Photo by Barbara Soto
They gave us no warning. Eric Copeland, Bjorn Copeland and Aaron Warren of Black Dice had been up onstage tinkering with their setup well before opener Protect-U’s performance but suddenly, the trio shocked the one-third-full venue with a loud, pulsating beat. The staticky, yet repetitive rhythm shot through U Hall’s overwhelming soundsystem and into our throats as if expressly designed to grab the audience by the collective jugular. If that didn’t work, the trio’s use of their guitar, vocoders and other electronic toys did the trick. Some people use such noise to create a catatonic effect and others might try to clear a room but Black Dice was apparently trying to create the world’s most unlikely dance party.
Like their unforseen opening, much of Black Dice’s music is jarring. Nobody envied the poor guy without earplugs holding his ears as the trio released a series of sounds that reverberated like a combination of video-game artillery and lawn equipment. Their machine-manipulated voices sounded otherworldly and evil. Yet, nothing suggested that they came to make bodies move quite like their stage presence. While his bandmates nodded and bobbed, Warren pogoed about, lunging back and forth between his microphone and his drum machine. The dance party peaked mid-set when the backing pulse quickened. The entire crowd cheered and for the 15 minutes that followed, there wasn’t a motionless body in the venue.
The party didn’t last. The beat shifted between electronic drone and funky pickup. The dancing slowed to head bobs. Yet, the set endured for another 30 minutes. This was not a gradual let down as the music never really slowed. Between isolated melodic notes and hazy static, some of that pleasurable cacophony started to twist into a sort of aural punishment. Then, without any sort of fade out, Black Dice hit a full stop just as suddenly as they began. The sound system released its vise on our throats. It wasn’t necessarily a welcome release and the crowd of the already-converted seemed like they’d willingly let Black Dice manipulate them into dancing again.
