On August 24, 2004 LiveEyeTv’s Mario Barbetta had a chance to speak to Black Dice’s Bjorn Copeland via cell phone while the band was in their van between Vancouver, BC and Portland, OR.
M: Can you tell us a little about how the band got started?
B: I guess the way it got started was… Eric and I started playing together in Maine, we grew up together… we’re brothers. When I went off to college in Rhode Island two of the other members of Black Dice, Sebastian [Blanck] and Hisham [Bharoocha], we all met, well actually I had known Sebastian, but we started playing at school… Eric was still in high school, he would come down for practices and then once we finished school he graduated high school and was living in New York, so we all moved to NY after the first tour, eventually met Aaron and Sebastian decided to keep painting, and it’s been like this since then. At this point this is the definitive line up, I guess.
M: umm…Can you give us a breakdown of who plays what instrument or which gadget?
B: Yeah, uh, right now the way that the band’s sort of set up, in a lot of ways it’s almost like one big instrument. Eric and Aaron are both playing mixer set ups that are just like… they’re just mixers set ups with different things plugged into them or plugged back into them so they create feedback loops so, a lot of the sounds are just generated that way and then processed. So Eric and Aaron both play those, I play guitar which is processed through a lot of stuff, and then I can send a signal to Eric or Aaron and they can fuck with the sound and send it to each other so, it’s kind of like one big loop in a way.
M: Are the shows a lot different now that you don’t have a drummer?
B: Is it what?
M: Have the shows changed a lot since you don’t have a drummer anymore?
B: Um, in some respects, but I think that we’ve all been playing together for so long at this point that, uh, it really isn’t a very big departure especially since a lot of the stuff we wrote for Creature Comfort was a lot less drum dependent. And we got a lot more interested in trying to figure out how to make the things we were making rhythmic without having to rely on the same types of sounds all the time, or, y’know, try to get things to work without having to repeat the things we did on previous records.
M: cool…uh, I noticed you guys play a lot of all-ages shows, is that intentional? …is it something you feel strongly about?
B: Well, yeah, we actually don’t play that many. This tour we’re all pretty happy with the fact that we’ve been able to play as many… and it’s sort of just like uh… it really just depends on the situation. I mean, if possible we prefer to play all-ages shows, but some cities it doesn’t work out as well, or depending on what the line-up is at any given point or what the instrumentation is that we’re using – I mean, sometimes we need a better PA to do some things and… On this tour right now our set-up is sort of self-contained to an extent that we don’t really need a PA as much as much as we might on other tours when we were using drums so… that definitely makes it a lot easier for us to do all-ages shows, cuz in a lot of cities they seem like they’re kind of more underground shows or y’know, maybe non-club spaces, so…
M: Are there any uh…
B: Hello? […breaking up]
M: Yeah, can you hear me? Hello… hello…
B: […eventually] Oh, yeah, you still there?
M: Yeah, I’m here. Uh, you guys have played a lot of cool shows with a lot of cool acts, any of them stand out in particular?
B: Umm… mostly just our friends, really. I mean, Animal Collective and Wolf Eyes and Blood on the Wall and Gavin [Russom] and Delia [Gonzales] and White Magic… Yeah, I mean, we’re really fortunate to have been able to meet as many people as we have. We have a lot of friends who we have really good personal relationships with who are also making really interesting music so, it definitely makes it sort of an exciting time to be playing, just knowing that in every part of the country you know you’ll have good friends you can play with who are making things that resonate with you on some level so… Those ones are in general the most memorable ones, I think, at least for me personally… more so than, y’know, bigger shows or supporting other bands but… umm… yeah. But we have been lucky. We’ve been really fortunate to play with a lot of amazing bands, so…
M: umm… What are your thoughts on the Providence scene…? I mean… why do you think there are so many noise acts from there for instance?
B: umm… Well, to be honest I don’t really know what’s going on there right now, I mean… when I was living there in school it was sort of like umm… I mean, there’s always been like a lot of, sort of left-of-center, kind of more aggressive music coming out of Providence… long before I ever knew anything about it or before I started going to school there but… when I started going to college there that’s like when Lighting Bolt and Force Fields and Black Dice and umm… Arab On Radar and Six Finger Satellites and Mind Flayer … there was just a lot of bands that shared members and shared similar tastes and then people started doing spaces in their houses so… In a lot of ways those types of shows, I mean… for Lightning Bolt and us and Force Field it was a long process of being able to get shows in clubs, even, I mean all those bands have been around for over 8 years at this point so it was definitely kind of… [to someone else in the car] Could you turn that down a tiny bit? … Umm, y’know, so eventually I think it just kind of nurtured itself in a way, I mean, people start hearing about Fort Thunder and the fact that it was like this crazy place and so other people around the country that had fucked-up sounding bands would play there… so it was definitely a really, it was a really nice place to start playing music, and all the people that I mentioned are really down with it and doing interesting things… but at this point I think everybody’s sort of diverged off into doing… doing more their own thing… it doesn’t seem, like, as centralized. And from what I understand, too, Providence is changing a lot, I mean, last time we played up there a lot of people had just been kicked out of the warehouses. There’s a lot of old industrial spaces there that people… that sort of helped foster the music scene in Providence and a lot of those are being closed down and people are getting kicked out, so at this point I don’t really know what… like how much is actually going on in Providence except for, y’know, Lightning Bolt… and whatever… Load Records…
M: …cool. Could you tell us a little about your recording process? Has your approach changed since earlier albums?
B: Actually with both records everything, for the most part, was written in our practice space and then we just recorded it live – like straight. And it’s pretty much the same. On Creature Comforts there’s a few… we spent a good amount of time in the studio just sort of dooking around and kind of trying to write things in there… umm, and we actually kind of got discouraged… ended up taking a break then going back and, y’know, sort started re-working things with different people but, for the most part all the songs were just recorded straight. Occasionally we’ll do like, some sort of an overdub, just to maybe over-emphasize something, but for the most part it’s just straight. Creature Comforts has a couple little vignettes that we sort of took from the couple of weeks we were recording at the Plantain, which is the DFA label’s recording studio, so… But both of them were pretty similar. I think since we write everything in the practice space it just feels… uh… it’s a different… I don’t know… it’s a way of working that we’re all comfortable with at least, and it’s sort of a long process. I think that working in the studio and being able to edit things on a computer, or shape things a little bit on a computer sort of… definitely influence how we work outside of that context… because I think that editing process is something we’ve all absorbed and now it just sort of takes place through our dialogue and stuff when we’re working on songs, rather than in the studio so, by the time we get there we usually have things pretty well sorted out and… we’ve been really fortunate enough to work with a lot of amazing… like, everyone we’ve ever recorded with has been really fantastic so it definitely helps, like, having someone that you trust and who’s invested in the project. But yeah, for the most part our process has stayed pretty much the same. Every now and then we’ll do a project… like Miles of Smiles was one we wrote in the studio for a specific… it was for an art show, so, that one was approached a little differently… and we’ve done a couple other different recordings that we just sort of just like, wrote in the studio using a computer, things like that, some of which we’ve adapted to play live, some of which just stay as a, y’know, recordings only… But, that’s pretty much how we do it.