Boards of Canada: Classic or Dud?

As for myself, I like MHTRTC. It's background music, but it's lovely background music all the same. My only consistent complaint with BoC is how analog and cheesy they occasionaly get. Like the last two tracks of the new ep. But at the same time "Bishop Amo Roden" redeems the whole thing. So...a "Classic", with reservations. But still not "where all art should be focusing at the moment."

BoC are at their most interesting to me when they move away from the two formulae I mentioned at the start of this thread. "Chinook", "Rodox Video", "June 9th", "Skipping Stones, "Red Moss" are all excellent - I think BoC Maxima is their best album; too much of MHTRTC is overtly unobtrusive and quiet as you say. Also, "M9", which makes all Parr comparisons redundant.

When they go "analog and cheesy" it's curiously endearing because I really don't like what they're copying at all - I like "Iced Cooly" better than any Roger Limb track I've ever heard. There's something in that faded-brown-to-gold process, I think.

boards of canada are really good. i'd say classic, for distilling the one ambient track that's on every idm album and basing a career around it. that's usually the best song anyway.

Fred: I'm not embarrassed with the phrase "on the money", it's just that the Pinefox has turned it into something of a cliche round here and made it hard to use without a moment's tongue in cheek.

'music has the right' took a while for me to love. much of it is classic but there are some boring parts. roygbiv is, of course, the highlight.

the best thing though is probably happy cycling on the peel session (is this on the US version of 'music has...'?)

i disagree about plone though, fernando. i think plone work when they are overly twee and fisher-price like, but too often (on the patchy album) they try and sound darker, or more ambivalent, or go the cod- morricone way, and it doesn't work.

Boc have done some beautiful songs (the last single was wonderful too), and i think its a bit of a shame that they often get categorised as 'smokers music' (which is pretty harsh criticism)

I'd have agreed with you about Plone once, Gareth, but now I find those tracks *unlistenably* twee; I can't get more than a minute into "Marbles" without choking, and don't get me started on "Bibi Plone". Conversely, "Busy Working", "The Greek Alphabet" and "Top And Low Rent" sound better to me than they ever did.

K-reg hits the nail on the head, as often, I think.

elliot

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.

-----

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

that's some hiveminded crossposting right there. cheers.

I agree that many (but not all) of their tracks are unsettling, I'm just saying you can pick up on that malaise even if you're mostly unfamiliar with their frames of reference (whether musical or ufological or religious or other still).

the voice counting up slowly until it falls apart, starts saying numbers out of order, starts saying the names of numbers that don't even exist, in the meantime there some guy sounding astonished saying "orrrrrrange" and children giggling and saying "yeah that's right",

was playing this in my car once and the passenger said "what the fuck is going on here? you know this is really creepy right?" and I was like hmm I never really thought of it that way

IABPOITC and Geogaddi are absolutely riddled with numerology, hexagons, Branch Davidianism ("Amo Bishop Roden" ffs), shortwave radio, 666/66:06, Revelations and so on - it's impossible for me to listen without feeling the pulse of something malign below the surface. It's what makes them great instead of pleasant incidental music.
And of course they sound like educational films, they're called Boards of Canada.
https://canadamodern.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/CM_Main5_Content_NFBLabels_CM76-1300x953.jpg

That one just strikes me as playful with no serious afterthoughts.

xp

It's what makes them great instead of pleasant incidental music.

oh man, i really disagree with this. their music-as-music is really unique and what makes (made?) them great and not pleasant incidental music - how synth lines fold together, suggest modalities but don't resolve into them, open up into a sudden vista with one sudden shift, etc.

Very much so.

boards of canada is music of mass suicide

not sure what you mean by this, so maybe this is in line with your comment - to me it seems like music that documents mass suicide, with sadness and some compassion.

of philosophical pessimism

mayyyybe ... even their darkest album has New Seeds. which is unsettled but energetic, propulsive, generative.

It's hard for me not to perceive some baked (ho ho) in context with BoC, being almost exactly the same age as them. There is a degree of specificity to the references to TV and wildlife films and media from 'our' childhoods, on MHTRTC at least. They had an incredible knack for it, being siblings around the same age is probably part of it - being able to excavate those memory / feelings together. But also some of it is literally samples from children's TV programs from the 70s FFS.

