Fantastic solo album from Eric Copeland from Black Dice.
From Pitchfork:
Hermaphrodite collects 12 tracks Copeland recorded using some fairly primitive equipment. “I played some guitar, a harmonica, a little percussion,” wrote Copeland. “The rest is electronic. Most of the sounds are just MiniDisc recordings with a mic. I recorded the entire thing on MD and an obsolete digital 8-track machine… I appreciate that there’s a little bit of mystery as to what is making the sounds, where the music is from.”
The idea for a solo album came about for a lot of the same reasons that birth most creative pursuits: “Everyone I play with was busy with other things and it was the summertime, so too hot to be outdoors all the time. I spend a lot of time in our practice space and started to really like things I was working on, so I just kept working until a lot of it felt too complete to offer to someone else. Eventually, I just committed to the idea of my own record and it felt comfortable at the time.”
He added, “I obsessed for a long time on some of the recording, spending hours and hours just listening and trying to feel comfortable with some new ideas that I wouldn’t explore with other people.”
As for the title, “it encompasses a lot of opposing ideas and I appreciate that it’s a little taboo to most people.”
About the track Green Burrito, Mark Richardson said:
Eric Copeland’s upcoming Hermaphrodite certainly sounds like a solo album by a member of Black Dice who also works as Terrestrial Tones with Avey Tare from Animal Collective. It contains the same abstract inclinations, a similar electronic palette, and also tends toward the weirdly, queasily psychedelic. But compared to the last few records from his other projects, I’m hearing a lot more joy and playfulness from Copeland solo. Nowhere is this more evident than on “Green Burrito”, a huge whoosh of chanted voices, drums, pedal steel guitar, and analog synths that sounds like a promising new wave band being fed skinny-tie-first into a wood chipper. It doesn’t progress like a song; Copeland just builds a little world and props it up for a while before letting it sink back into the earth. But it is tremendously exhilarating while it lasts.
