Lobsterfest 2014: Black Dice
By Zack Baker, Editorial Director
Black Dice is known for a few things: being loud, being reckless and being more fun than any reasonable human being should be able to handle. Headlining Lobsterfest’s Friday night shebang, the Brooklyn natives are more than ready to bring the party to Athens. ACRN recently had the chance to talk with Aaron Warren about the band’s scattershot past, why partying is vital even when your face is buried in a synthesizer and the most important question of all: dogs or cats?
Black Dice formed way back when Bjorn [Copeland] was in college and Eric [Copeland] was still in high school, and you joined up about year after that. 20 years later, how would you describe the band in the early days?
Aaron Warren: I moved to New York in 1999. The band may not have been playing shows, but they were around for a good three years before that and probably had been playing shows for two years. By the time I moved to New York, Bjorn, Hisham [Bharoocha] and Sebastian [Blanck] had graduated and came down here.
I saw a Black Dice show before I was in the band, in the winter of ‘99 or something like that. To me, it was a really exciting punk/hardcore band. They were physically confrontational, Eric and Sebastian would go out into the audience and be rough with the crowd. There was a violent aspect to it, but it wasn’t thuggish or mean. They were, like, really little dudes. It wasn’t like a bullying kind of thing, it was just aggressive. I came in from a hardcore music background, that’s what I loved, and the kind of shows that I had grown up on and been playing with different bands before I moved to New York. I was psyched on the sound and also the performance, but mostly because coming from the left coast in the late ‘90s, it was very popular to not show any kind of enthusiasm at all in shows. Shows would be really backed and the band would be going crazy, but the audience would be very still. It was sort of the opposite of moshing. So for Black Dice to be getting out there and pushing and getting physical, that was very exciting and refreshing for me. I thought they were a really fun and badass band.
Black Dice has changed very drastically and very frequently since then, what was the transition from that hardcore band to the more experimental, more electronic band you are now?
I think it just had to do with where people were at in their lives, what they enjoyed listening to and what we felt like we kinda wanted to be performing and presenting. When I joined the band it was still basically a hardcore band and I was really psyched about that--I thought it was really fun and the shows were fun. But at the same time we were getting into ‘60s records and psych records and sort of experimental composition. I think for [experimental composition] we just really liked the idea of it, even if we didn’t spend as much time listening to it. Hisham was from Japan, so he was really familiar with noise music and he had grown up listening to the Boredoms, they were like a punk band but evolving towards a weird new-age band. I was coming from LA and I had seen a lot of like, noise bands where it would just be drones and stuff so we were excited to try and push the form a little bit.
There was sort of a thing where we would just jam in between songs because the songs were really short--30-seconds or 15-seconds sometimes--and sometimes we would jam for a few minutes between the songs. The jams were longer than our actual songs were! That kind of became more interesting to us, and there was a period where we were an improv band or something, but I think that was the worst era of the band musically, in my opinion anyway. It was a necessary step, but those were sort of the cheesiest ideas we had. That stuff never really survived to records or anything, it was just a few shows as we were morphing into this different kind of band. I dunno, people graduating from college and getting into new kinds of music--electronic music and laptop music and stuff like that. I kind of came out of this strictly rock ‘n’ roll background, seeing DIY hardcore shows and stuff like that. So for me to see bands playing without guitars, with just a laptop or cd players or mixing boards or just a microphone, these things were all really radical to me. I wanted to be doing that, I wanted to be making the kind of music I was interested in.
That’s kind of how we got out of making hardcore music and with each successive album, we started to orient ourselves to different things: different types of gear, different kinds of influence--there was a period where I got super into hip-hop and just wanted to make sample-based music so I bought a sampler and put all my compositional efforts into making these weird samples and that’s still something I do now.
When I think about growth in a band, you’re a band that comes to mind. Listening to early stuff and then listening to Mr. Impossible, you can hear that you’re still the same band even if the music is radically different. What do you think is the center of your songwriting, what makes a song a “Black Dice Song?”
It’s been very different for different eras of the band. There were definitely eras of the band where we were definitely interested in that sort of denial of anything that you would expect, if we wrote something that you could have mistaken for something you had heard before it wasn’t interesting to us. We did some records and shows like that, just kind of formless. There were other periods of time where--in reaction to that--we thought that we had kind of taken that as far as it could go and the shows were starting to get a little bit stale because the audience couldn’t care less if we lived or died up there because we weren’t giving them anything that they need. Then there are whole eras, several albums in a row, where we were just like, “We’re going to make the weirdest party record that you’ve ever heard.”
The aesthetic of the band, the sounds that we gravitate towards, they’re very raw and extreme and weird. But that’s our vocabulary of sounds. Sometimes when we tried to make something that felt like it had a party vibe, it still came across as challenging or aggressive. There were times where we had this mentality that it was like, “Whatever, we do this for ourselves,” but it’s something that you have to realize, if I was in the audience, what would I want to hear? These days we’re just foremost interested in writing good tunes, in the most classical sense. Where you just hear it, you’re not a fan of any particular genre, but you hear it and know that it’s a good song. The first or second time you hear it, you see that something’s happening here and that’s awesome. If we can continue to do that with the tools and sensibilities that we’ve accumulated over the years, then that’s successful for us.
Is that where you’d place Mr. Impossible [the band’s latest album]? Or is that where you’re heading now?
I feel like the last record was our time to be a live band--trying to be like a garage, punk band with the instruments that we have. The vocabulary of sounds is still maybe experimental or noise-oriented or something like that but it was more of a rock band approach and we worked the material out in the rehearsal space, recorded it live so that it made sense playing it live, and that was sort of the whole idea.
We have some new songs that we’ll play on this trip that are sort of in the same vein, but what’s different about the newer material is that from the very beginning--over everything else--we’re just trying to plan out what we want to do with the song, what elements we need and what the song will be. That’s something basic for most bands, “I need to have this sort of rhythmic feel” or whatever, but we don’t have traditional music chops. Eric is a very musical person and he can hear something and do it, but me and Bjorn are sort of challenged in that department. It’s very rudimentary, at least in terms of our skills, but we’re always trying to do that.
For someone who’s coming to see you at Lobsterfest but had never heard your music, how would you describe your live set to them?
We’re a party band. You might not appreciate the party that we’re bringing, but we will bring it. I think people can take it or leave it [laughs], we want people to love it! That’s the difference as far as where we’re at right now, we want to make music that people can love and can just party to. That’s the most superficial aspect of it, but underneath that there’s our whole history of pushing every sort of idea that we have as far as we can with the tools that we have.
Now it’s time for the important question. As a band, does Black Dice prefer puppies or cats?
If we’re going by majority, it’s probably cats. But it’s not unanimous.
Who’s the stand out?
I prefer dogs, generally. But Eric and Bjorn both have a thing for felines. [laughs]
