty of heavily treated audio ephemera cut and pasted into the mix.
But there's a natural path forged between all the shifts, a sense that the abstraction feeds off the structure and vice versa. As such, Black Is Beautiful nears something that could readily be branded as Blunt and Copeland's aesthetic, which is likely to cause them as much consternation as it might pleasure. The key difference is the transformation from throwing a spanner in the works out of a gleeful kind of perversion to that spanner being an integral part of the overall picture. It's there when "9" is cut dead in its tracks to bring in a sample of a newsreader, only to quickly resume where it left off. And it's there in the outstanding centerpiece "10", which causes Copeland's vocal to disappear in the rearview mirror, getting obliterated entirely when the track is stonewalled by spacious stabs of noise. Occasionally the world needs to be blocked out to make sense of it. Black Is Beautiful undergoes that blocking-out process and finds no kind of sense anywhere, instead focusing on the gloriously messy sift through the clutter we go through just to approach a tiny semblance of meaning.
