I have been worried that the brothers’s new effort has not received the amount of attention it deserves. So to boost its profile a bit, here is a little something I prepared earlier (actually for their label, local indie imprint Warp Records).
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We live in an age of over-exposure. Too many artists actively strip away their mystique, promoting a public persona first and the music a distant second. Going against the grain of our time, Boards of Canada remain an enigma. Rarely photographed, seldom interviewed, performing live just a handful of times over the last thirty years, Boards of Canada let the music speak for itself.
Where some of their peers in left-field electronica cultivate a quirkily charismatic public profile, Boards of Canada earned their cult love through the records alone – the beautiful, eerie music and the beautiful, eerie artwork wrapped around it. They don’t have an image, instead their sounds have an unique power to conjure images in your head. As developed on the landmark album Music Has The Right to Children (1998) - which was featured in Pitchfork magazine’s list of the greatest albums of the 1990s – Boards of Canada’s trademark style of detuned synths and blurry textures have the elegiac quality of faded family photographs, blotchy Super-8 films, worn-out tapes and beloved vinyl spun so often the playback is pocked with scratches and surface noise. It’s an aesthetic that’s been hugely influential, spawning numerous outright imitators, shaping an entire genre known as hauntology, and affecting mainstream artists as influential in their own right as Radiohead, whose Thom Yorke credits Boards of Canada as a major inspiration during their experimental Kid A / Amnesiac era.
The Boards of Canada sound palette has even crept into pop music, via widely used audio software like Reason and Logic, which contains kits that digitally simulate the analogue-sourced, wavering off-pitch sounds they pioneered, sometimes titling them after specific Boards of Canada tunes like “Roygbiv.” Their songs have also been directly sampled by cloud rap and trap artists such as $uicideboy$, Lil B, Travis Scott, Clams Casino, Yung Lean and Lil Peep, and by the ambient R&B singer Solange. Indirectly and directly, Boards of Canada have contributed to making the sound of chartpop and rap radio weirder and spookier.
But although Boards of Canada are innovators, their music never loses touch with the timeless qualities that make for lasting music: beauty and emotion. They are contemporary electronic music’s preeminent melodists. From “Roygbiv” through “1969” and “Oscar See Through Red Eye” to the new album’s “You Retreat In Time and Space”, their records overflow with gorgeous tunes – elongated melody lines that ripple across many bars (a rare thing in electronic music, which tends to work with vamps and riffs). The duo - Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin, brothers despite the different surnames – have spoken about how they are not primarily concerned with making dance music, but instead see rhythms as “just a vehicle for carrying strange and beautiful melodies. As far as we're concerned the important thing is that you can whistle our tunes”.
Although often positioned alongside Warp labelmates like Aphex Twin and Autechre as one of the three giants of electronica, the group have more in common with esoteric postpunk and industrial outfits like Devo, Coil, Nine Inch Nails, and Nurse With Wound, or with shoegaze pioneers like Cocteau Twins and My Bloody Valentine. Boards of Canada records are exercises in world-building: Sandison and Eoin are dreamscape gardeners who dissolve the boundary between musician and magician. The brothers have talked about their belief that music involves “powers… that are almost supernatural… You actually manipulate people with music, and that is definitely what we are trying to do.” Fans and critics alike testify to their music’s uncanny capacity for triggering buried memories. As unsettling as it is therapeutic, their music seems to reach back into your personal prehistory and part the mists of time.
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Parting those mists to trace back to the group’s own beginnings… we find ourselves in the early 1980s, when the brothers started experimenting with tape editing as children. “We used to chop up shortwave radio recordings on an ancient portable recorder, and make tunes out of them by punching-in and layering tracks in a crude way,” they told an early interviewer. By the end of the 1980s, they had evolved into something closer to a band, with a line-up that included guitar, bass, and live drums (as opposed to the programmed beats and looped breakbeats of their later work). There was even, occasionally, a sung vocal, rather than the artfully deployed samples and soundbites they would become famous for. Boards of Canada’s models then were “experimental atmospheric rock groups” like My Bloody Valentine and Cocteau Twins. Something of that dreampop vibe lingered on into their later famous work: a tonally warped blurriness, a misty-minded mood on the threshold between dreaming and wide-awake. “Like when you glaze over when you're listening to something, but you're still there at the same time."
