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.
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