The only "aliens" vibe I can remember getting from BoC is I associate Tomorrow's Harvest with The Tripods.

like the problem to me of positing BoC's canon as unremittingly dark (beyond simple counterexamples) is that their whole method is haze, ambiguity. psychedelics can convince you that you've figured it out, you have the final story. they can also induce a kind of alert confusion that helps recognize things that conflict with your existing worldview. BoC seems to me to lean towards the latter.

mayyyybe ... even their darkest album has New Seeds. which is unsettled but energetic, propulsive, generative.

― lukas

immediately followed by "come to dust"

hope which is immediately and brutally crushed is, i think, something of a hallmark of philosophical pessimism?

most obviously to me their work has a very scarfolk vibe. is it people in their 40s who go in for the "scarfolk" thing? does that sort of horror take on different forms for the younger set?

they can also induce a kind of alert confusion

― lukas

ah! we want to talk leyland kirby?

i find all of that to be really funny tbh

― Give me a Chad Smith-type feel (map)

fair, i get that, but i also find "eraserhead" to be a fucking hilarious movie. i find cioran to be one of the funniest goddamn writers i've ever read.

and yeah i am a "context is everything" sort of lady, that's just how i look at shit

unique whimsy/dark balance, hard to pin down.

it's natural to want to pin it down, but - ugh, am I really going to reach for this metaphor? - the kaleidoscope keeps shifting.

immediately followed by "come to dust"

i don't take that track as cancelling out the previous, or even following on from it chronologically in the timeline of whatever story they're telling. i also think the apocalypse will be patchwork, confusing, unevenly distributed, so to me the idea of a more positive story being told alongside a more negative one makes sense.

leyland kirby

hmmm I only know the Caretaker stuff but it seems like a very different use of the past to me.

If anything, Everywhere at the End of Time (stages 4-6 in particular) goes to show just how tranquil and airy BoC's music is in comparison. Like lukas said, it remains tethered to ambiguity even at its darkest and thus differs greatly from the explicitly tragic, progressive breakdown of memory The Caretaker lays out in sound. There is nothing as hellish as Stage 6 in BoC's discography, and even if there were, it doesn't go on for more than an hour.

this has all been a great discussion. thanks everyone.

i think context absolutely matters with them. as a person who actively experiences auditory psychosis as a normal thing, i've always understood boc to be the music of the consciously insane — that is, people whose mental health is an ongoing chess match. sometimes you hear that one voice and it's happy and pleasant. other times, it's the same voice in the same timbre and inflection but it's saying some very disturbing things. same thing with their music. sometimes 'dayvan cowboy' sounds like the absolute most beautiful thing ever; other times it's the soundtrack to the apocalypse. nothing about the recording changes though.

i've always understood the "no censorship" message at the end of music has the right to be metaphoric — you have to let your psyche do what it does, because if you repress and try to silence the parts you don't like, it will end in conflict.

I do not experience BoC as scary or unsettling even when they are trying to be scary and unsettling. I experience them as awesome groove music; the idea of finding “Aquarius” unsettling is 100% foreign to me because that is one of my ginormous grin happy jams.

Enjoyed reading through that (the recent posts). Made me hanker for a time when I would read loads of meaning in BOC tracks (the Jim Jones references and so on).

all their albums have slightly different vibes but Campfire Headphase really feels like the outlier in all that. I bang on about this a lot on ILM but it's at once the most and therefore the least accessible to me. I can't hear the devil in those details. it's washy and pretty, but in the same way as Moon Safari is washy and pretty. it lacks that darkside occultism that drew me to them

but i also find "eraserhead" to be a fucking hilarious movie. i find cioran to be one of the funniest goddamn writers i've ever read

― Kate (rushomancy), Tuesday, August 18, 2020 5:50 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I find Cioran as depressing as it gets but I definitely agree about Eraserhead. How do people not find, for instance, the “OK Paul!” and “So I cut it like a regular chicken?” scenes uproarious?

I'm with kate and all those who find the music profoundly unsettling. Are those of us who do so roughly in our 40s or older? I feel like the music, as it does the makers, may have the melancholic resonance for those of us who grew up in an analogue era and watched 70s era science filmstrips.

