boards of canada - the campfire headphase

It's amazing how fast news speads on the net !

[Angry Robot blog, and Rate Your Music etc]

Hopefully it's better than Geogaddi.

okay, fuck it, i'm excited.

i also think dan is right about the cover.

xpost

yeah the person is what reminded me of the first album's cover. the non-existent faces and clothes.

If by ripping themselves off you mean refining and honing their sound until it's even more fucking awesome than it already was, I hope they rip themselves off some more.

Robinson

xpost

Yeah, I think it's shit. It's the cover of MHTRTC plus some extra mid '90s techo-shit added on top. So, I predict the new album will sound exactly like MHTR with added digital glitchery.

In a Beautiful Place is perfect as far as I'm concerned. A perfect EP

― frame casual (dog latin), Wednesday, December 12, 2018 1:23 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

xp :)

please don't make me go listen again you assholes

You gotta be in the mood, maaan.

I know I felt slightly underwhelmed by Kid For Today first time I heard it - it's kind of repetitive compared to stuff on MHTRTC, but it's a really nice sustained wintry vibe and, as it's BoC, there are lots of subtle little details floating in and out the mix

Is this the apex of BoC fan art? Taking a 5 note, 2 sec snippet of flash audio from their old website and making a whole tribute style track from it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzdsrbRFbOg

Campfire Headphase gave us Dayvan Cowboy, which is their best album track imho. They hit higher peaks on their EPs, however.

Yeah, Dayvan is all-time. I think BoC is overall better at individual tracks than at entire albums.

Satellite Anthem Icarus tho

ignoring the intro, that run of four tracks is their pinnacle imo

and it isn't especially close. like, chromakey dreamcoat's last minute, all of peacock tail I mean

the intro is dope! that was the first sound of BOC i ever heard- my fondness for this album probably comes down to that. i didn't have any expectations or concerns about them using acoustic guitars

there's a lot of electro-rockism in this album's lower status tbh

Obviously. Guitars! They’ve sold out to become Beth Orton’s backing band!

I'm happy to be ILX's designated "I like BoC when they put the guitars in" opinionaut

I tried this again last night. Still nothing. :-(
I can't hear any melodies. And it's too clean. Generic. No mystery deep time moments. I like how their stuff up to and including MHTRTC had a layer of moss on it. This is just my problem, though. I barely listened to anything these days that doesn't sound foggy and covered in moss or rust.

Shame. What it lacks in occult dread, it makes up with pastoral epiphanies. This is the perfect music I’d listen to in a beautiful place out in the country

Satellite Anthem Icarus is like a masterclass in counterpoint & arrangement

Tomorrow’s Harvest OTOH I’ve never gotten close to get into

Felt like a conscious 180 degree turn after all the criticism they got for Campfire

yeah I like Tomorrow's Harvest for what it is: a sustained moodpiece or soundtrack

If there was a film to go with it, itd make much more sense.

I'm listening to the opening run of TCH now and yeah this is just stellar stuff

Took me 20 years but I finally connected with this album.

Btw can you believe this album turns 20 this year.

not that they need more accolades but it really feels like vaporwave sprung from all this, BoC has always felt like very online music to me so I'm guessing all these young'uns doin that kind of thing in 2010 were really trying to capture what BoC were. I know Vektroid was pretty open about it.

the other day I put that wild part of Xavier: Renegade Angel where he's arguing with himself on top of "Dayvan Cowboy"...dunno if it's good exactly but its definitely a trip

Children and Geogaddi got canonised but this stands right there with them

and tomorrow’s harvest is their masterpiece

(ftr I like campfire headphase plenty)

At one point in my life Geogaddi was my favorite thing of theirs but now it's my least. And yeah their last two are probably their best two and also took me a while to truly get them. They are both masterpieces.

Would love for them to drop more but I kinda feel they're retired in the Scottish countryside

Dayvan Cowboy is my favorite track of theirs by a wide margin too

Yeah I've cooled somewhat on Geodaddi. It was my favourite, but maybe the appeal of its edgy kindertrauma aesthetic has waned since it came out. No fault of its own, of course - that path was a lot less trodden in 2002, and bringing the darkness further to the fore was a canny move at the time.

My not-a-fandom of Campfire Headphase is well documented. It was like they'd turned the big lights on halfway through watching a cosy horror film - very unwelcome. All the corners had been brightened, all the edges sanded off. Dayvan Cowboy sounded like the soundtrack to an advert for an SUV or a travel company, tipping BoC from queasy to easy listening. Or at least that's how I perceived it.

