Boards of Canada - 'Geogaddi' C/D

Preview was stunning. The Union Chapel in Islington, but it's more on the cathedral scale (if anyone knows this building they can appreciate how their sound filled the space). Fun to see the journos puzzling over the blue plastic hexagons they'd scattered on the pews, but a shame that some left before '1969' kicked in. Although I'm no big fan of their kaleidoscopic visuals, it all fell into place with their final projection - a hexagon, but it's the key to their method. As I've said before, I didn't expect them to deliver; yet this low- key opening should guard against hype and subsequent backlash when the album doesn't immediately deliver. It's another fine record, let's hope people's high expectation don't interfere.

was that an "industry" thing, k-reg?

Yeah.... there was one in Edinburgh, then Tokyo and NY several hours later, did anyone else go?

nickdastoor: Oops, I spelled 'diapers' wrong.

Hm, never struck me before reading this thread:
dia (ancient Greek) = "through"
per (Latin) = "through"
Quite an unconvincing name for the thing, considering its supposed function, eh?

so, now that it's out and about on filesharing services, i can state that i really enjoy this record, perhaps even more than their last full-length. very hypnotic, controlled progressions. the song 'julie and candy' is phenomenally good.

I've looked many different places on the web, but for whatever reason haven't been able to find an answer to this question:

WTF is "Disengage"? Is it a Warp records promo? A radio show? Something else? I've only seen it as two long MP3 files, labelled "Side A" and "Side B", and totalling about 35 minutes, suggesting that it's a vinyl release. Yet when I look for info, I can find nothing. It's got Nlogax, Turquoise Hexagon Sun, Roygbiv, etc.

I just found it. I've listened to it a couple times in peripheral, so I haven't really digested it yet. There's nothing on it that firmly caught my attention, it sounds very comfortable, very much like them. It'll take some time, I suppose...for them it usually does.

Re "Disengage", the answer is, it seems:

it's a compilation from the 'hi scores' ep and 'music has the right to children' album, which was put together by skam and broadcast on local radio in england on a skam radio show. the tracks are available on easy-to-get releases.

Oh fiddlesticks.

http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1509223292

Fragments of unknown music heard on crackling distant short-wave radio, the signal fading in and out, melding with disparate voices, counting, volcanic documentaries, molten larva, pools teeming with life, traces of melody cutting across strange amorphous reverse keyboards, at turns poignant, wistful, dark and elemental, '1969 in the sunshine' going through my head like a Buddhist chant. Head full of flu, but I'm in love with ‘Geogaddi’.

Manifesto of the Children of the Analog(ue) Baroque

Did anyone ever attend an elementary school built in the 1970's? Mine was, and I still remember the very colors and fonts on the wall. I still remember the huge white numbers painted over the ROYGBIV walls in the pod-like enclaves for each grade. kindergarten=ORANGE, first 1=yellow, 2=green, 3=blue, 4=purple, 5=red. Those letters were so cool too, lowercased and vertically arranged on the wall in the hallway entrance to each 'pod'. that school was so badass. everything was in lowercase letters, it was full of sunroofs, it had an atrium with a rocky pathway that cut through the plants, a very cool lunch room with long tables, 'psychedelic' trays, and chairs that were blue, orange, or black. we would hope to be in the same color chair as a pretty girl and make fun of the guy who was in the same color chair as an ugly one. That was when i was truly happy and content. When all that mattered was the playground, Children's Television Workshop, Star Wars, Atari or even the Odyssey 2, and Little League. We watched all the film strips and videos (remember those big discs that you inserted like a card) with the analog synths in the background. BoC bring it all back home. Their music seems to make me yearn for such nostalgia. However, the BoC music seems to pull those deja vu moments out of the deep chasms in our minds but we know very well we cannot go back to those days. There is a sense of detachment in the music of the BoC as well. It's a strange gestalt. I know someone out there has had similar memories and would have to agree. Some of us whether we know it or not are Chilren of the Analog Baroque. When George Lucas infected every child's mind. When Francois Truffaut communicated with little greys with an ARP modular. We proudly wore those ringer shirts with 3/4 length sleeves with the same color as the collar and a number 88. Our dads had mustaches and beards and wore corduroy pants while our mothers had sexy feathered haircuts like Charlie's Angels. Even Dolly Madison cakes had a cool logo(she was hot for a 2 dimensional face without a nose). We had the boardgame Operation, then Pong, then PacMan and then the Commodore 64. As children, we saw the death of John Lennon and Steve McQueen. Oh, those were much simpler days. Perhaps our best years are gone. When there was a chance for happiness. But we wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in us now. No, we wouldn't want them back.

