Geogaddi: The Poll

xp no "nlogax" no credibility

Voted for “Alpha And Omega” yesterday & it occurred to me just now that with this poll wrapping up on Halloween I might not even remember that fact unless I put it on the record now. Could’ve voted for any number of Geogaddi cuts, it’s a record I love, but “Alpha And Omega” has a sort of forceful menace to it that feels unique in the BoC catalogue and I thought it might otherwise be overlooked.

"beach at redpoint" is probably the creepiest moment so that's the correct choice for me.

How I'm voting as well

I picked

Uh whoops. I picked Beach as my favorite too, but I'd always thought it was one of the least creepiest on this album! At least compared to the more outwardly/intentionally "unsettling" stuff with disembodied voices like Devil is in the Details. "Haunting" feels like a better descriptor than "creepy" in this case... but even that doesn't really feel accurate to me personally; I think it's a very pretty song honestly lol.

I was not the biggest fan of this album the first 5x i heard it... now I love it more and more every time I listen to it. I love most of BOC's output (even Campfire Headphase, which IS awesome even if it drags at the end) so I'm not sure if I'd say it's their best or my favorite. But it's the one that feels the most rewarding on repeated listens easily.

Idk if creepy is exactly what I get from it; "hypnotic" maybe? If it's pretty, it's much less conventionally so than a lot of BoC, with those layers of dissonance - and the blurred, distant voices.

I guess dissonance between layers is common on this album tbf.

Music is Math or Alpha and Omega, probably.

Instinctively it's Julie And Candy. What an incredible sounding album - great for clearing out the ears, and a room.

I'm a little surprised at the love for Alpha & Omega. It was a standout on first few listens but it makes me think of hippies sat around banging "tablas" over a JMJ record. Not so much menace as overbearing joss-stick fug. Still alright though.

I hadn't listened to this start-to-finish in a long time so I did before voting. It's still how I remember - exhausting, especially in headphones or in the car. There's a lot going on with each individual sound and I suppose it doesn't help that I work in audio. My ears just glom onto the weird things going on and I try to dissect everything. I wonder what they would do with a modern pop factory studio where 80, 90+ tracks are going - each one tweaked to an inch of its life.

I really like any time a Geogaddi song comes on shuffle, but what's great about relistening to it now is staying with it when you hit the run of Dawn Chorus, Diving Station, and You Could Feel The Sky. I voted for one of those.

Dawn Chorus sounds like Moby's Porcelain being played on two out of sync turntables and i think that's what frustrates me about the majority of The Campfire Headphase

Just gave this a quick once through for the first time in ages. Favourites are still Corsair and 1969 and it's not a patch on Tomorrow's Harvest. Voting Corsair

this is quite interesting lol

https://soundcloud.com/ujdaq/porcelain-chorus-moby-boards?ref=clipboard

glad I'm not the only one who thought this

N
Eden 2w

Good comments upthread. I love many of these songs but never listen to the album as a whole, unlike their other records. Feels exhausting.
I'll vote for Music is Math (although for me it only makes sense whith the Ready Let's Go intro). Love the tone on that one and tha track seems to encapsulate their whole thing: codes and numbers + traces of the past (inside the present).

I agree with it being exhausting. I listened to Hi Scores last night... gawd it’s pretty much perfect

it's a whole album of 'deep cuts', so to speak, save for maybe Music Is Maths and 1969, which strike me as the pop singles on here.

agree w that. Kinda feel like I should pick one of the deep cuts within the deep cuts here, but that wouldn't be the track I like the most. Appropriately, the one I do like the most is the one DL thinks sounds like it should be on Campfire Headphase (if I'm understanding him correctly): Dawn Chorus.

btw feel like it's not really a BOC thread until DL shits on Campfire Headphase lol

haha. I really tried to hold off this time

Not dl, but it's not uppermost in my mind when I think about their finest moments.

I once read in an interview that they purposefully created Campfire Headphase as a positive, untroubled listening experience- a place to go when you need to inhabit a restorative space for a while

in that spirit I certainly thrashed it during a time in my life when I was coming home from work stressed and unhappy - there are times when I want the dread & darkness of Geogaddi or Tomorrow's Harvest but not always

The relative ambiguity of Music Has the Right to Children suited them best.

still feel Tomorrow's Harvest is their masterpiece LP

IABPOITC probably my favourite release of theirs, but I'd gladly listen to any of their albums or EPs at the right moment - I don't consider any of them weak

PS I don't quite know how to describe this feeling but the idea that BOC might one day release new music somehow BLOWS MY MIND like nothing else in my music fandom? it would be like a new Syd Barrett LP or something.

