Black Dice

Pioneers within America’s noise underground, Black Dice reinvent their identity from one album to the next. Emerging in the late ’90s as a ferocious hardcore outfit, the group soon abandoned that approach entirely, favoring looping percussion, murky electronics, and dense atmospherics on their landmark 2002 release Beaches & Canyons. Subsequent records steered the trio toward abrasive trance and radically experimental techno, a trajectory heard on the 2012 album Mr. Impossible and the 2021 set Mod Prog Sic.

Rhode Island School of Design attendees Bjorn Copeland on guitar, his brother Eric Copeland handling vocals, drummer Hisham Bharoocha, and bassist Sebastian Blanck established Black Dice in 1997. Bharoocha had spent a short time in an early version of Lightning Bolt, another Providence band forming around the same period. The group’s initial recordings appeared as a run of 7-inch singles issued on various hardcore-focused imprints, their sound rooted in the aggressive, noisy punk style shared by acts on Gravity, Troubleman, Vermin Scum, and similar labels. Within several years the members moved to Brooklyn, where Aaron Warren replaced Blanck. During this period Black Dice departed from conventional song structures and traditional rock instruments, folding experimental and electronic textures into both studio work and performances. An early sign of the change surfaced on the self-titled 10-inch also known as Black Dice 3, with further development documented on EPs and assorted projects issued between 2000 and 2002. Now part of a circle of kindred experimentalists that included Animal Collective, Erase Errata, Wolf Eyes, and Excepter, the band delivered its first full-length statement, Beaches & Canyons, on DFA in 2002. Although limited to five tracks, the nearly hour-long album revealed a reflective, ambient take on noise and improvisation. Critical praise for both Beaches & Canyons and its 2004 successor Creature Comforts expanded the group’s reach. Bharoocha departed in 2004, leaving the remaining trio to explore new directions on Broken Ear Record in 2005, where Afrobeat and trance influences entered their electronic constructions. The same path continued through Load Blown in 2007, Repo in 2009, and Mr. Impossible in 2012, as the band refined techniques that upended conventional sampling, programming, and electronic arrangement. The 2019 compilation Natty Light gathered the earliest recordings, while 2021’s Mod Prog Sic marked the first collection of entirely new material in nearly a decade.