As the whirlwind of New York hype continues to sweep up anything with tussled hair, ill-fitting denim, and fashion shootability, the city's bands are overcome by a desire to press forward and experiment with less conventional sounds. That I saw a packed room of folks happily withstanding the piercing cymbal frequencies and beyond-dub plateaus of disembodied voices and ceaseless pounding dealt by Black Dice was heartening in some curious way.

Not so much a test of aural-threshold tolerance as a reveling in the pure fervor of sonic variety, the band's music has evolved from an earlier thrash aesthetic into something far hazier. Sucking power electronics, soundwave massage ambiance, tribal hypno-thud, and Kraut space-ambling into their enshrouding smoke, and parlaying the physical manifestation of early-Swans/late-MBV malevolence present on their super-long long-player Beaches & Canyons, Black Dice have enjoyed continued success while consistently mutating their sound. Their latest single for DFA, "Cone Toaster", is even dancy, with the Boredoms' Eye turning out the B-side remix "Endless Happiness".

I met up with vocalist Eric Copeland and bassist Aaron Warren at a local Brooklyn bar where Eric works, where the strains of the country jukebox and loud pinball games riddled most of our conversation. We discussed spontaneous sound creation, exotica, noise, and rocksteady music, and of course, feelings.

Pitchfork: So how was touring with Godspeed you Black Emperor?

Eric: It was cool. They roll with a lot of people. We roll significantly lighter. We spent a lot less time with them than you'd think. There are so many of them that you would just talk to a few people everyday. A lot of the day would be them soundchecking, and on days off, we tried to just hang out on our own.

Pitchfork: Do you feel that you grow more by touring, or by recording and messing around in practice?

Eric: I feel like we never have toured a lot. There are some real great points to it, like I'm glad we worked out a lot of stuff, and we certainly had a lot more fun. But I don't know, I don't think any of us want to do it all the time.

Aaron: We've also toured the most and recorded the most in the last year and a half, so it's hard to say what's the most influential. Like, in years past, we just recorded once a year, and that was it. We've had chances to do other things.

Eric: We've also been playing the same material, so there's only so much, and we try hard to make it different and more engaging for us. There are a lot of these songs we played for fifteen months, and it's somewhat dead. It gets hard to...

Pitchfork: How often are things changing onstage? How much of it is you just happening upon new sounds, and how much is choreographed beforehand?

Eric: We know changes. We know how to change from something to something else, within something that sounds sorta repetitive. We have these things that we want to do, but we only have little signals for changes. Aaron: It can sound radically different from night to night, but then sometimes it just won't sound that different at all. Sometimes we'll talk about it, and we'll say, "Let's really concentrate on this," sometimes we don't talk about it.

Pitchfork: Are there concepts you're concentrating on more?

Eric: I feel like for us to have a good show, we usually have to talk about-- maybe this doesn't even sound that cool, but we have to talk about our feelings. Sometimes we tend to rush things, instead of just slow down, and try to put it into something that you can relate to it. Things slow down and it can mean a lot of different things to us.

Pitchfork: So it's not, "Aaron, I feel that you're impinging upon me and my personal boundaries, getting into my frequencies."

[laughter]

Eric: You'd be surprised. It's become...

Aaron: It actually is a little bit on that edge.

Eric: We often make sure we're feeling good about each other.

Pitchfork: So it's a relationship, and since you're so loosely structured, there's so much more of a flux going on in your own head, and that comes out in the sound.

Aaron: It can get reeeeal dark if one person's in a bad mood. Or if he's uncomfortable. It happens to all of us. It's a tricky thing.

Pitchfork: Let's go back to the early formation...

Eric: We had a bunch of singles before Aaron [joined], but it was terrible. [Laughs] It was a different band. Aaron probably played songs from the first single we ever did, but I feel like once Aaron showed up, we all, in trying to teach him, found out Aaron had strengths, and we had strengths, and we had to find a comfortable place for where we could all play. Those other records are cool and stuff and they're full of similar ideas and motives, but I feel it sounds so much different.

Pitchfork: [To Eric] Did you start in Providence?