Gradually Sandison and Eoin homed in on a distinctive set of sonic procedures that no one had yet thought to work with (although many would follow in their wake). They became fascinated with the fragility and fallibility of recording mediums, their specific rate of decay, and how this degradation of the material husk of memory added an extra layer of elegiac poignancy to the memories captured in a photograph or a cassette recording. So Boards of Canada started to apply “a process of corruption” to elements within their music, always preferring analogue effects to digital methods. They might run some parts of a track through a defective tape recorder. In one case, they took a whistle melody and “bounced it back and forward between the internal mics of two tape-decks until the sound started disappearing into hell. Like when you look at an image reflected within two mirrors forever, in the distance it gets darker and greener and murkier." By this point, Sandison and Eoin were working in their own studio as members of the Hexagon Sun artists collective, based in an area of rugged beauty to the south of Edinburgh called the Pentland Hills.
Apart from some early tapes heard only by friends and family, Boards of Canada’s public life as recording artists started in do-it-yourself / release-it-yourself fashion with the 1995 album Twoismissued via their own imprint Music70, and followed the next year by a very limited-edition cassette, Boc Maxima. That same year, 1996, they formed an alliance with Skam, a rising young electronic label based in Manchester, through which they put out the EP Hi Scores. Although Boards of Canadaslotted in comfortably alongside the Autechre-style crunchy beats and askew melodies of their label mates, you could already detect a unique sweet sorrowfulness to their tunes and tones.
Skam itself allied with the Sheffield electronic music bastion Warp Records to co-release Music Has the Right To Children, the group’s classic 1998 album. Limned with a set of intertwined obsessions expressed through the track titles and the samples used – leitmotifs such as the unspoiled beauty and timeless grandeur of Nature, the grounded yet spiritual folkways of Native American tribes, the innocence and the strangeness of childhood, psychedelic and paranormal states of consciousness – Music Has A Right announced a new and different direction for electronic music. Its smudgy textures and wavering off-pitch tones stood out against a late ‘90s backdrop of digitally crisp music full of fidgety beats and ultra-finessed production. Amid this wide-awake club of sterile sound and banging beats, Boards of Canada showed that music could still be the stuff of dreams.
Many of the sampled soundbites on Music Has A Right came from pre-teen voices captured from children’s television – kids giggling, sounding out phrases like “I love you” or chirping “yeah, that’s right!”. Others were calm and kind voices of authority, redolent of a doctor or a teacher, or suggestive of the voice-over on a nature documentary. The group’s name originally came from the educational programs, wildlife docs, and animations produced by Canada’s National Film Board, a culturally innovative institution whose work had a nostalgic allure for the brothers, who had lived in the state of Alberta for a few years when their father worked there.
This Arcadian imagery carried through to their next release, the 2000 EP In A Beautiful Place Out in the Country, albeit with a softly sinister undertone. On the title track, a vocoderized speaker invites the listener to “join a religious community and live in a beautiful place out in the country" – and it takes you a while to realize that this is an offer of membership in a cult sect. Geogaddi, the duo’s much anticipated 2002 full-length sequel to Music Has A Right To Children, pushed further into the foreboding with tracks like the ominously glowing “The Devil Is In the Details”. But there’s also something close to a Boards of Canada mission statement in “Music Is Math”, whose recurring soundbite about “the past inside the present” defines the group’s obsession with the threads of history woven into the fabric of now. At a time when most electronic music, from drum & bass to trance to minimal techno, was fixated on increasingly kitschy ideas of the Future, Boards of Canada were more in tune with the truths understood by poets and novelists: Proust and his obsession with “lost time”; Faulkner, who said “the past is never dead. It’s not even past”; and Nabokov, who dismissed science fiction with the comment “the present is only the top of the past and the future does not exist” while in his memoir Speak Memory salvaged as much of his own halcyon childhood as he could mentally retrieve.
