Cuarteto Tributo a Black Dice y True French present eric eric copeland, sides a & b

Cuarteto Tributo a Black Dice/True French

VFI020

Tracklist

Side A:

1. derretimiento-poop
2. no fun fest y DFA
3. burritos
4. MaemAemaE

Side B:

1. no is weird, is cute
2. (peace on dune) for Ayn, rising
3. black on chimes water
4. two decades of sustained adolescence

Esteban’s Notes

Hubo una vez una casa en Nueva York donde vivían Animal Collective, Black Dice y Axolotl, entre otros proyectos de drone y noise, etc. En la casa se compusieron y grabaron Sung Tongs y el Beaches and Canyons. En Nueva York también estaba Gang Gang Dance, Excepter, Mouthus, Sightings, Prurient, Zs y Religious Knives. Además era la época en que estaba el circuito que recorrían Wolf Eyes o Lightning Bolt a lo largo y ancho de Estados Unidos. Mucho mejor que la Nueva York de finales de los ’70s, que el circuito de hardcore de los ’80s, y que Seattle de los ’90s, o por lo menos esa es la idea de hacerle un puto tributo 20 años después.

Travis’ Notes

October 2017. At this point I’ve been on the scene long enough to tell some stories and old enough to know better. Also, possibly by virtue of the first two, I’ve also come to know myself better by extension.

First, a quick story of me coming of age. The year was 2003 and I was a sophomore in college. It was a weekend and I was tasked with a weekend burn to Baltimore to pick up a drum set for a friend and bandmate. Of course there was no way of knowing that I would eventually live in said city nearly 15 year later, but this was one of my first exposures to said metropolitan enclave. Granted, we were only in the city for about 36 hours, but in several ways, said visit did indeed make its mark. However, for the sake of brevity I’ll focus only on the important stuff. Namely, it was on this trip that I was introduced to Lightning Bolt – and by extension, Load Records, and even further down the field, Noise Rock and finally, noise in general. Prior to this trip, I was very much an advocate and aficionado of the Warp Records scene and an acolyte of the gospel of Squarepusher. What can I say – I liked techno, was in an electronic music program and played bass – we all need idols. I was also of the belief that in order to achieve said sound, you needed tens of thousands of dollars of specialized, obsolete equipment, a top-flight computer, ninja-level programming skills and the capacity to content in the overtly-masculine battle of the breaks, because hey, the more “core” your breaks were, the more of a “daddy” was your reputation. And, having none of said equipment, I was limited in my output until the appropriate gear was obtained, programming applied and beats broken with funky, jazz-inflected bass over the top. I know – strange times.

Then along came two guys named Brian, as played from a cassette in a friend of a friends car on the way back from some party or another in Baltimore. Mind was blown. Two guys – one playing the heaviest drums I’d ever heard, the other making the hardest sounds once could imagine – on an electric bass no less. Two guys in masks. Maybe a couple pedals. And a wall of speakers. The next day I hauled it to Fells Point to see if I could find a copy at Sound Garden and no such luck – keep in mind that this was before the internet made things easy and it wasn’t just a matter of googling up hours of documentation on anything mundane or sublime. Record stores had curated selections – and finding experimental rock was still difficult. It would be over a year until I actually found a copy of a Lighting Bolt CD – keeping in mind I was in rural Ohio at the time and Oberlin didn’t have a record store outside of the school bookstore until long after I graduated. In fact, it took a trip to Louisville, Kentucky to find a copy. Scary, yeah? Not to mention, it’s not like I wasn’t looking in the meantime – and as was the style at the time, Morpheus yielded little to no results in the noise rock vein and even my stint of activity with the college radio station didn’t unearth much. Such were the ways before YouTube and Wikipedia. At one point in my junior year, I found myself at Other Music in NYC, spending nearly $200 on cd’s that I’d never heard of just to see what was out there – only to discover that I actually recorded one of the discs!

Even so, by the time I left Ohio for Michigan, and then California, there were still sizable gaps in my knowledge of the genre I was increasingly becoming a fanboy of. I don’t think I could actually consider myself a true noise musician at this point – that coming to fruition sometime in my second year of graduate school, but things were in the works. But even so, I’d never heard much of the stuff that I probably should have – ie, Wolf Eyes, Black Dice, Pterodactyl, Pink & Brown, usaisamonster, etc. Lots of Merzbow, though. Who knows – maybe I’m just a noise purist or something. I was also pretty into Tigerbeat 6 when I first moved to California, so maybe I was still transitioning from beats to… trip metal.

Either way, gaps in what should have been fairly standard knowledge for one on the scene. And my listening habits didn’t help. Want to know a secret? Even to this day, other than Merzbow, I really don’t listen to much experimental music – in fact, you’re more likely to find something from the Stooges, Depeche Mode, Morrisey, Tom Waits or Bomba Estereo playing on my stereo than something from the scene. My rationale: don’t bring your work home with you. Also, having attended and recorded at least a firm 500 shows during my time in the bay, I’ve heard my share. Am I a noise musician? Yeah, sure. Maybe more of a Francisco Lopez composer who uses noise, density and harshness at extreme volumes as the primary tools of a sonic palate, but yeah, sure, noise musician. Or so I’d like to believe.

Now let’s talk about Esteban Mora. He’s the real deal – at every show in San José, in multiple projects, performing and recording incessantly – knows everything about everyone who counts on the scene and you’ll probably never hear any 90’s dancehall at his house. In my opinion, he is by far the de facto heart of the Costa Rican noise community – and doesn’t need a national composition award to prove it. He also knows who Black Dice are. Not that I don’t – I mean, I’d heard the name before, but to be honest, I’d never actually heard any of their music – most likely under the assumption that it would sound like most other noise jams out there. Until about 2 weeks ago, that is when Esteban sent me a pile of tracks from what he described has his “Black Dice tribute band.” Naturally, I was intrigued. And also kind of perplexed – I mean, the stuff he sent – kind of pop. Which lead me to listen to actual Black Dice tracks… which were also pretty snappy. Who knew? Apparently everyone but me.

I’m not exactly sure why, but after Esteban sent me these tracks, I was compelled to remix them Dub style – run them through my mixer, open up a bunch of effect sends and plug in a bunch of boxes I’d built to further take these things down the rabbit hole – a remix of a tribute of an idea. And were it not for the circumstances of when they were recorded, that probably would have been the case.

Here’s what happened – Pau was in the hospital recovering from an emergency appendectomy. I’d slept maybe 6 hours over the course of three days and took off from work to take care of Xime while we waited for Pau to be released and her parents to fly up from Costa Rica to lend a hand – in short, one of the worst times and scenarios one could have to pull out a bunch of experimental delay boxes in hopes that one could make a Jamaican-style remix with absolutely no experience or cultural background/understanding of what that even entailed. Not to mention I was exhausted and ended up plugging half my stuff in backwards. The result: total brutality – kind of amazing, actually. I sent the tracks back to Esteban saying this was the best I could probably do and I’m unfortunately just not a dub selector and he loved them. So here we are. A noise-addled failed attempt at providing a dub remix to a tribute project to a noise band that’s actually not all that noisy. Esteban provides side a. I provide the b sides. Any additional remixing is highly encouraged. Fell free to hit us up and we’ll .ftp you some tracks.

Media

Personnel

Side A: Cuarteto Tributo a Black Dice

Side B: True French