On A Roll from p7 “We have a lot of residents now, but we haven’t gone out and said, ‘Hey, these people are residents,’” Space co-owner Coloma Ka- boomsky adds. “I think Loco Dice is at a very high caliber of the art. He’s a mature act, and it came organically, a next step between the culture of Miami and the culture that Loco Dice brings around the world.” Born to Tunisian parents who immigrated to Germany, Dice earned his nickname from watching his grandfather play backgammon, then collecting the dice after the game. “Loco” was attached after his late Ibiza nights in the 1990s. Standing over six feet tall, tattooed, and pierced, the producer is tightlipped about his personal life. He won’t discuss family or ro- mantic relationships and claims the Wikipedia page on which his supposed real name and age of 47 appear are inaccurate. Describing himself as “a kid coming from the dance floor to the DJ booth,” Dice blends his experience, musical te- nacity, and hunger with street smarts he picked up in cities like Düsseldorf and New York. His roots are in hip-hop, spinning under the nom de guerre Dice C in the 1990s. He tagged and rapped his way through Europe and toured with Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg via Death Row Records. Though he found success, Dice edged to- ward the dance-music scene back when that was a career killer. An early impetus was spin- ning in Rotterdam with the “bubbling” sound — a hip-hop creation wherein DJs sped up the BPM to make vocals sound mousey and im- part a relentless percussion to the beat. The sound blew up, and Dice soon took his first residency at a Düsseldorf nightclub called La Rocca around the turn of the millennium. “This was the first club to believe in me 6/30/22* and allow me to do what I was doing: big hip- hop,” he says. “I did my show like a resident: I started with ‘80s hip-hop, soul/funk, and then slowly to house music and even techno. The people loved it, and I created a buzz as a DJ who could mix up these styles.” So how did a hip-hop DJ transition to techno? The shift wasn’t without obstacles. Here was a branded hip-hop DJ stepping into Ger- many’s minimal-techno underground, where unembellished instrumentals and repetition reign. (Dice once dubbed his style “123 BPM chunky terrace music.”) But hip-hop’s and techno’s origins are similar in many ways, both having come from oppressed Black communities in the U.S. While these days techno is thought of as ex- clusively the domain of white, European- bred DJs, its origins can be traced back to Black Detroit artists like Robert Hood, Juan Atkins, and Jeff Mills. “Every time — even until now,” says Dice 8 2 about the resistance he faces. “Hip-hop comes with a bad taste — I don’t know. I think my ex- planation is that many people like to exclude themselves from hip-hop. People don’t see hip-hop as a great musical and political move- ment with this important history, especially electronic music. I’m hip-hop. I can’t change the way I dress; I can’t change how I talk. And when you come to a place which is ‘clean,’ it may sometimes disturb them even though we’re the nicest guys. After the whole minimal boom, I started to go back to my roots. I can include the vocals and snippets, I can do more than play two records, and I started to bring the hip-hop music back in; I dropped an al- bum called Underground Sound Suicide in 2015. You can’t imagine the hate and shitstorm I got — and now it’s a timeless piece.” On the Underground Sound Suicide track “Get Comfy,” a burst of laughter boosts the track while club-driven bass takes over and minimal textures hover atop as British rapper Giggs delivers bars in a streamlined flow. The song, which has more than a million streams on Spotify, is one of many examples of elec- tronic music’s malleability. You can also see that malleability during Dice’s 24-hour set at Club Space, where the producer is going back-to-back with Marco Carola, a once minimal mastermind in his own right. Assuming you paid the $250 at the door and made your way up to the terrace, you’d be lucky to get a quick two-step in with- out stepping on anybody’s toes. Even the DJ booth is packed. Still, the crowd is vibing as Carola and Dice drop Johnny Dangerous’ controversial “Problem #13 (Beat That Bitch With a Bat).” Later in the set, the crowd moves to the hip- hop-infused track “Take It Over” by Elio Riso & Muter, with Dice waving his hands with each bar spat. “I mix weirdly compared to others,” he ex- plains. “They mix on the one, and I may be mixing on the two or the three. Sometimes I go on the snare instead of the beat, sometimes I go with an overlap tok-tok-tok where you think it’s a delay, but it’s just me trying to mix. I make sure you know more tracks are coming.” He tugged and pulled at electronic music’s limits before falling into the minimal sound. “When I started with electronic music, I never knew I had this passion for the music,” he says. “I was buying it, and slowly I went from this full range of house music packed with vocals and sounds, and soon I started the reduced kind of stuff. But I didn’t want to play techno. Techno was too hard for me.” While Dice wrestled with the “minimal” identity, a BBC Radio One Essential Mix by the producer in 2008 turned out to be a red- letter day for him. “After that mix, I got the ‘minimal’ stamp,” he says, chuckling. But compared to the orchestral minimal- ism of Plastikman’s “Consumed,” Dice’s mu- sic always sounded beefier and percussion-heavy, with loops running ram- pant. Vocals, and even Tunisian chants, a call- back to Dice’s heritage, bounced throughout his productions. Despite his pushing minimal to its limits, some saw his production as something to ad- mire in the developing underground scene. “When I was touring with Richie Hawtin, I played completely different. I would tell him, ‘Rich, I can’t play techno/minimal,’ and he would always say, ‘That’s why I take you with me. Play your music. You’re a piece of the puzzle.’” By 2006, Dice was releasing music on la- bels like Hawtin’s, M_nus, Luciano’s Ca- denza, Josh Winks Ovum, and Sven Väth’s Cocoon and collaborating with artists like Dubfire for Dice’s Desolate label. In 2018, Dice released his debut album, 7 Dunham Place, a seminal work encapsulating his time in New York City and his boundary- breaking ethos. “I achieved everything I’ve created with JUNE 30-JULY 6, 2022 MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2008 NEW TIMES | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | MIAMI NEW TIMES | MUSIC | CAFE | FILM | ART | STAGE | NIGHT+DAY | METRO | RIPTIDE | LETTERS | CONTENTS | miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com miaminewtimes.com