Eric: Bjorn [Copeland, guitar] and Hisham [Bharoocha, drums] were in Providence, but I lived in Maine. I was in high school and I would just go down there on weekends. Then I moved here to go to art school, and they graduated and had nowhere to go. Bjorn was open to suggestions, and Hisham wanted to move down here, too. It was becoming serious; we had toured once or twice already.

Aaron: I moved here in '99 to go to school.

Eric: We had a friend in common. I think it was pretty early when Aaron got here-- it was one of the last shows we played with Sebastian [Blanck, ex-bassist], and then Aaron came to live with a bunch of us.

Pitchfork: So were you already moving in this direction before he split?

Eric: A little bit. I feel we had started playing around. Our shows used to be "all songs." Then it would be songs with these long transitions between things, instead of just flat or silent. When Aaron came along, we got better at that stuff, and that became more what we wanted to play. Playing the songs became secondary.

Pitchfork: Between the two songs it was more interesting?

Eric: I feel like it sounded way fresher.

Aaron: We just started working on those ideas in the practices, instead of the songs. Once I learned those old songs, the fun part of the practice would be us just playing around with all these effects.

Pitchfork: What did you guys like about those moments?

Eric: We've always had a real concentration on the whole set. Whether it was ten minutes or an hour, we always tried to make sure it was fluent, and not just the playing of a bunch of songs. I just feel we have this concentration on something else so when we started realizing that, we had to develop that, as it became far more important. It's much harder to play those transitions between the songs. Eventually, those transitions became so involved that the songs just fell by the wayside.

Aaron: I remember we did do some jams that were just retarded. This one, Bjorn had this tape case and a microphone on it.

Eric: Stretched rubber. A big rubber band. It sounded kind of cool. We played some good and some bad shows. We played with two drum sets, a turntable and bass. A contact mic on a champagne bucket. A clap track.

Aaron: Tape machines.

Pitchfork: What kind of stuff were you getting into at the time?

Eric: I don't know if we were listening to different stuff. We all just listened to like, indie pop music, I would say, but none of us ever owned... Bjorn and I owned a dozen hardcore records between us. Primarily, just 'cause someone would say, "you remind us of this." It was always a little bit off, a little different than how we perceived ourselves. I've kept a couple of those records.

Aaron: I've got a huge 90s hardcore record collection, seven inches, all the Gravity stuff, West Coast hardcore bands. I have a lot of that stuff. But back to the original question, I remember I was living in L.A. for a while, and I used to see these noise bands. I remember seeing like Merzbow and stuff when he was just doing all pedals, and that was the first time I had ever seen a performance with no guitars, no keyboards, no anything. When I saw Masonna, he just had a coin purse, a microphone, and stacks behind him. That was a revolutionary musical experience for me, but I still played guitar for five years after that, and sang, and it never occurred to me to that that was something I was going to do. I'm sure that kind of thing was in the back of my mind, that yeah, you could do that kind of stuff. It seemed natural enough to do, but...

Pitchfork: Some of those noise shows were the most absurd things. I saw one of The Haters, where they had a funnel tied at the bottom of an enormous wheelchair, and the mic was on the funnel grinding against a buffer for twenty minutes. Oh, the guy was wearing a Mexican wrestling mask, too.

Eric: I felt like when things started getting a bit more open [between us], we were trying different things out, but felt like we were really behind what our audience seemed to be aware of at the time. I feel like there's very much of the underground that's really aware of this stuff, and it's a little bit backwards, like we're catching up, but it's kinda nice being ignorant of it. When we approach these ideas, they always feel new to us, even if they may not sound new in comparison.

Pitchfork: Do you feel sympathetic with what you hear nowadays?

Eric: Not really. I feel like most of that stuff comes from a weirder place. It comes from different attitudes, I also don't know, maybe it's my interactions with it, but I don't feel we have much to compare it to.

Aaron: I feel that I don't know a lot about modern noise music. There's so many people doing it, and it's really specific to certain areas and musical philosophies, and I just haven't explored it at all. Not for any particular reason...

Pitchfork: Do you feel isolated from it?

Aaron: There's just a lot of shit out that I honestly don't know anything about.

