To paraphrase Nate Dogg, if you smoke like Eric Copeland smoke, then you're high like every day. And at some point on that Möbius strip, the routine transmissions of life-- TV chatter, street chatter, radio chatter-- morph into otherworldly assaults, mounting evidence of a conspiracy against human peace. Hippies called this "turning on."
But pop art proved that there were ways to embrace the noise without surrendering to it. Scanning the backside of culture for fleas, discovering American gods in the grain of public access shows, etc.-- ways that you could baptize, by fire, whatever grotesqueries the TV Fast Food Complex fed you as a kid. It's why twenty- and thirty-somethings are out making paintings influenced by bootleg Bart Simpson T-shirts or "video art" like "Wonder Showzen" (a deformed twin of "Sesame Street" by people who presumably have never met a child), or why Ariel Pink has an audience.
Eric Copeland-- one-third of New York's Black Dice-- is a lifeguard in this world. Alien in a Garbage Dump, a CD issue of two vinyl-only EPs, sounds like the soundtrack for Chuck E. Cheese's memorable 1993 ad "Ultimate Pizza", time stretched and desiccated by effects boxes. Or like what Panda Bear's Person Pitch might sound like if Panda Bear was replaced by the doll from Child’s Play. Like an alien in a garbage dump.
It's fun. I boogie to it. Grooves collide in what sound like accidents; ringtone-sized melodies are played and played and replayed and replayed and wrung out like roadkill. The songs bounce and reel. He never opens the window for air. Copeland exists in the world of noise and art music, but Alien's blissful repetitions are closer akin to hip-hop or the tireless elation of steel drum bands. After all, "breaks" were basically just the DJ finding the brightest beam of sunlight in a song and looping it till drool trickled from the audience's mouths.
Apparently the searching, high-minded folks at British magazine The Wire have started calling music like this "hypnagogic pop," a reference to the state between wakefulness and sleep. I don't buy it. Copeland-- and James Ferraro, and Nite Jewel, and all these coastal folks vomiting up crusty, 80s-inspired psychedelia-- are fully awake, just on some other side of reality. It's not hypnagogic-- it's stoned, daffy, and righteous. It's chewing up something familiar and making it weird again. Life gives you lemons, so you make Alien in a Garbage Dump.
