Boards of Canada: Classic or Dud?

White Cyclosa is one of their most unsettling tracks but also I reckon the main melody is the same as in this Stargate SG-1 cue.

Can be heard at 3:24 here:

https://youtu.be/FqqKJhN8fZo

This is intriguing. Care to expound?

― Totally different head. Totally. (Austin)

i don't know how to expound. do you _not_ feel the crushing weight of utter and complete hopelessness, despair, and futility when you listen to it? do you check it out and go "yeah that's some sick jamz alright"?

Not exactly. . . but I guess I should say that I sort of get that vibe from most of BoC's music. Some of it less so, to be certain, but Tomorrow's Harvest doesn't strike me as especially so in that regard.

Sidebar, but I often consider it as maybe their best overall record. But that's like picking a favorite ice cream flavor for me; even my least favorites are still pretty good and satisfying.

Would very much love to hear some new music from them — especially this year. It would be fantastic if they did release new music and, through doing so, finally exposed the fact that they have been communicating with their home world with their music this entire time and the aliens finally show up. Because if that's going to be the case with any music makers out there, I want it to be them.

☺

All the crazy marketing stuff, pre Tomorrow's Harvest, was fun, I remember watching some live-streamed video clip that was broadcast from a screen near the Shibuya crossing in Tokyo, sharing in the excitement of the people that had gathered there to watch some daft little video snippet late in the evening.

Oh, and Elvis Telecom going out to the weird desert playback session too...!

It would be fantastic if they did release new music and, through doing so, finally exposed the fact that they have been communicating with their home world with their music this entire time and the aliens finally show up. Because if that's going to be the case with any music makers out there, I want it to be them.

― Totally different head. Totally. (Austin)

you and i are coming from very different headspaces, my friend

And you are still my friend, Kate. Isn't music wonderful?

thought this was a pretty good BoC rip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNUILIt70MY

That YouTube clip is Celebrate, whatever that song's called. Recognised the Yahoo and then it used more and more of it.

If you have a copy of NI's Kontakt, the best BoC rip is getting any of the AudioWarp products and making your own

Oh, and Elvis Telecom going out to the weird desert playback session too...!

Seven years down the line, Tomorrow's Harvest is now one of my very favorite records. In my head it's superseded the collapse documentary soundtrack trappings and (I'll never describe this correctly) lifts up time's fabric from the continuum and gives you a look. My place in the overall scale of the universe might be tiny as hell but instead of despair, I get a brief rush of cosmic overview effect.

otm

I love Audiowarp, I have all of thems instruments.

I envy TH fans. I never ever managed to get into it, apart from one or two tracks. It always seemed very thin musically but I guess I’m the one missing out

i don't know how to expound. do you _not_ feel the crushing weight of utter and complete hopelessness, despair, and futility when you listen to it? do you check it out and go "yeah that's some sick jamz alright"?

― Kate (rushomancy), Saturday, August 15, 2020 1:22 PM (three days ago)

I definitely get this feeling when listening to it, but its despairing emotions are counterbalanced by beauty and mysticism for me, largely influenced by the setting of the album: California and its deserts. The cover is a forlorn and empty looking San Francisco cityscape as seen from Alameda. The music video for Reach For the Dead is filmed in or near the Mojave, which is where the secret location for the first listening party was. Driving around that desert and in places like Death Valley feel like a perfect setting for the album. You take in the overwhelmingly intense beauty and simultaneous desolation of what appears to be a post apocalyptic natural landscape simultaneously which completely fits the emotional bill of the record for me.

Considering the album's cover art, the band's affinity for the Oakland underground hip hop scene (remixes for Odd Nosdam and cLOUDDEAD) as well as their hippie tendencies, I often wonder if Oakland is their 2nd home or something

first time i connected with tomorrow's harvest was on a road trip through deserty places over the weekend. it's perfect for the road. i don't even know what really made it snap into place for me. it has a nice dynamic range so it sort of fades in and out over the sounds of driving. obviously very cinematic. i guess i just needed to find the right cinema for it. as far as crushing weight of hopelessness and despair goes, idk, i just admire that it doesn't flinch from the present - a virtue that i find strangely uplifting.

Tomorrow's Harvest is dreich and apocalyptic as fuck. Certainly unlike their other albums, but not without its merit. That said, I listened to the first album the other day and it's a lot bleaker and less colourful than how I remember

I’ve always heard them as pretty bleak, with a few very pointed exceptions: ROYGBIV, that celebratory pair in the middle of CH.

Even Beautiful Place is creepybeautiful.

my favorite mood of theirs is more ~hazy stoned meditative~ a la “wildlife analysis”, “olson”, “kid for today”

Aquarius has a really unique mix of funk/dark dreamy vibes/whimsey

Parts of Geogaddi scare me, like the samples about Branch Davidianism...