Take heart, The Symbol Remains will be out next month.

still feel Tomorrow's Harvest is their masterpiece LP

correct take

i also feel that way but this was my favorite before it came out

Take heart, The Symbol Remains will be out next month.

― pomenitul, Wednesday, September 2, 2020 12:50 AM (eight hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol.

Not shitting on it but Campfire Headphase is def the weakest of the bunch for me, too. The others are still in fairly regular rotation. They'll never top IABPOITC though; it's revenant.

Geogaddi is the first of theirs I got into and probably remains my favourite, though MHTRTC and Harvest are of equal quality.

They'll never top IABPOITC though; it's revenant.

Good way of putting it!

I think the pre TCH stuff now sounds (perhaps unsurprisingly) relatively adolescent (which is obviously not at all a necessarily bad thing in rock n' roll!), While TH is clearly a mature work. I'm glad they've grown up rather than not grown up. TCH I admire more than love most of the time. IABPOITC is... a little but boring aside from Kid For Today which rules.

Err, 'adolescent' doesn't strike me as the right descriptor at all, doubly so when you consider that Michael Sandison was born in 1970 and Marcus Eoin in 1971.

I'm not unaware of their ages, I'm almost exactly the same age as the latter and would happily confess to being relatively adolescent as a ~25 year old compared with how I am now. Neoteny is endemic in much of our generation donchaknow. Nonjudhment. But it's a sense of the art not them as people. It is alittle ironic because of olcoutse they conspicuously play with childhood images and themes. But basically it's a positive regarding the later work.

A great deal of 'IDM' / electeonica in the 90s played heavily with literal juvenilia. These guys came along as elder teens in comparison.

I will accept that literal juvenilia might not be the right term but I think you will know to what it is I refer.

Not sure I agree with any of this tbh – BoC always struck me as having a fully-formed vision from the mid-90s onwards – and when they play with childhood tropes it feels like a young adult's game, quite unlike, say, Animal Collective, who always gave me the sense they'd never truly moved past adolescence.

Young adult / adolescent. I think these are about the same thing here. Particularly as compared with everything they've released from TCH onwards.

Speaking for myself, the shift from teenager to young adult was a quantum leap forward, even in retrospect.

There's by definition further maturing to be done from "young adult". I dunno, this seems like semantics. A young adult's game is unlikely to be a middle aged person's game.

Of course there is, but it’s still a massive step up from the crass immaturity of adolescence as far as I’m concerned. YMMV, I suppose.

I'm not equating adolescence with teenage, or even especially crass immaturity . I'm talking about *relatively* adolescent concerns, attitudes and perspective. And in terms of what's at play in the work rather than people who I don't know obviously.

ugh mature work blegh, do not want

the stuff before geogaddi I just love listening to. the stuff after I don’t. bring on adolescence.

their overall sound got uglier and less pleasant once they got better gear or whatever. and lost character. everything just sounded more and more sterilized, like the synths became a slick VST of whatever they did before. all the haze disappeared.

Vs. artists repeating what they did twenty years ago and becoming progressively less relevant.

This is awfully pseudy but fuckit - earlier I happened to be half listening to a podcast in which they were talking about h4untology and 4ccelerationism and... something about how the preoccupation with a haunted past or the past haunting the present was an intriguing and fun response to perceived stasis but innevitably ran out of steam (so to speak). This tendency that BoC was a cool bellwether for therefore ended, certain headless horsemen still being flogged notwithstanding. So that was culturally a precursor or 'adolescence' if you will for, well, whatever it was that came or is still to come. To BoCs real credit they were quick to recognise this for themselves and take different approaches.

yeah I see what you mean. It’s a catch-22 cliche, right? Repeat yourself and risk diluting the magic, try something new and risk losing the magic.

my hot take is that they stopped enjoying or being excited by making music some time around geogaddi.

Sad to see Campfire still being dismissed 15 years later.

Don't think anyone's dismissing it, just seems to be most people's least favourite.

how did I manage to miss the opening track to their 2001 ATP show? (I somehow thought it was a sound check/intro kinda thing, but it's like their answer to Eno's An Ascent)

https://youtu.be/fjrPpzNeNZ0

(don't read the comments)

one of my friends recently casually mentioned that he saw that show and I was pretty near speechless with envy

their Warp10 set is worth a listen too
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGQ6Sp2JuPA

the devil is in the details

Thanks, it is! xp

the gyroscope devil gysroscope is gyroscope in gyroscope the gyroscope. details

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

hmmmm

DAWN CHORUS? What even happens in that song?

Plenty. It may be the only track I can easily conjure in my head from the title alone!

Sending a team of lawyers to rescind the count

Yes, this is an irregular result.