― Boring, Maryland, Tuesday, August 18, 2020 5:55 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm (I’m mid forties and I agree with you and Kate)

all their albums have slightly different vibes but Campfire Headphase really feels like the outlier in all that. I bang on about this a lot on ILM but it's at once the most and therefore the least accessible to me. I can't hear the devil in those details. it's washy and pretty, but in the same way as Moon Safari is washy and pretty. it lacks that darkside occultism that drew me to them

― doorstep jetski (dog latin), Tuesday, August 18, 2020 7:23 PM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

we've probably been over this in a million other threads but despite BOC being one of my favorite acts of all time I flat-out dislike most of CH. One of my biggest musical letdowns ever (redeemed eight years later by the brilliant TH) - maybe this is why?

oh man, i really disagree with this. their music-as-music is really unique and what makes (made?) them great and not pleasant incidental music - how synth lines fold together, suggest modalities but don't resolve into them, open up into a sudden vista with one sudden shift, etc.

I honestly think it’s in the melodic/harmonic department where the fakers falter, map otm re their odd modulations, unresolved harmonies etc.. there’s a lot of cool counterpoint going... like the whole thing that “June 9th “ builds up to..

But also, their early textures sounded legit naturally mucked up... it’s like saw 85-92, ‘shitty’ tech like the rebels in Star Wars...idk

but also I don’t think eg freescha and those types ever tried for a VHS-80s creeps type vibe, it was just reverb, pitch modulation lfo whatsit... they were stuck on some kind of astronomical wonder bullshit. idk.

I've not been able to listen to Tomorrow's Harvest since the start of the pandemic. Thought I was ready to do so but I just picked it up, had a look at the artwork and put it right back on the shelf. Still too scary for me.

'New Seeds' on TH I do find to be one of the warmest-yet-coolest things they've done. Melancholy bliss. Not that I've been reaching for BoC much this year either.

we've probably been over this in a million other threads but despite BOC being one of my favorite acts of all time I flat-out dislike most of CH. One of my biggest musical letdowns ever (redeemed eight years later by the brilliant TH) - maybe this is why?

― Paul Ponzi, Tuesday, 18 August 2020 23:34 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

my opinions of these albums are diametrically inverted. the wonder of taste!

New Seeds is amazing.

Campfire is their weakest album overall, but has a handful of stunners (Chromakey, Dayvan Cowboy, Peacock Tail).

It seems very BoC that "Macquarie Ridge", which for me remains the most beautiful piece they ever recorded, was hidden away as a bonus track on the Japanese release of Campfire. Perhaps they were embarrassed about how nakedly emotive it is.

so i've never heard that song before and was pleased to find it easily listenable on youtube, but i also am somewhat annoyed that the country specific bonus track continues to be a thing.

good song in any case though.

so i've never heard that song before and was pleased to find it easily listenable on youtube, but i also am somewhat annoyed that the country specific bonus track continues to be a thing.

― Totally different head. Totally. (Austin)

oh yeah? well, i'm annoyed that _countries_ continue to be a thing! :-P

but yeah it is a great song and i dont' think i'd heard it before. also, their remixes are awesome and some of my favorite things of theirs, and they're not often heard either.

back to leyland kirby!

If anything, Everywhere at the End of Time (stages 4-6 in particular) goes to show just how tranquil and airy BoC's music is in comparison. Like lukas said, it remains tethered to ambiguity even at its darkest and thus differs greatly from the explicitly tragic, progressive breakdown of memory The Caretaker lays out in sound. There is nothing as hellish as Stage 6 in BoC's discography, and even if there were, it doesn't go on for more than an hour.

― pomenitul

for me the caretaker and boc are different in several ways. first, everywhere at the end of time is a monumental work of _individual_ desolation and loss. alzheimer's is a particularly strong fear for me, particularly disturbing to me. i'd prefer there to be bright lines between the living and the dead, we all act as if there are for a number of reasons, but in point of fact there aren't, necessarily. a life is not just heartbeat, a life is not just breath, it is a number of things that are beyond our ability to name sometimes, and beyond our ability to agree on most of the time, so heartbeat, breath, we treat them as absolutes when they aren't, when it is not just possible but not uncommon for people to die while still breathing, while their heart still beats.