Parts of Geogaddi scare me, like the samples about Branch Davidianism...

In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country (the EP) is more beautiful than creepy and the best thing they've ever done imo. I like all of their albums tho, especially the first two for Warp.

Geogaddi terrifies me the most by a significant margin.

I do not get hopelessness from any Boards of Canada I've listened to

Me neither – it's too cartoonish for that (in a good way, of course).

Their sound, that is.

It’s not even that it’s cartoonish. With the possible exception of a couple of Geogaddi tracks I only half-remember, I do not hear anything remotely frightening, depressing, or oppressive in their music. In fact, I pulled out The Campfire Headphase this afternoon in response to the discourse on this thread and found it extremely relaxing, pleasant, and invigorating.

I once played Geogaddi at work and was told to "turn that spooky ghost shit off right now" lol

that's what's appealing about them though isn't it? their music is spoOoOoky without necessarily using the common signifiers of spooky music

In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country (the EP) is more beautiful than creepy and the best thing they've ever done imo.

Every couple years I read praise like this, give the EP another try, and wind up scratching my head. To me it's utterly boring.

geogaddi was my first boc record, and before tomorrow's harvest it was definitely the darkest/most disturbing one. the backwards masking, the disturbing distorted voices that would ordinarily sound calming but instead sound like what happens to all my skype calls after about 20 minutes - yeah, i definitely get a manson family/branch davidian vibe from them, when they talk about 1969 they're not talking about woodstock

as terrifying as that is, the manson family murders were in the past, the branch davidian conflagration is in the past. yeah there's something "retro-future" about tomorrow's harvest, but it's, you know. the past inside the present, if you will. i "know", don't really "know" intellectually but feel in my gut, where things are going with the environment, "know" that nothing will change that, "know" that of all the things going extinct, the most terrible of these is hope. and for me, tomorrow's harvest is an incredibly vivid, incredibly immediate chronicle of that process. even now, the only hope i have left is this: i hope to god i'm wrong, about _everything_.

i had the impression that campfire headphase was considered chill and pretty but i haven't listened in a loooooong time.

i think there is definitely an unsettling mood that is sustained throughout tomorrow's harvest. i get that their music is pretty enigmatic and suggestible but imo there's an undeniable sensation that it's a soundtrack to a future-past film about climate change or nuclear holocaust or the like, supported by the titles of the album and the songs.

xp to gd you gotta get stoned and hear it on a good system maaaaan it is totally gorgeous and singular in their catalogue for being so austere and restrained but it really opens up...

The Campfire Headphase is on the more positive end of their trademark vibes, sure, but even before Geogaddi, you can easily picture Beth Gibbons delivering a sad torch song over 'Turquoise Hexagone Sun' and there's an unsettling urgency to 'Rue the Whirl'. Come to think of it, 'Sixtyten' can also be rightly described as menacing.

xps

and yeah, that's very obviously a non-universal experience. a lot of my experiences with music are non-universal. but there's something between "personal" and "universal" and tomorrow's harvest is there. when i hear that record i understand that it's not just me.

boards of canada is music of mass suicide, of philosophical pessimism. it's also occult music, there are things they go out of their way to hide.

geogaddi has a couple pointedly spooky tracks imo - "gyroscope" and "devil in the details", but that's about it

tomorrow's harvest is desolate but not spooky

and yeah, there's darkness in "music has the right to children" (music does, but we don't, not anymore). the percussion on "telephasic workshop". "aquarius" (and again, think of what the age of aquarius _means_ to them) - 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", it's entrancing and hypnotic and also, you know, wherever that's going it's not anywhere safe or healthy or good, that's some "a page of madness" shit.

i find all of that to be really funny tbh

I don't really care about the intertext tbh. I've always connected with it as absolute music, so the subliminal stuff about cults and mass suicide and survivalism doesn't shine through at all when I'm listening. The fact that I got into BoC when I was 14 and Music Has the Right to Children had come out a year prior probably has something to do with it as I had no context for their music when it fell into my lap, except maybe something like 'There is no dark side of the moon, really…'

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

This reminds me that I've been meaning to start a thread about the ways in which we, as listeners, actively or subconsciously decontextualize music that tends towards the programmatic.

i don't really care much about references either but boc is quintessential 'stoner music' to me. also feel like they were always essaying about alien lifeforms on planet earth - like, that's the nature of the menace or disturbing element in their sound.

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.

I'm not familiar with too much beyond MHTRTC but their early material has this woozy/warbly character that can be unsettling... similar to the quality of 70s film projectors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYoDINXAo7w

xp!

like they sounds like my 3M Minnesota "computers with big tape reels are our future" childhood

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