Boards of Canada: Classic or Dud?

What better comparison point for a band who call a track "M9"?

and into a world where synthesizers coexist with hundred-year-old willow trees.

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love this. Also the term 'soccer children' = beautiful, somehow very BoC. Ah well, that used to be me ;)

Since one of my earlier threads seems to have been resuscitated, I'll just add that I probably rate BoC higher in terms of *magic realism* than I ever have. I can sort of see where Billy's coming from with the ISB comparison, as well: if you're looking for the halfway point, Bill, I'm waiting with a C90 of "The Fourth Dimension" ...

The 70's BBC children's television series, The Changes, is an
indisputable influence for MHTRC. Robin Carmody is well aware. His BBC Radiophonic Workshop essay is outstanding.

IABP and Geogaddi are minor shifts in the BoC sound. The whole David Koresh theme is creepy, but I love it.

I say they're ace, hands-down, CLASSIC. They make beautiful textures, tones, and melodies with very few synths and outdated samplers and that is no simple feat!

Any ILXors ever been to the Pentland Hills area or met the BoC or any of the music70 collective?

Boards of Canada = Near Classic; depends on what they do next.

re: the "british sound" as mentioned above: stirmonster (v. occasional glaswegan ILM poster) once mentioned elsewhere [heavy paraphrase ahead] that he found the prettiness of BoC's music a sharp contrast to the dreadful starkness of the north coast of scotland.

Not in the north of Scotland though, just next to Edinburgh. The Pale Saints recorded some of their records near there.

anyhow, classic, "geogaddi" included.

in some ways i think much of their back catalogue is a bit tainted by the beats. as in, they seem unnecessarily leaden. they certainly date the records to a particular time period (its less apparent on geogaddi i guess). i like pretty much everything still, but the beats detract for me, or, at least, are the worst parts of most of their stuff

i can't think of many examples of tracks where the beat seems a real problem to be honest - anyone have any specific examples? it seems like a bit of a shot in the dark otherwise. i can think of many examples where the heaviness of beat compliments what else is going on - 'Whitewater' from 'Boc Maxima' for example - but i can see what is meant by the suggestion that more could've been done with the beats - they just come in and seem to trundle from A to B without varying much of the time, but somehow they manage to seem quite deft rather than leaden (Orange Romeda! Amo Bishop Roden!). it may just be the tempo of most BOC songs that makes the beats seem leaden rather than the sounds used to construct them (muffled, dirty, retro - to match the overall sound).

i think the drums on something like Mort Garson's Plantasia would have been a better approach

i nearly always find the beats a welcome addition, and BOC always seem to have valued electronic rhythm to a fair extent and they tend to prefer it heavy. it's usually one of the last things to come in, which can give the impression the track has been built to support the beat rather than the other way round, no? which is an understandable criticism if true, only i don't hear it as a big problem myself - i don't think it would make a significant difference to how i hear BOC. 'ROYGBIV' seems as good an example as any of the beat being useful, if only for the bit where the bassdrum drops out again just for 4 bars - that's possibly the best bit, but it couldn't work without the beat beforehand.

how about Autechre or Biopshere? do their beats sound better because they're complex or 'modern', or 'lighter'?

what are the drums on 'Plantasia' like (hint)?

It’s pretty coincidental; I listened to Music again last night and it didn’t work for me as well as it usually does. (I believe) I too felt the beats slightly lacking. But hey, some of my favourite moments are things happening to the beats. There is a wonderful bit in ‘Kid For Today’ where the heavier beat enters and plays two snares in a row (so that one is on the spot of a bass drum). And the lo-fi drums at the end of ‘Aquarius’. And the fantastic beat fucking in ‘Pete Standing Alone’. And the sonically beautiful drums in ‘Roygbiv’, ‘Turquoise Hexagon Sun’, ‘Last Walk Around Mirror Lake’... yeah, they’re not so bad after all.

as for BoC, they're like one of those artist everyone Loves and is influenced by, but justifiably. I Love Boards Of Canada, and I don't care what anyone thinks.