To further illuminate things, Pitchfork (I think) ran an article at the time that lifted the lid on BoC as a band; where they revealed they were in fact brothers and that all the mysterious backmasking and cryptic songtitles were (obviously, now I look back) part of a big deliberate prank with no further meaning to be found.

Well of course they were. The world had changed between 2002 and 2005: Trying to maintain an aire of esoteric mystery in 2005, when so many more people were turning on to social media, and the blogosphere, wasn't just broadly futile, it was embarrassing: Like a child performing a magic trick who asks you to look away while they openly fumble around with their props.

But I loved the mystery, the gnosticism of BoC. I wanted more of that. And in some ways I miss my own naivete in the pre-and-early internet days where artists could cultivate an aura that would have me and others speculating about whether Richard D James really did own a bank and a tank, or whether BoC were part of a shadowy cabal of Scottish hippie cultists broadcasting secret messages through their music, or even more terrestrial things like how to track down and decipher the arcane back catalgoues of acts like Basic Channel or Boredoms.

So with that, I'm going to go back to Campfire Headphase today and enjoy it for what it is: It's BoC's 'Wild Honey', a down-home and honest album freed from the sybilline trappings of their previous work. I'll report back.

Listening now. It's very pleasant, and there are familiar melodies and sounds which fall like candied fruit into my recollective mind. BoC have a habit of doing this - these little sonic triggers that bury-in over time. The strings on Dayvan Cowboy have never sounded so gorgeous.

Still not a fan of those super-bright and shimmery acoustic guitar sounds, and probably never will be. Reminds me of that "folktronica" craze in the early-2000s which did nothing for me. The incongruity of electronic beats + chimey acoustic guitar just isn't a sound combination I generally enjoy.

Despite knowing the reasons why, I think leaving out all the cool samples does this album down a bit - there's less to latch on to, and it does end up coming off as a pleasant-if-backgroundy album of beats and sounds as opposed to a thematic work like MHTRTC. I hear a lot of DNA with something like Air's '10,000Hz The Legend', but even that album had enough presentative weirdness going on to justify its relaxed 70s space-lounge vibe.

and tomorrow’s harvest is their masterpiece

― Cognosc in Tyrol (emsworth), Monday, August 11, 2025 1:17 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

absolutely

also, terrific posts, dog latin.

unlike dog latin I think the folktronica stuff aged very well. I know, I wasn't really expecting it to either. but I go back and listen to early Four Tet, The Books, etc...that music still sounds great to me. there was a period where I was over it but I dunno. I sure love it now. anyway I think this might be my favorite of theirs actually. the key for me was getting into those tracks in the second half, since the first half I loved right from the start. but geez, there's some real pretty stuff in there. I dig the messed up country vibes on a track like Hey Saturday Sun. if only they'd went out on a limb like this more instead of releasing albums once every never these days

Yeah ... their last masterpiece imho. A perfect headphone album.

Anybody ever figure out what that track was that had the sample "I was kind of on my own" in one of the fake sets with all the Freescha tunes?
― Rakel, Wednesday, 28 September 2005 16:23

21 years later and if I still have the mp3 it's on a dusty old external drive that may not work anymore but would still like to know this :)

Oh yeah me too. I liked that tune

Played this today and still struggle to find anything that holds my interest aside from Slow This Bird Down

It's my least favourite of theirs, I struggle to remember much beyond Chromakey Dreamcoat, Dayvan Cowboy and Peacock Tail.

'84 Pontiac Dream is the keeper of this for me

the lack of fun samples and backmasking and whatnot really smooths the record out though. for people like me, for whom "fun samples and backmasking" is half the appeal of BoC, it does take it into blandish territory. but I can see why a lot of people have no need for all that jiggery-pokery and want to hear a cleaner, more unadulterated BoC

"slow this bird down" might be my favorite track of theirs. incredible yet understated feat of sound design

there are moments when this album hits just right

This album had the TUNES

A supremely comforting summertime album for lying in semi-shaded grass, took me literally decades to appreciate

ciderpress be sure to check out their remix of Beck’s “Broken Drum”, very much cut from the same cloth as “Bird”

A post I fondly think of from this thread is (re: Oscar See Through Red Eye) “Yes, it doesn’t ‘really go anywhere’ because its already there!” I’ve stolen it many times over the years.

bit of a constants are changing head myself

my fave boc easy