Pitchfork: What kind of stuff do you listen to these days?

Aaron: Techno somewhat, but reggae mostly. People like Alton Ellis, Ken Boothe, just like old rocksteady. I got into dub music first, as it's really heavy sonically and shit. Now I find myself really appreciating good singing and good lyrics-- nice songwriting. More like 60s type of stuff.

Pitchfork: Do you want to talk about making Beaches and Canyons? What were you all thinking about at the time?

Eric: Man, it was a weird time...

Pitchfork: Or what you remember?

Eric: [Laughing] What the fuck is that supposed to mean?

[laughter]

Eric: I feel like it was a weird time. Personally, it was pretty dark. Between all of us it was pretty strange. We couldn't really perceive putting that record out. No one could really afford that record. We funded all of it, had to borrow money from my dad to record it, and then we had to shop it around. Maybe it's something personal, exclusive to me, not exactly humiliating, but it puts you in your place. We had a bunch of records out, and they had done fine, but no one gave a crap. We made this record, and we really liked it, but people we sent it to, we wouldn't hear back from anyone. Just sending it out to anyone.

Aaron: We did some mass-sendings. That's the absolute lowest way to put out a record. It was basically... not desperate, but a struggling time for us. We totally worked hard to evolve this new sound.

Pitchfork: Did you believe it was worth digging the financial hole for it?

Aaron: Completely. We were totally in debt, going, "Fuck, we can't do anything else until we do this." The last record we did was so old, so it was impossible to send it out and say, "This is who we are."

Eric: It had been a long time since we had recorded.

Aaron: It was a tricky time for sure. We kept going, "Is this worth it, to spend all this money on recording?"

Eric: It was a relatively cheap record. It's not like we spent ten grand on it or anything, but we were there for four or five days making it. And we had known DFA socially and sorta professionally, we knew about them and The Rapture's relationship.

Aaron: They had called us in to talk about doing a record in the future, but not that record. But we had just finished it, and so we were like, "Check this out."

Eric: And then we left, going, "Welllll, back to the drawing board." I think it was... we were on the train heading back home...

Aaron: Like an hour later, they called us back. They had listened to it, and everyone was stoked about it.

Eric: Now maybe it's a little more skewed, but back then they were at the level that we needed at the time. They could do vinyl and CD, it was great. They paid for the recordings and it's been... I think that they've grown much faster than we have, being in the spotlight now, but it's still cool.

Pitchfork: You still feel comfortable with them?

Eric: Yeah, they're all friends more than... they don't expect anything we're not prepared to do.

Aaron: I'm fully excited about the relationship. I think it's really awesome to be on a pop music label, a lot of different kinds of people, not this niche, this very specialty sort of thing, but it's such a different group of people than we've ever had a chance to be around.

Pitchfork: I don't think they really see any boundaries on what they're doing, which is nice.

Aaron: I think it's a nice place for us to be.

Pitchfork: What were the processes that went into doing the record?

Eric: That was all pretty much a live record. There were one or two major edits, there's some tidying up, some making things sound a little cleaner. For the most part it was whole and complete. For the most part, they're all first takes.

Aaron: There were maybe a couple of songs we struggled with, but the record is just it. There's nothing left over.

Pitchfork: The Lost Valley single was earlier, right?

Eric: That's earlier. That was at a different studio, again for nobody.

Pitchfork: You've got a new single, "Cone Toaster", which has Eye from the Boredoms remixing a track. How did that come around?

Eric: We wrote him an email. [Laughs]

Pitchfork: Did you meet them at All Tomorrow's Parties in L.A.?

Eric: Hisham is from Japan, and he has a relationship with them already. He had emailed them several times before.

Aaron: We met them in Japan when we played some shows there last year. He was there in Osaka, and we hung out, and saw him again in L.A.

Pitchfork: How do you think it came out?

E and Aaron: Ohhh!

Aaron: It's killing me. Fucking awesome.

Eric: It's kinda cool, it doesn't sound like us. I think it was real ambitious.

Pitchfork: And on your side of it, "Cone Toaster"?

