7.
Black Dice – Beaches & Canyons
Such a great album. There’s a few good ones [by Black Dice] but that’s my favourite, because that’s the most listenable in a way, out of all the more experimental ones. I was kind of into all those bands – Lightning Bolt, too. I was into a lot of dance music as well. Funnily enough this album is now closer to where we’ve ended up than some of the dance music I was listening to at the time, which in retrospect didn’t inform what I’m doing now at all, whereas Black Dice did.
It comes down to world creation again, because they were totally creating worlds, but just through soundscapes and sound design. I still think it’s the most incredible sound design, really innovative use of certain types of gear, I remember they had certain amps that would sound a certain way. [Recent Black Dice] sounds really bad, it kind of became a parody of itself, where it’s like, this is actually just rubbish. With Beaches & Canyons though, there was definitely something magic about it, where they came the closest you can come to making songs without any kind of melody or structure at all! But that’s cool, because it was almost some of the same things that I liked about some of the more abstract grime beats. Like I said earlier, I was really fascinated by the idea of, what if Black Dice was just a sound kit, what if you then had to build rhythm tracks out of it? I think they’d probably have been down.
