The Black Dog

The Black Dog

Everything gets slicker. When it comes to consumer technology, you just have to throw up your hands at some point. My discman finally died its death a month or so back, and I was forced to buy an iPod I couldn't really afford. If I'm honest, I caved mostly because the idea of buying a new discman in 2007 was too ridiculous to contemplate. I would have been laughed out of Best Buy. Aesthetics are a little bit different. I continue to wear Chuck Taylors and Vans because I'm as turned off now by extraneous bells-and-whistles as when I was when griping like a 14-year-old Andy Rooney about all the lights and pumps and gels. So I guess sneakers were my inchoate introduction to refusenik simplicity. And if you still want to be cheesily ostentatious, a pair of snakeskin Chucks or slip-ons with stupid flames airbrushed on them are a lot more honest than a goddamn Identi-Kit basketball shoe with a bunch of pointless and "modern" plastic gewgaws.

Like the late 20th century output of your neighborhood Foot Locker, my recent distaste for electronic music stems from a sterile slickness imposed by the march of technology colliding with an aesthetic asceticism-- an over-articulation of an extremely limited language. Too much "minimal" sounds both conceptually thin and sonically fussy. Listening to the new 2xCD Book of Dogma, a collection of rare EPs by famed but obscure proto-IDM act the Black Dog, I was struck on the first few listens by a joyous simplicity that manages never to sit still. Take "Seer and Sages", which, over a beat that never deviates from its two loud thwacks, shifts from boogaloo house pianos to techno synthesizers recast as "Baby Elephant Walk" baseball stadium muzak to an agitated rave spasm of pure noise to an outro as delicate as anything off a Kompakt Pop Ambient LP.

If, as with the crude, cut-up New York house and sparkling Detroit techno they were inspired by, time has somewhat dulled the shine of the Black Dog's sonics, it's also made the music sound more direct and engaging than ever by cultural contrast. To flip another non-musical metaphor, minimal can feel like the suspended animation slog of non-narrative avant-garde filmmaking in THX/IMAX fidelity, but these early Black Dog tracks are like a spelunking spaceman bounding happily through the corny, color-saturated landscape of a no-budget 1980s sci-fi flick with a cranked-up soundtrack of post-Kraftwerk synths, sampled self-help gurus, cosmic divas, distant dog howls, and chirping wind-up birds. Though Book of Dogma comes wrapped in the chilly graphics of