To add further insult to injury, when they finally settled in to write the record, they realized that their practice space had no heater. “The whole time we were writing Broken Ear Record, we were wearing hats, scarves, gloves, parkas, with little space heaters wedged between our legs,” Bjorn recalls. “That’s why we wanted to go somewhere other than New York to record it. We wanted to reward ourselves after such a year.”
Given the opportunity to play in Australia’s What is Music? Festival and tour with groups like the Residents, Chicks on Speed, Sun City Girls’ Richard Bishop, and New York’s own Gang Gang Dance, the band hung around after the tour to record at a studio in Byron Bay. On the other side of the world, it gave the band the space necessary to thaw out the songs written in the dead chill of a New York winter. Eric explained: “We were coming off of hard times, a really unreachable last album, some hard feelings, a stern tour. We wanted to have a little bit more fun, try some new ideas out, even look back at old ones which we'd never really done.”
Their first record as a trio, Broken Ear flowed quickly in the sun and nearby beach, being laid down and mixed in ten days. What will immediately strike listeners on first spin of the new record is the front and center presence of beats, something they hadn’t fully explored since their Timbaland and NY Times-approved “Cone Toaster” single from 2003. This reappraisal came in part from the difficulty of touring behind Creature Comforts, as Aaron describes: “It was really stressful making these structures, to where these willowy (beatless) sounds that had to hold bigger parts up.” Bjorn further expounds: “It got hard to be alienating people every single night. We wanted something that people could connect to more readily.” Now free of a drummer, Black Dice could re-imagine the types of beats they liked within the new, streamlined trio context and create them from scratch, with no drum machines present. They also revisited their early recklessness and abrasiveness, albeit in a more orchestrated context. Eric admits that the past is “still something we think about today, discussing those old shows.”
Still rooted in noise, the band was clearly entranced by what they heard around them. Bits of doo-wop, African rock, Hot 97, and Brazilian pop can be gleaned in the din, but they are just part of the whole. Aaron explains how their other disciplines in visual art and video editing affect their sound: “In Bjorn’s studio, his art is so immediate and hand’s on, whereas with my video work, everything is completely analyzed, super-zoomed in…kind of like radio jams and pop music. We just focus in on this specific texture, this feeling, and expand it for the whole song.”
Broken Ear Record pulls from every resource at hand: “Snarly Yow” and “Smiling Off” tangle together industrial stomps along the lines of Cabaret Voltaire or Autechre, while mindful of Adrian Sherwood’s On-U Sound. The latter track is rubbery and catchy enough to warrant remixes from Vladislav Delay and the DFA itself. Vocals (nearly absent on Creature Comforts) also return. Sleepily mumbled on “Heavy Manners,” elsewhere the voices are densely layered, evoking primal chants and 10cc-esque choirs. Come “Twins” and “Motorcycle,” there is a twitching tribesman bounce and a bout of tinnitus, yet bumpin’ and grindin’ regardless. Concise, concentrated, and most crucially, cathartic, Broken Ear Record wastes not a note. Let it shatter ears and expectations alike.
Protection - we do a lot of it these days. Sun cream for our skin, sunglasses for our eyes, condoms for you know where - but do you remember to protect your hearing?
Click to find all the information you need to look after your hearing now so you can enjoy music for years to come
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