Q&A with the Black Dice

This Friday, Aug. 30, Brooklyn's most inventive noise bands, who have scared the fuck out of crowds with their mix of mindwarping sound collages and stage aggression, will play a benefit show at Northsix to raise money for a cat named Max. Max, an 8-pound orange tabby, got sick last December and had stomach surgery in January that cost his owner, Catsup Plate Records founder Rob Carmichael, about $5000. The show will be headlined by Black Dice. Max won't be there. "He'd be pretty freaked out by the noise," Carmichael says.

That's understandable. I played Black Dice's Cold Hands (Troubleman) for my four-month-old kitten on the day I was preparing to go to Enid's in Greenpoint to interview three members of the band. He bobbed his head quizzically before running the hell away from the weird noises. Later that day, he puked out something that looked like a big portion of corned beef hash.

Black Dice is known for shouts and murmurs. Their music is often about what you don't hear. What's that guy mumbling in the background? Is he okay? Is he being eaten, set on fire? Those unsettling moments are juxtaposed with ferocious wailing, like somebody's trapped in a building that's being demolished.

Who the fuck are these guys? It's been hard to tell. There were albums with no liner notes or pictures of the band. There was no band website. Black Dice is now ready to end the intrigue.

"I think mystery is sort of nice sometimes," drummer Hisham Bharoocha says. "But when it sometimes becomes impossible?"

"?for people to get any information, it doesn't make sense," guitarist Bjorn Copeland says, finishing the thought.

Black Dice, who formed in 1997, quickly became known for sets less than 15 minutes long, as if they had to channel their entire lifetime of fury and confusion and sadness and happiness into one burst. This is the type of shit you do when you're 18. (Their upcoming album, on the other hand, is often soothing and has two tracks that are longer than 15 minutes each.) Band members threw metal and glass into the crowd. People bled. Fights ensued.

"It was actually fairly common for a while that there would be one person [in the crowd] who kind of misunderstood what was going on and got really aggressive," Copeland says.

"You have to admit, we knew that it was a very physical show we had, and we wanted to make the crowd not feel like they were in the same place as they were every day in terms of shows," Bharoocha adds.

Given the art-school-type crowds Black Dice attracted, the shows often ended with people talking about how all that tension made them feel.

"There were a lot of long discussions [between the band and the audience] afterward, and I feel like they usually came out pretty good, with everybody pretty much understanding where the other person was coming from," says bassist Aaron Warren.

"That's really awesome in a way," Copeland continues. "I don't think a lot of people who do performances or play music actually have the opportunity to do it and then have a dialogue about it."

Black Dice have since toned down their stage show. Selective memory is one of the most crucial parts of becoming an adult, and Black Dice is growing up. They've (mostly) lost their tendency to break stuff, and want to fix stuff instead. They're trying to make things right, getting their business together, embracing the adult world, viewing an opportunity and seizing it. They see a chance to start a real career, and they're attempting to make it happen with what seems to some like a new-age album that should be sold next to therapeutic soap.

"My mom heard the new stuff and said she thought it should be in healing stores," Bharoocha says. "My family definitely thought there was something wrong with me in terms of my other music."

Black Dice's forthcoming album, Beaches and Canyons (out on DFA Records in October), is "quite a bit different than all the other stuff we recorded," Copeland says. "It's a lot warmer-sounding and there are a lot more types of sounds."

The sounds include what seem like ocean noises and bird calls and pleasant beeps reminiscent of Japanese videogames that have cuddly pink and yellow characters. It's a calming, sometimes bewildering experience. It's wholly original music that can command the attention of hundreds of college kids in a dirty, smoky room, but it's also music you can take a bubble bath to. Even my cat likes this album. This is nowhere close to hardcore, and that's exactly the point.

Black Dice was asked to join this summer's Oops! tour, where bands like Lightning Bolt (with whom Black Dice toured Japan earlier this year) and the Locust slashed their way through the country with their decibel-shattering theatrics. "It just didn't sound like playing with five bands that all sort of catered to a really specific audience was a good idea," Copeland says. "I don't really associate us with any of those bands except as friends anymore. A lot of the bands are really good, but I think what makes them special is doing something unique to them. And I think cramming together five bands that are sort of similar doesn't really showcase what's special about each band."

Black Dice now has a whole crew to help showcase their new noise. They're moving away from the DIY lifestyle that made them kind of legendary but also held them back. They now have a publicist and a booking agent and a fast-rising upstart label in DFA. They admit they've been bad about money, and now it's time to get better.

"All of us would love it if the rewards were proportional to the amount of work we've put into it," Copeland says.

"As you can see by the music, we're not planning on going double platinum soon," Bharoocha says. "But we would like to do okay."

They're in a decent position to do so. DFA is hot right now, thanks to the success of the Rapture and the attention surrounding the resurgence of the so-called local music scene.

"I think the press is nice now, but it's obviously not very accurate a lot of times," Copeland says. "Like, I don't ever recall feeling that there's some crazy scene of bands here until they started writing about it."

But Black Dice is wise enough to try to capitalize on some of the hype. There will be a national tour and radio promotion in the fall.

The Northsix show should be a spectacle. The lineup also includes Avey Tare/Deaken and Panda Bear, members of the Animal Collective who are known for doing something different every time they play. All the musicians on the bill are blessed with audiences that don't demand anything except a brand-new experience, so the acts have the ultimate freedom: the opportunity to be wildly inconsistent and beautifully all-over-the-place and still loved. Expect all sorts of strange shit to go down.

Black Dice headlines a benefit for Max the cat on Fri., Aug. 30, at Northsix, 66 N. 6th St. (betw. Kent & Wythe Aves.), Williamsburg, 718-599-5103; 9 p.m., $10.