Black Dice - Move To New York and Troubleman Unlimited

Move To New York and Troubleman Unlimited

In the summer of 1998 the band relocated to New York City where Eric Copeland was attending college. At an early New York performance the band met current member Aaron Warren who had recently moved from Los Angeles to attend NYU. began to experiment with their sound, While their earlier sound can be described as a mix of early-eighties-inspired thrash and harsh noise, the band has changed their music with each record and era of performance, Eric Copeland has stated about the band "We definitely have eras; we have records that feel like they indicate all the songs we were playing at that time.". and Bjorn has said that it's always been a very gradual progression for the bands evolution of sound stating "To be honest, I think we've been in this weird in-between space the entire length of the band. There will be these moments where people can identify really strongly to this one (sound)... Once it got kind of weird, the kids that were into hardcore really didn't like it.".

The band began incorporating more pedals into their setup and slowly leaving their earlier hardcore-leaning style in favor of more rhythmic music similar to motorik and dub music. Eric Copeland describes this transition as "...it stopped being thrashy and started being more sounds instead of songs." "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."

It was around that time that the emphasis shifted from conventional song structures to more open-ended sonic investigations. Shows of this era maintained an equally physical presence through the use of high volume levels and an extreme range of frequencies, and violent performance became less frequent. The music bore more resemblance to crude first generation industrial music or contemporary power electronics than straight noise or hardcore. Eric describes this era as "we were like heavy noise dudes, and it got a lot of industrial people would ask "Oh, you guys to listen to Whitehouse?""

Warren recounts when he lived in Los Angeles, "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."

By the fall of 2001, live shows had grown in length to almost five or six times of the earlier sets, with the occasional song reaching 45 minutes. An emphasis on signal processing provided a broader sonic palette. While volume and physical presence of sound remained crucial, melody and repetition became key compositional elements. During this time, the band recorded with post-industrial/noise band Wolf Eyes initially meeting them because they wanted to book a show in Michigan and Wolf Eyes member John Olson book them in his basement. The brothers recall recording with Wolf Eyes in an interview for Tiny Mix Tapes "We probably burned through like $100 worth of grass... On the first day!".