Black Dice

Drawing back the curtains on the live section of Cargo’s twin-chamber venue like an embattled action hero might inspect a grisly flesh wound from under a hastily-improvised tourniquet, Family Underground’s psychedelic rumblings spirit us away into the expectant darkness.

The Denmark collective, formerly known as FLOWER, dredge up enormous psychedelic drones that invariably evoke an imagery of elemental extremes; of fire, ice and tectonic plates grinding insensibly up against one another. The visuals provide an interesting counterpoint to the megalithic madness unfolding onstage, a slowly evolving series of treetop photos which, taken in isolation, could either be microscopic images of capillary networks or details of Jackson Pollock paintings, such are their abstract complexity.

You’ve probably guessed it by now, but we’re deep into a conceptual territory that makes me think, somewhat obscurely, of a Leonard Cohen quote; the one about how ‘there’s a crack in everything, that’s where the light gets in’. In artistic terms at least, that crack has become a raging torrent as conceptual art made plain its distaste for craft over intellectual theorising. But it’s only through the prism of human construct we’re able to discern moments of beauty; the rest, as they say, is bullshit. I’ll grit my teeth and wager these guys are the latter.

I wasn’t sure I would ‘get’ Black Dice entirely, either, but live they seem a far more engaging proposition than on record. Ecstatic, even, if three silhouettes masturbating onstage could ever be considered a glorious union. Like a dance-based Animal Collective hollowed out of melodies in favour of overstuffed rhythms clashing chaotically against each other, in full flight it’s like witnessing Fantasia conducted in an outsize branch of Curry’s.

If anything their principal talents seem to lie in winding up row upon row of maimed Duracell bunny beats and watching them collide stupidly, stopping instinctively one short of the kind of white noise freakout that’d have our eardrums prolapsing in exhausted protest.

The visuals, meanwhile, are really something else; a mind-bending blur of reds and whites, faces fizzing ominously out of the static, reinforcing the show’s curious, ‘fuck dance, let’s art’ status among the massed intelligentsia. One track sees a man’s face regressing in on itself while the band come on like imploding cranial cavities, while ‘Roll Up’’s dampened-fireworks fizzle is accompanied by psychedelic-hued Rorschach images erupting violently out of the screen.

Thank god they can’t hang this shit in a gallery.