I love it... Its awailable on AUDIOGALAXY AS FULLABLUM ZIP 44MB ;)

THAT, mitch, was exactly what i was trying to avoid in my review, in case you were wondering.

Regular readers may be surprised to know that on a whim I bought this record today.

and?

Yeah I'm really curious too.

Come on, Tom. We need to know.

Hey Tom, if the "chamber music of childhood" factor begins to grate, you can always pretend it's a concept album about the waco debacle.

i found this page via google btw. why is this not sitting well? my stomach is getting upset listening to it, it's so good. overcome with emotion is what i mean.

Jamesebee

Blimey give me time! Well OK, this afternoon I listened to it twice. First listen: hmm it's quite good. Second listen: oh wait a minute no it's not. Other thoughts: "I wish I hadn't lost my Position Normal CD"; "Why do they bother putting beats on?" The beats thing ended up annoying me more than the general gloopiness, which works well for the first half-dozen tracks then gets tiresome.

But this is on two listens - I've paid my money for the fucker now so I'm committed to giving it a decent go, and perhaps my front room when I'm trying to work isn't the best context.

Jess, I thought your review was very incisive. It's the best review of Geogaddi I've read. My post above was meant to be tongue-in-cheek(ripping off quotes from Momus and Samuel Beckett).I will insist, however, that the BoC aesthetic cannot be fully separated from the "mid-70's fantasia" and that's a good thing. Moog and ARP synths have always been eerie, not just 20-30 years later. Like prewar rosewood Martins, the classic synths just get better with age. The BoC are more than one trick ponies too. I would surmise that MHTRTC could partially be a reference Charles Mingus' 1971 Let My Children Hear Music, a dense, multi-layered work. Have you noticed that Geogaddi is 66 minutes and 6 seconds long?

bryan: thanks. i wasn't trying to be snarky upthread. i had just been joking with mitch - concurrently as i was writing the review - that i kept going off on really lame "flights of fancy." actually, i liked yr post a lot. i'd have written something like that, except i'm no good at concept reviews.

Have been listening to Geogaddi for the past 2 days. When I first got MHTRTC, I was hooked immediately & expected the same with Geogaddi. Initial thoughts were "this doesn't sound at all like BoC", but given repeated listenings, it engulfs you like a warm tide.

Was reading some earlier responses on how BoC incorporates music & sounds from old 70's documentaries from the NFB (National Film Board). I am Canadian and a product of the 70's school system. I bought MHTRTC on an internet recommendation and had no idea who BoC were, but got chills when I heard Wildlife Analysis from MHTRTC for the first time. Back then the NFB had produced a series of short (1- 2 mins) vignettes describing various Canadian wildlife. These clips were shown mainly on the government-run CBC network (who else would show them?). Riveting stuff -- "The woodchuck is a lonely creature who makes his home in old logs..." etc. If anyone wants a prime example of the source of much of BoC's "70's nostalgic" fuzz, the theme music to these clips is it. You can actually view these clips on-line (on a government web site, no less), just do a search on "Hinterland's who's who" on your favourite search engine. May not seem like much, but compare this theme to Wildlife Analysis and then make up your mind.

This track, similar music and samples throughout the album, along with the sounds of children and their laughter, all combine to evoke a very strong feeling of childhood nostalgia for myself, anyway. I can't help but link much of MHTRTC back to films I've seen in school or on TV. While this is not the main reason I listen to BoC, it is certainly a draw: the fact that someone has tapped a distant, shared memory of a blank, obscure time and place -- 70's Canada (cripes, what, if anything, ever happened there -- We all know the important stuff only happens out in New York or LA) -- and incorporated it into some of the most beautiful music ever recorded.

Anyhow, I'm a little off topic, but thought I'd put in my 2 cents (pence?) after reading some posts regarding the 70's film links in BoC's music.

Back to Geogaddi -- f'g Brilliant. More rhythmic, swoopy, definitely darker. Feels like a pirate radio transmission you were never meant to hear, but doing so may have revealed you to Forces best left unknown. It could be bad: They may know you now. Good thing I stopped doing acid a long time ago, the beats and swirling synths on "1969" and "Opening The Mouth" would have me chewing the wallpaper. It would be wholly unfair to compare Geogaddi with the transcendant MHTRTC. Geogaddi is a different road, one that I, for one, am happy to travel.