The Campfire Headphase, released in 2005, harked back to a phase of the group’s own prehistory, with shoegazey electric guitars joining the customary arsenal of vintage analog synths and carefully corroded samples. Rippling with melody, tunes like “84 Pontiac Dream” and “Satellite Anthem Icarus” were classic iterations of the group’s established style, while “Dayvan Cowboy”, the second single off the album (as the lead tune of the six-track Trans Canada Highway EP), broke out for new terrain with stirring strings and an intricate battery of crashing cymbal rolls like drum sticks splashing into a pool of mercury.
After a long, fan-frustrating gap, Tomorrow’s Harvest arrived in 2013. From track titles like “Sick Times,” “Cold Earth”, and “Come To Dust through to the ambiguous album title Tomorrow’s Harvest itself, the record is shadowed with ecological unease and survivalist undercurrents. Sonically it is steeped in the influence of horror and science fiction film scores by composers like Fabio Frizzi and John Carpenter, and draws deliberately on the soundtrack vocabulary of the “video-nasty” era of 1980s straight-to-VHS exploitation movies. Tomorrow’s Harvest was the group’s first record to break into the UK Top 10 albums chart. Even more amazingly it cracked the Billboard pop chart too - peaking at #13 - a testament to how their fanbase has grown and expanded to new generations of listeners.
Now, after their longest hiatus ever – thirteen years of silence broken only by their celebrated NTS mix Societas X Tape, created for the 30th Anniversary of Warp Records in 2019 - Sandison and Eoin return with a startling new album. Inferno substantially reinvents their sound, drawing on some of the esoteric influences audible in Societas X Tape, while building on the darker atmospheres of Tomorrow’s Harvest.
Where once the beats rolled out calm and steady, inducing a head-nodding, heavy-lidded trance, there’s new rhythmic tension and density, a crisp intricacy of layered percussion and mid-toned bass as taut as an elastic band. Adding to Inferno’s atmosphere of unrest and disquiet is an expanded role for speech soundbites, which in some cases run continuously through an entire song, or are multiply meshed and overlaid to create a feeling of babble - like voices inside your head whispering sinister insinuations. Some of these vocals exude the blank-eyed sincerity of the cult believer; others resemble the kind of admonitory or soothing voices of authority piped out of the public address system in a dystopian movie like THX 1138. Nearly all American voices and often creepily processed, the speech elements woven through Inferno sometimes recall the sampled preachers and talk radio presenters on Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life In The Bush of Ghosts. At other points, the album feels like a soundtrack for an imaginary giallo, that Italian genre of psychological horror movie known for lurid, saturated colors, disorienting camera work, and tempestuously dramatic scores by composers like Fabio Frizzi and Goblin.
Inferno is a departure in other ways too: having hitherto largely avoided the topical and concentrated on conjuring up their own dreamworld alternative to reality, Inferno is unmistakably a record attuned to the dark forces and evil actors currently at work across the planet, a response to a world consumed by delusion, untruth, and digitally-updated forms of demonology. It’s probably as close to a political statement as these mystery men will ever approach.
For Boards of Canada have always avoided anything explicit or crystal clear; they traffic in the evocative and the elusive. Everything about their music – the artwork, the track titles, the vocal samples used – is pregnant with meaning. But unlike the blabbermouth self-curators of modern music, Sandison and Eoin prefer not to spell things out, for fear of breaking the spell. “If we were to explain all the tracks and their meanings... it would ruin them for a lot of people. It's more like viewing something through the bottom of a murky glass, and that's the beauty of it."
- Simon Reynolds
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