But I'll say that some of their tunes stick in the head alarmingly well for 'ambient' music. Is there a reason I haven't gone and re-investigated them since? Yes, it's that I actually find their music a little creepy and disturbing.

Yeah, this is one of the greatest things ever.

Want to listen to this - especially the BoC/Shamen/Books mashup - but subscribe to Apple Music? no https://music.apple.com/us/album/early-hours-dj-mix/6772230636

All Reason Departs in my head all day today. Absolutely the album highlight for me.

kind of obsessed with the guardian reviewer who complained about the drum programming on this record, perhaps one of the worst takes ever?

Sure looks like it. Multiple factual errors in it too. Reminds me of some old school Pitchfork reviews that tried to be edgy and extremely panned some albums like Tool's Lateralus and NIN's The Fragile that ended up aging extremely well (both of those reviews have been scrubbed)

Clarification: the albums aged well, the reviews most definitely did not.

Wait they really took the reviews down? Why not leave them up and get the views from people bringing them up to dunk on them? (plus integrity etc)

Somewhere Right Now In The Future Somebody Is Scrubbing The Reviews That Did Not Age Well

The Guardian review is so wrong I wonder if the guy even listened to it

Wait they really took the reviews down? Why not leave them up and get the views from people bringing them up to dunk on them? (plus integrity etc)

Some of those reviews were outright embarrassing. I guess when they started becoming more respected as tastemakers they scrubbed the archives. The Tool review is actually still up ! Famously rated it a 1.9. The Fragile was like 2.0 or something. They reassessed it as 8.7

I actually think both reviews are still up so maybe they unscrubbed!

xp it came the day after the listening sessions so the they basically heard it once and reviewed off of memory. An already flawed situation

You Retreat is the one I keep returning to - the gorgeous hymn like beginning, the guitar & bass come in like they are from a Daft Punk RAM era track with classic BoC keyboard runs over the top, ah it's magic really. also interested in the sound right at the end of the album, like an electronic scanner maybe? (tying back to the idea of scanning for other civilizations on the 1420MHz frequency at the start of the album?)

The drum sounds are ok but I was yearning for more interesting beats on this record after the first couple of plays.

But would they be Boards of Canada without those slow plodding beats that have that mechanical shuffling quality? - that feels like it's integral to their sound

imo Geogaddi was a little more interesting rhythmically

I just listened to Geogaddi this weekend and in many ways it’s Inferno with fewer hooks

this album strikes me as the societal collapse prequel to the post-apocalypse that f Tomorrow’s Harvest

feel like Inferno is not only rhythmically cool but has a dizzying amount of rhythmic and textural detail buried in the mix, little spectral drum parts like the degraded-to-the-point-of-near-imperceptibility pattern overlaid in Father and Son

xp The Tomorrow's Harvest album cover features a hazy blurred view of the SF skyline from the Alameda Naval Air Station. Marcus Eoin referred to it as "an ingredient of the theme on this record" and added, "if you look again at the San Francisco skyline on the cover, it's actually a ghost of the city. You're looking straight through it."

That album does feel somewhat post-apocalyptic, but so do all of their other albums. That inscrutable enigmatic quality is what I love most about them

yeah one reason this album rewards repeated plays is there’s a lot of musical and rhythmic layers in it

i only just now noticed after 10 listens that they're chanting hare krishna on naraka, even though i knew from the discourse that the chant was somewhere on the album. i think it rules

I was one of the hyperbolic posters that was claiming on release day that this might be the best BOC record

With the benefit of time I am prepared to say that yes, this is indeed the best BOC record

will need a little more time before making that declaration but I can definitely say it's the one I liked the most right off the bat, all the other ones slowly grew on me. this one also sounds better the more I hear it so yeah, maybe

was BoC ever POLLed?

missed this when the album came out but can be listened to now - looks cool

https://www.djfood.org/dj-food-i-hear-the-sun-an-inferno-promo-mix

I listened the other day on Apple Music. Decent, but for me its best moments were the songs from Inferno. Love DJ Food, though.