Eric: That was an older song that we worked on for fucking ever, and we recorded it once. It was okay, and then we went on tour, and we had become so much better that we knew we weren't going to be happy with that version. So we did it again, and worked really hard mixing it, and that was the first thing we had done that wasn't pretty much live. Now, however many months later, I feel like it's at a better version, and it's a shame we can't record it again.

Pitchfork: It sounds really different live as opposed to the record. I think the middle section is pretty intense.

Eric: When we remixed it, we liked a lot of stuff in it and tried to play it more similarly, but there's stuff that didn't work. We also wanted to be a little more ambitious.

Aaron: We're still working on that song. It has some weird parts. The way we approached recording it was a real kinda messy mixture-- bringing a song in completely live and building a song from basically nothing in the studio. And on that track, we did both, and took the best parts. It's this major Frankenstein song, but I think it sounds pretty good. I'm excited about the way it came out.

Eric: I think it's a cool track to have done in the studio, too. It's nice to know that's how we finished it. That one is really challenging in the studio.

Aaron: I'm excited for this particular release. It's such an oddball.

Eric: We had recorded a different song for that single. I think if we had proceeded with that one, which kinda got lost somewhere, it wouldn't have been as solid a release. I think it's a good single, and it's good that we don't have to record it ever again.

Pitchfork: I'm curious about your use of technology and how it's grown. [To Aaron:] What were you doing when you started off playing in the band?

Aaron: I was playing bass. I had two distortion pedals, maybe. Hisham was working at Electro Harmonics when I first joined. He was getting lots of pedals, and we were trying out different things with them. There was one thing I was really psyched on when I moved to New York, which was the Microsynth pedal. It's almost like a little keyboard pedal, with all these filters on it, and he gave me one of those. He had some old pedals, and we all started checking out some different stuff. At one point I, uh, lost all the pedals, and had to get started all over again.

Eric: They got stolen from a show at ABC No Rio.

Pitchfork: You started just switching over to the pedals then?

Aaron: Well, we all started growing little pedal families.

Eric: They were major achievements when we put something to rest. When Aaron stopped playing bass on a song, I remember it being a little worrisome. When I started [laughing] playing them...

Aaron: It was definitely major. Right now, I don't use that many. I have three delay pedals and that's it. I have a filter bank and two mixers, and that's my setup right now.

Pitchfork: How did you get into your pedal collecting?

Eric: I don't even own most of my pedals. I just borrowed for a long time. When Hisham was working at Electro Harmonics, he had a preamp built for Bjorn, like 40db preamp, and it's super gnarly sounding. I actually still use it. And I was just playing a microphone, I would make it raw as shit, it was unreal. That made one sound. Then I got into playing a cymbal with a contact mic through a lot of shit.

Aaron: The first time we got the delay pedal, it was a major achievement in technology for us. It made all these different kinds of things possible. Suddenly there were all these new sounds for us.

Pitchfork: With things changing so much release to release, what are you working on next, idea-wise?

Eric: We have a split twelve coming out for this studio project for this gallery in Japan, called Miles of Smiles. It's one of my favorite things we've ever done, but it doesn't sound like us. Hanson Records is going to put it out. We have two songs recorded we tentatively want to remix, but it's on the backburner now. We have plans to record a new record in June, but we're still assembling all the songs we're going to use. It's a lot of stuff we're going to be trying out.

Aaron: We're getting more comfortable with making stuff up as we go in the studio.

Eric: For this record, it's going to be different. We have an opportunity to work with Plantain studios, and I think the way that they work is not the way we have in the past. We want to go in with an open mind and allow them to teach us a lot about what they know. Everyone has so much to offer, and it's nice to think that while we have these rigid ideas, they do a lot of stuff taste-wise that we can really get into.

Aaron: If you look at it in comparison to where we were before Beaches & Canyons, we're sitting in a luxurious position right now. Totally rolling in it, in terms of exploring different ideas...

Eric: With this one, we really have time to take it easy, and if we don't like something, we don't have to finish it that day. That's when things get weird. When we get crabby, things get bad. I feel like we're all like...

Aaron: Sensitive.

Eric: Sensitive petals.