FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Music

Black Dice Get Crafty With Their Visuals For Animal Collective

The noise rock pioneers branch out into new territory, creating the visual experience for Animal Collective’s Coachella set.

Animal Collective came to Coachella to “bring the weird,” and they did so with the help of their good friends, fellow musicians Black Dice. Ditching their usual role as noise makers, brothers Eric and Bjorn Copeland and Aaron Warren decided to apply the same lo-fi, experimental techniques they use to create their brand of glitchy, discordant electronic music to the visual process, bending all kinds of outdated video equipment to their whims. The resulting visuals, entitled Jumbletron, still embody Animal Collective’s distinctly trippy, psychedelic-influenced aesthetic, but also have the feel of early video art experiments, exploring the boundaries of their video medium as much as they serve they strive to create unique visual experiences.

Advertisement

Projected on two giant jumbotron screens on either side of the stage, as well as on three giant cubes suspended above the band (also conceived and designed by Black Dice with the help of United Visual Artists) the onslaught of colors, patterns and textures was difficult to ignore, confronting and confounding the viewers with its abstract absurdity. The performance also featured lighting design by UVA, the design collective responsible for re-imagining Coachella’s main stage. UVA set the tone for Animal Collective's performance with their own light and sound stage show right before the Animal Collective set, with the doors of their three-dimensional cube opening to display the band. During the set, UVA created reactive light patterns to enhance the band's performance and Black Dice's visuals. There was so much stimulation going around, we hardly knew where to look.

The view from the stage before the cube doors opened up to reveal Animal Collective.

We caught up with Black Dice to find out more about their creative process.

The Creators Project: So how did this collaboration with Animal Collective come about? And what was your vision for the visuals you created?
Bjorn: Well we've been friends with them for a long time and have a pretty thorough understanding of their aesthetic and what we thought would work with it. They were really vocal about not wanting to have their image on the jumbotron screens just by themselves, so they asked Eric to come up with something that would knock them into a slightly different, more fantasy realm, so it wouldn't be so straight. They wanted people to be kind of sucked into their world, so we came up with imagery that was sort of trippy and had organic parts to it, and that moved in a lot of different ways. Then we designed these structures that are a little architectural in scale to coincide with the projections, so [they’ll be displaying] a jumbled version of all of the side imagery. Hopefully those two elements communicate what they wanted and have a big, impressive, visual version of their sonic world.

Advertisement

So where did all the imagery come from?
Aaron: We basically try to work as cheaply as possible, in all our mediums. We work with the gear we can afford and with the materials we can afford, and sometimes that amounts to nothing, so sometimes it's just trash. So for the videos, some of it was generated by gear that's not meant to generate content. For example, a video mixer, if you plug it into itself, will make a pattern—something that's not supposed to actually generate an image is now providing the content. So we would start by making colors and patterns and shapes and movement, then we'd also take other stuff like VHS tapes and DVDs or stuff from magazines that we had at our house. That's sort of the way we work with a lot of the visual stuff that we do, we'll just take stuff that we have and sort of make it into something that works for our purposes.

We tried to use the video hardware as a real-time instrument, so it was something that any of us could be doing and making and the three of us could say, "That looks good." And it wasn't like something where one of us was working at a computer, everyone says "That looks good," and then you have to wait 10 hours [for it to render] to really see it. That definitely happens a lot because that's just the nature of working with computers, but we tried to make it as hands-on as possible.

Are the visuals for the performance happening in real-time then?
Eric: We have all our clips on DVD or Blu-Ray but the live mixing with the live feed of the band that Coachella was filming on stage, that was live. And every night it's a little different just based on how it gets mixed or what's going on onstage. So it's as live as a DJ where they're playing a record, they didn't write that song right then, but they throw that record on at the right time and it's somebody's decision to nail it like that. That's kind of the way we work.

Advertisement

What kind of effect do you hope your visuals have on the audience?
Bjorn: Seizures.
Aaron: Yeah, we want to blow minds. We sort of were going after a real classic rock band visual aesthetic. There's a fine tradition of just blowing people's minds, like Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, all the way up to Iron Maiden with props on the stage. It's sort of a tricky genre to work in because it's easy to go cheesy, but at the same time, it needs to be big and dumb. We sort of tried to tailor these clips to work in the fashion where, if you're drunk and you just have this plastic cup with some Gatorade in it and you're not listening to the band, you look up and you're like, "Holy shit, what the hell is this?" Then that sucks you in. That’s something we were hoping for.

Bjorn: It's also what we would want to watch. Every time we made a clip, one of us would be like, "I could watch this all day." Maybe that's narcissism or whatever, and maybe I'm prejudiced, but it's something that we were really happy with. We figured out a way to work in a related medium than we normally do, and the formulas that we came up with for making music worked in the same way. The content I think is super strong and doesn't look like anything I've ever seen before. It certainly wasn't aping, it was in a tradition, but I don't think any of it was ever coming close to aping some other shit we saw at an Orb show or anything like that.

Advertisement

Who creates the visuals for your own performances? Is that you guys? Because those are always really awesome.
Eric: The live projection stuff is by our friend Danny Perez. We've done one-off things before, but probably not for 8 or 9 years because 8 or 9 years ago, we picked up Danny. Up until about a year ago, he's been the person doing it. So it's been as different as it could be making these visuals for us.

Bjorn: But we've made videos before. We've made a bunch of music videos for ourselves, we've made one for !!!, so there was already some momentum as far as making stuff. And I think seeing Danny do it really successfully and blowing our minds with what he did, we kind of had a bar of what to shoot for. I think it was a big influence, what he did.

Do you think you've surpassed the bar?
Bjorn: I think it's a matter of taste, at this point. But I think we did something that's on par, quality-wise. I think the novel part to it is that we somehow seem to be able to wrangle sort of high quality things out of the most humble of means. Using all this outdated video mixer stuff was pretty much the exact same set-up that we use to make music, so I think there's something special about that, the fact that you can take anything and sort of elevate it to a different place. I think that's one of the more lofty aspirations a lot of bands have, too, to sort of take people to a different place and engulf them and remove them from the setting. So, hopefully we've been successful at doing that.

What made you guys decide to use this unique, hack-oriented creative process? Obviously it came out of necessity, but for instance, what compelled you to plug the video mixer into itself and see what would happen?
Aaron: As someone who works with a computer like 10 or 15 hours a day sometimes, for me it's just really important to have a knob or something that I can touch, turn, and have something happen. Especially when you're working with other people, it's a drag to have to describe what something's going to look like. The immediacy of some of this older technology really works for us.

Eric: I think we've stuck to it to because it's free. I think at some point everyone would have opted for something more reliable, but I use the same equipment I've been using for over 10 years and it works and it's dirty and it's fine, but it's super responsive to me, or I'm really responsive to it, I don’t know anymore. It's kind of the same thing. Maybe in 10 years we'll be using other things, but there's something nice about working with what you have. There's no shame with not understanding technology. Even some of the video materials we used were just like paper, I don't think paper's used very much for video anymore, but it kind of didn't matter. It looked cool once we got our hands on it.

Photos by Peter Sutherland.