Is there any actually music for the last track "magic window" on Geogaddi? I have the vinyl version and on the last side there is only a small engraving of a family holding hands. It lists 'magic window' as a song though and it is written on the record label for the last side. This album is quite amazing though. Anybody that has it and doesn't like it keep listening. It has grown leaps and bounds on me only in the first three days.

Not on my copy. I put it through some audio editing software and it flat-lined.

Let My Children Hear Music is an interesting record and I'm not sure whether it totally comes off. Teo Macero produced, and very much tried to do here what he'd done for Miles from In A Silent Way onwards - i.e. looping sections of music, multitracking (though of course, as every schoolboy knows, Mingus was first at doing this with Black Saint in '63). Some of it is a bit too rich and overlapping and, Sy Johnson not being Gil Evans, some of the fine detail tends to get lost. "Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife," "Don't Be Afraid The Clown's Afraid Too" and "Hobo Ho" are stone classics, however. "The Chill of Death" is musically a bit too hokum Hammer horror meets Richard Strauss with some Parker licks tacked on, but Mingus' narration is very good, sounding uncannily like Orson Welles.

Major irritant with this record of course is that, since the files got lost, we have no personnel details and no one seems to be sure who exactly does what (example: credit for tenor solo on "Hobo Ho" has ping-ponged between Bobby Jones and James Moody).

I guess I don't get it either. I put the album on and wanted to jump out the window and end my life instantly. Too much of a video game soundtrack to me.

What are some of the video games that you're playing? I'd like to get my hands on the soundtracks, at the very least.

Geogaddi is one of those records that you can't really listen to until you've spun it a few times. What i like best is the way that the vocal samples are woven into the fabric of the track, not just added on top. I've found this record a much more interesting listen than MHTRTC - none of the tracks outstay their welcome, if you know what i mean. Fave tracks are the two spooky ones "Dawn Chorus" and "the Beach at Redpoint". I have a gatefold edition with a rather wonky booklet of images in it.

Listening to it for the first time right now, and I'm quite enjoying it...though I can't help but notice that track 14 (the one I'm listening to right now) is amazingly similar to Jean-Michel Jarre or Vangelis or Tangerine Dream or something, and is therefore frighteningly close to something that is just on the edge of acceptibility for me, new-age-wise. I don't think this is going to slide into ponytail-sportin' Linda Evans-marrying kinda music, so I think I'm safe.

Early Tangerine Dream is excellent.

Yeah, a caveat: I actually like Tangerine Dream just fine, mostly. Phaedra is still one of my favourites.

I got Geogaddi the day before I left London for a quick visit to San Francisco, where I am now. I ripped the CD onto the laptop, and listened to it on that looooong flight over, and I'm listening to it now as I stare out of the hotel window at the mass of industrial buildings, bridges and the Bay in the distance... to say that the music makes an intensely evocative soundtrack to staring out of windows at strange sights is an understatement. Flying over the Icelandic glaciers to Alpha and Omega was almost lysergic.

Childhood melancholia, someone said, and that's very close. About a decade ago, in my mid-twenties, I took some LSD and went wandering on Hampstead Heath (a big and quite wild area in North London, beloved of Blake, Constable and loads of others). Going through a heavily wooded part, I found a path lined with privet hedges. I grew up in a garden with similar paths: the sudden burst of incredible emotion this discovery produced was so overwhelming that I had to sit down and catch my breath. It wasn't like being a child again, but the sheer cascade of long-forgotten images and emotions brought my childhood back to me with an intensity that cannot be expressed in words. The whole fabric of being a child was recalled, overlaid with an awareness of how my personality had changed in the intervening years.

BoC - both with Music Has The Right... and now Geogaddi -- produces a very similar (but thankfully much, much more wistful and less powerful) experiences. I don't know how they do it: of course those distant children's voices are a big part, but the production and progressions make it much more than just a pushbutton trick.

As for Geogaddi versus MHTRTC, who can say. I'm still not finished with MHTRTC, and yes Geogaddi is similar and yes it's different. I've only heard it through about five times, and that's nowhere near enough.

One thing, though. I'm very, very glad BoC do whatever it is they do. These two albums are worth a year of Top 40.

RW

Yeah right, if that year was 1952 maybe.

I will try again with the CD today. It just seems so... obvious somehow, you know? I think though this might be one of those cases where I like the follow-up bands more than the originators - ISAN's Beautronics does similar things but its clicky fragility touches me in ways that BoC just can't (so far).

still not sure about this one yet. it seems more obvious, but somehow less obvious at the same time. i took a while to get into Music Has The Right To Children as well though.

