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By: Mark Gomes
Date: 3rd Oct 07
Release: Album
To Cure: A predictable playlist
What:
Load Blown
Who:
Black Dice
On:
Mistletone Records via FUSE
Where:
Misteltone Shop / the usual outlets
MySpace:
here
Related links:
Paw Tracks / Eric Copeland Interview / Black Dice book from PictureBox
Black Dice are completely sublimated, Shinto-like, in the teeming hive of sounds on new album, Load Blown. The New York trio's ‘ecological' concerns (their words) have never been answered better than this - each track is a close-up look at the surface of some new, virulent and electronic ant-hill. There's something paganistic about their artificial powers of regeneration; it's a freaked-out, amoral and thrilling feeling of the music being somehow half-animal / half-machine. Black Dice are like those islanders in The Wickerman who perversely worship nature, but instead are given over to the embodying powers of electronic music.
Fans will expect as much, not only as a one-up from 2002's watershed post-noise album Creature Comforts, but also because Load Blown takes in tracks from the recent Roll Up / Drool and Manoman 12" EPs. The open-ended format and communicative bubbling and gurgling of the former is like the album overall - sheets of trebly static roll across sampled drunk guitar, synthetic balloon rubbing and, four minutes into the track, the huge revving sounds of a broken, sit-in arcade driving game. Kids nowadays would do better dropping acid to this, than to Microcosmos or Koyaanisqatsi.