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Those expecting Black Dice to travel further in the trajectory suggested by the beat-infused abrasiveness of Cone Toaster will no doubt be disappointed by Miles of Smiles. Black Dice's newest 12" on DFA is not very similar to the material on the aforementioned EP, and it doesn't share much in common with the blissful psychedelic clamor of their Beaches and Canyons album, either. It's something else entirely, an unexpected tangent into the realm of sampling and tape music.
Both tracks appear to have been constructed by meticulous editing, like so many avant-garde tape collages. However, the effect is decidedly less academic than many works of concrete music. Miles of Smiles hits me on a visceral level; an urgent, intuitive drama that decisively pushes forward. Side A opens with the insistent chirping of crickets joined by a cacophony of looped voices and structured clouds of noise. Muffled beneath this dark fog of noise are pounding Japanese tribal rhythms. I am suddenly lifted onto a circulating jet stream of fluttering electronics, before being violently torn back by a jagged edit, pulling me into a surreal, stereophonic audio environment. Someone is shaking a rain stick, a bag of runes or a handful of mosaic tiles. It's a shamanistic invocation that sets the stage for the sudden explosion of nervous percussion and ethnic, vaguely Arabic swirls of sound. Side B is "Trip Dude Delay," a study in industrial exotica, a shrill piercing tone which gives way to stacks of mutated voices, gently coaxed and sculptured. A left turn into psychedelia sees the track dropped into a chasm of echo, a cubist hall-of-mirrors that refracts the abstraction into semi-clarity. I am suddenly caught up in a giant, cresting tsunami of noise, an adrenaline rush of forceful wind accompanied by a roll of thunder. I am swept along, riding through apexes and nadirs of sound, feeling the tension of nature's senseless brutality. Finally, I'm dumped off on a tropical island, where whacked-out Boredoms-style percussion and strangled birdsong fill the crisp, sparkling ocean air. Not unlike its photo-collage cover art, Miles of Smiles is a highly structured mosaic, yet it remains willfully disorganized, vital and surprising.
samples:
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Hipshot
I've long felt that exotica deserves recognition as one ofpop music's first forays into the integration of cutting-edge studiotechniques, emerging hi-fi stereo effects and cross-genrehybridization. Exotica's melding of crisply reproduced, hi-fidelitycocktail jazz with exotic instrumentation, tribal drumming, oceansounds, bird calls and a galaxy of ambient textures was years ahead ofits time. Not until the dawn of psychedelia did pop music ever againattempt to be this evocative, using the studio as an instrument totransport the listener to other worlds.
Mike Cooper's Rayon Hulais the first truly sincere attempt at 21st century exotica I've comeacross, a cool breeze of an album, experimental but eminentlylistenable. Cooper is a British expatriate, and for the past 40 yearshe has played blues, folk and improv with some of the Britain's bestand brightest. For this album, he turns his attention to the strange,misunderstood world of exotica, specifically the Hawaiian cool jazz ofArthur Lyman. Rayon Hula is billed as a dual tribute to Lyman, the incomparable musician behind classics like Taboo and Hawaiian Sunset,and Ellery Chun, the inventor of the Hawaiian shirt. If the premisesounds dangerously kitschy, the album certainly does not.
Constructedfrom a series of looped samples from Arthur Lyman's records, Cooperoverdubs his own lap steel guitar, electronics and field recordings.The result is a densely layered album, where complex arrangements andgently circulating piano melodies float over off-kilter, irregularrhythms. Care has been taken to arrange all of the elements in aslightly askew fashion, so that accidental convergences occur betweenthe whimsical, hypnotic loops and Cooper's added electronic noises andcurling steel guitar. It's a marvelously under-produced album, as ifCooper knew just when to let go and let the music stand. Noisy, atonalpassages give way to warm, tropical rushes of melody. Backwards-trackedmemories cycle through forgotten vacation photographs of lei makers,coconut stands, midnight luaus with synchronized hula dancers gesturingon the blue sand shores of the Pacific.
It's a shame that Cooper'sHipshot Records has no distribution to speak of. To buy the album, Ihad to send cash to Cooper at his home studio in Rome and waitpatiently for the CD-R to arrive in its flimsy Photoshop sleeve. It'struly a DIY operation, but Rayon Hula is the first entirely rewarding work of modern exotica, so it's more than worth the wait.
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This 1990 live recording documents an interesting moment in the history of one of the U.S.?s most interesting and long-standing avant-garde collectives. Under the early tutelage of Chris Cutler, the Colorado-based group has, since 1979, produced a wealth of music rooted in the early admirer/member's progressive legacy, an elusive, genre-bending approach with a particular emphasis on rustic folk-pop and dark, frayed psychedelia.Anomalous
As with previous like-minded collectives, the studio environment has become, with time, an integral part of Biota's creative direction. While the group's core instrumentation is uniquely acoustic (including accordion, hurdy-gurdy, saxophone, viola, and the more exotic curtal, crumhorn, and shawm), their music requires a considerable amount of keen electronic processing to produce its dense, disorienting, often surrealist currents. There is no typical Biota sound; their records map a sound world that is impossible to summarize, touching on woody baroque pop, free jazz, contemporary chamber music, and ambient soundtracking, with plenty of extra space left to the band's always-inventive, never-gratuitous forays into industrial-styled noise. The constants that do exist in their output appear only in the music's more confusing qualities: the murky sheen that keeps even the most immediate or accessible phrases at a mysterious distance, the conscious effort to make the percussion slightly and perpetually off-beat, and the wobbly perch of particular instruments in the mix, hovering a few inches from their comfortable timbres as if ghosts of themselves. Much of the power and uniqueness in Biota's music comes from very specific in-studio manipulation of the various instruments, in ways that retain the earthen vigor of acoustic sound to the exclusion of all other comfortable associations surrounding its creation or place with the larger collage. For Musique Actuelle, their first live event in nine years, the band essentially recreated their studio setup onstage, utilizing no samples, tapes, or synthetic sound of any kind. The only amplified instruments are the electric bass and guitar, with all instruments played untreated from the stage, their acoustic sounds gathered via microphones and processed by three band members in real time. The resulting work is site-specific, composed for this particular event alone, and its holds up surprisingly well in comparison to Biota's previous studio recordings. The performance divides into four movements, spanning haunting, dirge-like chamber pieces, Celtic jig-inspired shuffles, a raucous, saxophone-led psych driver, and one massive, slow-burning hulk of ambient sound which ushers in the fourth movement's climactic and conclusive ascension into noise. Sound processing remains a continual presence throughout, at its most subtle supplying simple delay and pitch-bend effects, and at its peak of involvement, transforming the entire performing group into a writhing, fractured mess. The immediacy of the band's unique instrumental palette often gives the music a false simplicity, something quickly denied as skillful electronic manipulations uncover hidden layers of sampled sound or warp specific passages entirely. The complexity of Musique Actuelle is unbelievable for a live recording and almost as staggering when taken at face value. Biota's traversal of stylistic boundaries is in no way arrogant or awkward, and the group's ability, less than halfway through their long life, to transcend a base "fusionist" approach, creating music that sounds just as singular as their recent efforts, is remarkable.
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