Black Dice. Not the Black Keys, Black Angels, Black Lips, Black Lab, or Black Kites, but Dice. Some of these songs were originally released on 12” by DFA records, so – does that give you a hint about how these dice will roll?

We start out with some disjointed spastic number that’s kinda like Moby doing his technoBlues while totally distracted by some new computer toys and letting the sound crash into an LCD Soundsystem outtake, but without any of the solidity. Blip blues. That’s just the intro, too. We then move into some demented lo-fi electro groove that’s also a little LCD, but only if you were listening to it in some surreal underwater farm with chickens and no vocals. There is definitely a place for this in the big blue world of sound, I’m not sure if that place is in my ears at this point, though – I’m really not up to speed on my IDM lingo. While managing to feel frantic and mellow at the same time, some of the songs start getting into a fairly repetitious cartoon soundtrack groove – like those scenes in the early spider-man cartoon where he’s swinging through the city and the same buildings keep flying by over and over again, and what the hell is his web attached to if he’s going in a straight line in the middle of the street?

I think this – music? sound? noise? glitch-pop? is ideal for letting my mind wander – thoughts and visions keep popping up through the broken static and laptop beats. It’s like a white noise generator designed by Salvador Dali and Merzbow. There are moments of an industrial noise band that hit very rarely, but you can see some connection – though the fuzz and hiss, to me, makes these sound structures a lot more mellower than most of that genre. Even when compared to bands like the Boredoms or Melt-Banana, the Black Dice seem to have a more soothing approach to creating aural sculpture. Personally, I think I’d add a My Bloody Valentine drumbeat and some swirly guitars, but that’s just me. These dice have been rolling for about ten years now, so evidently they’re doing something right.