Eric Copeland - Hermaphrodite (2007)

 

Noise / Neo-Psychedelia / Hypnagogic Pop

RIYL: Black Dice, James Ferraro, Fuck Buttons

★★★★½

Eric Copeland's art has always been on the fringe of my musical interests. As many of you know, I have an insatiable appetite for the sounds of his main band, the curated noise-collagists Black Dice, to which he contributes the occasional garbled vocal and a whole lot of knob-twiddling. But his solo work, rooted more in nauseating trash-scapes and repetitive techno patterns than the mind-expanding, rhythmic bliss of records like Beaches and Canyons and Creature Comforts, has often eluded me, despite my eye constantly being drawn toward the dazzling paper collages that adorn his DIY covers.

I first heard (and dismissed) Hermaphrodite around the time of its release, when I hadn't yet realized the true extent of Black Dice's greatness and was still treading lightly in genres of noise and experimental ambient. Though I've dabbled in some of his more recent output since then, I never once returned to his debut, despite all my clamoring for more music from that era. That all changed a little while ago when, inspired by that familiar craving, I finally dusted it off for another spin and was surprised to find that my reaction to it was the complete opposite of my typical Eric Copeland experience.

Though repulsed by the atypically monochromatic visual accompaniment this time around, the garbage disposal of sounds leaking out from, scuttling off of, and exploding against the disc were both engaging and perplexing (in the best way possible). A few more listens cemented a strange affinity for even the more reclusive tracks ("La Booly Boo", "Scum Pipe", "Fkd") while the early standouts of the title track, "Green Burrito" and "Spacehead" started to climb the ranks of my favorite tracks from Copeland's exceedingly bizarre corner of the universe. Though clearly exorcised from the same twisted mind as the more pop-forward excursions of his later work, the underbelly compositions that make up the indefinable Hermaphrodite have a certain raw thrill to them that appears to have been lost to the ages.