Black Dice/Animal Collective – Chicago, IL 8/19/04
Two of New York’s most talked-about purveyors of sound-freakiness descended upon Chicago on an otherwise serene Thursday evening, bringing their innovations in campfire chants and noise-craft to a nearly sold-out crowd at the Empty Bottle. After an opening set from Black Forest/Black Sea, Animal Collective took the stage, sans goblin masks and rabbit suits, to the disappointment of some in the audience (perhaps just me). After a few sound problems sorted themselves out within the first two songs, the quartet (Avery Tare, Panda Bear, Geologist and Deaken) began to hit their stride with “Leaf House”, the lead track from Sung Tongs, their most recent album. The track masterfully combines clipped cycles of chords with half-yodeling vocals and an insistent soft-edged bass drum, with hypnotic, utterly enchanting results. Following the oddly reptilian meowing that concludes the song and a few moments of reserved guitar strumming, the group transitioned into an equally catchy track that I wasn’t familiar with (possibly from Avey Tare’s split EP with David Grubbs?). One of the most striking elements in the Collective’s live show was the increased prominence of Tare’s lyrics, which revolved around the gently sardonic refrain “when I’m snuffed out/ I doubt I’ll find a swimming pool”. Tare and co. concluded the song with some manic vocal tweaking, as each mic was shot through with stuttering shouts that tangled with a quivering synth wave and echoes of guitar. A sudden, driving rhythm rises out of this, with more dynamic shifts in the vocals and a cheeky Stevie Wonder revision (“I just called to say I like you”). The performance’s fractured hippie feel came to a climax as the band passed around on-stage dancing duties, which generally consisted of hopping, clapping and head-shaking. Tare abandoned his guitar briefly, focusing instead on assembling a string of jagged vocal ellipses, his howls alternating with the band’s sudden lapses into silence. Things wound down with “Kids on Holiday”, after which the band determinedly began packing up equipment, despite the crowd’s calls for more.
If the Collective’s show came off like a skewed family jam, seeing Black Dice was more like witnessing the composition of an action painting, as the listener heard their method of purposeful wandering and gradual assemblage culminate in thick, masterfully crafted sonic landscapes. While I later recognized elements from their live set throughout Creature Comforts, most of the elements from their latest LP reappeared disguised by strange effects and new contexts, subsumed in the 50-minute set of constantly transforming sound. The fairly quiet set of scattered beats that the trio began with slowly passed from bubbling sludge into a syncopated rhythm underlined by Bjorn Copeland’s s gradually striated guitar patterns that resolved into two chords. As the initial loops cycled through the speakers Aaron Warren began adding reverberated shouts, punctuating the progress with a bass drum beside his sound set-up before the melody began moving through more traditional-sounding digital oscillations and spirals.
The arc of Black Dice’s career thus far has been marked by a move away from the wall-to-wall thicket of distortion that permeate their first few releases and a growing interest in more textured, serene washes of sound; but their patient preambles on recent recordings belie what is clearly still a deep fascination with noise. As they began their first ascent with a pattern resembling Miles of Smiles’ “Trip Dude Delay” the crowd started petering out more rapidly, while the remainders broke out air-traffic control earmuffs or simply struck the classic fingers-in-the-ears pose. While a set of earplugs usually lessens the intensity of a live performance, in this case it both saved some of my hearing and allowed me to pay more attention to the way Black Dice pull the experience of sound through the entire body, so that you suddenly find your toes, thighs, or genitals reverberating sympathetically to a particular tone or timbre.
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In fact, as the group began the next phase of their show with rattling beats that stuttered in and out of a recognizable rhythm, I couldn’t help but continue to think about how their approach to music was interlocked with a nuanced awareness of the body. As I watched the group begin to add more layers of percussion and reverb, with a woodblock suddenly popping awake and a sudden explosion of insect chirps oscillating between the speakers, it was impossible not to notice that Warren was continuing to sway, slouch and occasionally hop back and forth behind his board of knobs, neither in nor out of time with the music, as many in what remained of the audience did the same. While their set moved into the more opulent, encompassing seascape-sound that they began exploring in Beaches and Canyons, it struck me that somehow what we were seeing was dance music turned inside-out. As an inverse of the regimented 4/4 rhythm and endlessly sunny hooks that are meant to impel your body onto a club floor, Black Dice’s method feels like a map of the mind/body’s own idiosyncratic passage through time; its contours shifting to accommodate a lingering interest upon a sound-object that wavers between meticulous and slightly hysterical, a sudden wave of warm, trembling guitar or synth, a lapse into near-silence. This was strangely and astonishingly human music for long stretches of the show, but as their set neared its peak the audio equivalent of a zoom out moved through the music, as the room was slowly overwhelmed with sheets of churning, frenetic noise and the listener became an awe-struck mote confronting a beautiful and menacing sound-world that was entirely Other. You have never heard anything quite like either one of these bands – but you should. See them.
Live Dates Recently Added:
06/11 – Northsix, Brooklyn, NY
08/11 – TT The Bears, Cambridge, MA (w/Sunburned Hand of Man)
10/11 – La Sala Rossa, Toronto, ON
11/11 – Lees Palace, Toronto, ON
14/11 – MJQ Concorse, Atlanta, GA
18/11 – Cats Cradle, Carrboro, NC
20/11 – Vox populi Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
21/11 – The Knitting Factory, New York City, NY
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