that is what terrifies me about alzheimer's, the prospect of dying not all at once but by degrees, the person i was slowly slipping away and being replaced with confusion and pain, of wanting to make a final end to it but never knowing when or how. the way cioran meant to kill himself but in the end it went too fast.

the most disturbing stages of "everywhere at the end of time" for me are stages 3 and 4. what used to be comforting is twisted and transformed into a nightmare, moments of respite and solace turn wrong and hellish without warning. the subject sees themselves slipping away and can do nothing, hope for nothing.

i haven't listened to stages 5 and 6 all the way through. i'm not interested in doing so. not because they're too "disturbing" but because they have no _meaning_ for me. there are no words, there is no reference to the person the subject of the work once was. it's all pain and confusion and sometimes bliss but none of it accessible to me, a living person.

to me, what tomorrow's harvest does is to cover a lot of the same ground as stages 3 and 4 of "everywhere at the end of time", but that record is not about individual desolation and loss, but about _collective_ desolation and loss. in "everywhere at the end of time", the subject loses themselves. in "tomorrow's harvest", we watch the world dying, everything we loved, everything we knew, coming to dust, knowing that there is no hope for it, for our children, for any of us.

that's very hard. should i look away?

hmmm I just listened to Semena Myrtvykh again and I'm starting to come around to your way of thinking, and that was before I googled what it means

They're no Blue Öyster Cult, that's for sure.

https://bocpages.org/wiki/Semena_Mertvykh

Mike had the following to say about this track:

"...at the end of the whole album, you've reached some sort of sanctuary and then the whole thing is stolen away from you again with the final track. That last track has a deliberate feeling of complete futility that I find kind of funny. That's where the obsessive, scientific work comes in, and yeah, it takes us ages."

Good thread. I've never picked up despair from BoC or at least I've not been very sensitive to that side. Creepy yes, bleak sometimes, but also regularly serene and life-affirming (eg Campfire, which unlike most is prob my fave). For me the most disturbing aspect of their stuff is the whole "past inside the present" thing (very similar from what I ger out of Patrick Modiano's books) and the idea on the one hand that the past is still very much alive in what we do and how we live, and on the other hand that the present is twisting our grasp of the past (that's kinda how I interpret the blurred faces on the cover of MHTRTC). The pagan mystic stuff and numerology is fun but secondary and probably not really worth digging too deep. Mainly, I just find their music incredibly beautiful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI3b6EEltD4

machine yearning

New Neverman remix. Hopefully they release a new full length soon. https://lexrecords.com/news/treat-em-right-boards-of-canada-remix/

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

Possible that this YouTube upload is genuinely a 30 year old copy of Hooper Bay that some guy in a Edinburgh has had in a box for 30 years

side A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H9Kk8V1Rp0

side B: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pIFVsAw6mI

I know there have been lots of fake BoC leaks in the past but this one sounds good to me, especially side B

Someone, probably the YT uploader, has also uploaded a couple of photos to discogs:

https://www.discogs.com/release/26811377-Boards-Of-Canada-Hooper-Bay

and he just happens to be unable to record it properly? bull.

(sorry, I'm not a believer)

There’s been discussion about the recording quality on the BoC forum. Posters who I assume are teenagers are speculating that if this is a 50 year old from Scotland that maybe he doesn’t have access to smart phones and can’t use technology. Which I laughed at but also cried a bit because I resemble that demographic. But it makes sense to me, he’s apparently said he was posting because people didn’t believe he had it. Posting in deliberately low quality helps back up his claim, but if it was a FLAC quality rip it would be all over the net and might open him up to WARP’s solicitors contacting him.

then why not record 1 minute of each track in high quality? Anyway - I've been burned by hoaxes too often, it's safer to not believe :-)

Iirc the only previously known snippets of this single/ep was “circle”, shared by BOC themselves.

If that one matches the snippet then it could be legit.

Here’s the snippet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s-LHQdQnsU

as any medieval monk worth his salt will tell you, the secret to a good forgery is mixing in actual authentic stuff with the fakes

Turns out this was a fake after all. At least the people responsible didn’t drag it out too long

yep

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiXfSh1tYP0

I wish they'd just work with Warp and drop all this old material already and put these bootlegs and BS forgeries to rest finally.

gy!be did it with "all lights..." and it seems to have worked out pretty quietly, which I always understood to be what they wanted, so you never know, maybe one day.