Not as immediately captivating as first. On second listen thought I was listening to MBV! Hope it's a grower.

Indeed I also thought I was listening to an MBV offshoot as the "warped" effect appears to be present right the way through my copy of "Geogaddi." I am unsure whether this is deliberate or whether I've got a duff pressing. It would also appear that without the "warp" this would in fact turn out to be very ordinary New Age electronica and that BoC may in fact be a one-trick pony.

Does anyone else's copy "warp" or is it just me (I have tried it on four different CD players, all in otherwise perfect working order, with the same effect)?

The album has alot of pitch shifting in it, maybe that's what sounds like "warping" to you. CD's don't warp, man.

I disagree, Tom. I think groups like ISAN are the ones who sound obvious (though I do like them), taking the most direct and simple aspects of the BoC-like sound--childlike melodies, wistfulness, fragility, etc.--and building their entire sonic oevure with them. With BoC, on the other hand, there are undertones--menace, vague dread, grittiness (often if not always overlooked)--that are less salient, and thus perhaps more difficult to co-opt. With _Geogaddi_, it seems like they've brought those aspects more to the fore (though still with characteristic subtlety), and I really think it raises the bar. Just curious, Tom: have you listened to it in a nice set of headphones yet? There are some low frequencies that are absolutely devastating--they envelop you in a way that doesn't happen with ordinary room speakers. I hope you end up liking it, anyway.

"CD's (sic) don't warp, man."

Which is why I put the word "warp" in inverted commas, fuckwit.

Can somebody please give me a SERIOUS and NON-ARSEY response to my query?

Marcello - yeah, that sound/effect is there.

Clarke - oddly enough, I think it's the "undertones" of unease etc I find most banal, in the way that pointing out that ice cream van chimes are "spooky" is banal (though ice cream van sampling can be great - see Earth Leakage Trip's "The Ice Cream Van From Hell", a record with no depth but a lot of bottom). I'm more drawn to ISAN maybe because they strip this stuff out - also because their little- clicks rhythm aesthetic is way better than BOC's big clumping Warp breakbeats.

The pretty-much unbeatable yardstick in records-about-the-condition- of-childhood is still Position Normal though. Who were clearly inspired by BOC, so good for BOC on that account at least.

I did enjoy Geogaddi more on headphones - I was still itching to hear something else by about track 13, though. But if I'm going to get into it that's the way to do it.

I love Tom's sarky one-line response.

I can't answer your query, Marcello, but I can say that some of the bits of MHTRTC that others find incredibly evocative *always* bored me. Their best moment for me remains "Nlogax", the funkiest they've ever got and the furthest from any risk that anyone might even think of invoking those dreaded words "New Age".

Still not heard Geogaddi.

Being relatively young around here, I heard MBV and Boards of Canada for the first time around the same period. I do think the comparisons are based on the "warp" thing if you mean the sort of vague blurry sheets of melody that seem to be melting all over the place. I actually thought my copy of "Loveless" was screwed up at first, as in that context the "warp" sound was much less expected than in BOC records.

There's definitely a bit of a wobble at the beginning of the album, though not as mind bending as the MBV is on first listen...still would be enough to make me run to the stereo if it was a vinyl or cassette copy.

Status report: favourite track now is number 21. Track 14 still reminds me of Tangerine Dream.

Well on my copy it runs all the way through the CD (particularly noticeable on tracks 2, 10, 19 and 20) as if the thing had been mastered from an off-centre vinyl album. All I want to know is whether or not this is deliberate MBV-type distortion to conceal the fact that BoC are suffering the same aesthetic crisis as the Cocteaus '85-6, i.e. impending New Ageism if they're not careful.

I will probably email BoC/Warp Records themselves as I'm clearly not going to get a proper answer from the morons on this board.

So much for requests for information. Thanks a fucking bundle.

I don't really get BoC either. There's a Baxendale lyric which goes "we could break into our old school / and just lie on the tennis courts / listening to the Boards of Canada", and it's such a lovely image that when I eventually bought MHtRtC it couldn't really live up to how I had imagined them.

Marcello. You asked - is this warping effect apparent on other peoples' copies of Geogaddi? I said it was on mine (and nothing 'sarky' about it, Robin, as it happens). You try to be helpful and you get called a 'moron'.

As I read it, "Tom's sarky one-line response" = "Yeah right, if that year was 1952 maybe."

Sorry Tom, it read as though RC was referring to your reply to me.

To my study, Sanderson. Double quick.