https://bocpages.org/w/api.php?action=feedcontributions&user=Maxr&feedformat=atombocpages - the unofficial Boards of Canada fan wiki - User contributions [en]2024-03-29T11:58:53ZUser contributionsMediaWiki 1.28.0https://bocpages.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:La_Part_du_Feu&diff=6666Talk:La Part du Feu2009-06-02T18:48:10Z<p>Maxr: Created page with 'I will be transcribing this article. I can provide a translation, but that might take a while. -maxr'</p>
<hr />
<div>I will be transcribing this article. I can provide a translation, but that might take a while. -maxr</div>Maxrhttps://bocpages.org/w/index.php?title=User:Maxr&diff=6664User:Maxr2009-06-02T18:41:35Z<p>Maxr: </p>
<hr />
<div>My name is Maxime and I currently live in Canada. I enjoy typing more than I should, and thus I've been transcribing article scans. I speak both french and english, and can provide translation. So far, I've transcribbed [[Peering Out from Behind the Curtain]], [[The Last Secret of Pop]], [[Protect and Survive (interview)]] and [[Two for the No-Show]]. I plan on transcribing all articles that currently need it. I have litte knowledge in editing these articles, and they might need some additional formatting.</div>Maxrhttps://bocpages.org/w/index.php?title=Two_for_the_No-Show&diff=6663Two for the No-Show2009-06-02T18:40:55Z<p>Maxr: /* Text */</p>
<hr />
<div>"[[Two for the No-Show]]" by Will Hodgkinson<br />
<br />
== Bibliography ==<br />
* The Times, 28 Oct 2005<br />
<br />
== Text ==<br />
{{Original}}<br />
Boards of Canada are so publicity shy they make Dylan look like Robbie. Will hodgkinson gets an exclusive, reclusive interview.<br />
<br />
A fog of myth surrounds Boards of Canada. For the past decade the Scottish duo have been making beautiful instrumental music that has won them fans such as, Björk, Beck, Johnny Marr and Radiohead. Albums such as ''Music Has The Right To Children'' (1998) and ''Geogaddi'' (2002) are evocative, deliberately imperfect electronic portraits that are both elegant and threatening.<br />
<br />
But Boards of Canada hardly ever play live, rarely grant interviews, and generally take at least three years to make a record. They don't like having their photograph taken. A visit to their website will reveal nothing more than the cover art for their latest album, ''The Campfire Headphase''. The exist purely on the strength of their music.<br />
<br />
A few facts emerged over the years. Marcus Eoin and Mike Sandison (''left and right in our picture'') met as children in the late Seventies, and were inspired by American television shows such as ''The Six Million Dollar Man'' and educational programmes from the Film Board of Canada to start making music. After stints in school bands they began to work solely together, saving their pocket money to buy exotic musical instruments and spending all their free time in their self-built studio. It's only recently that they revealed that they are in fact brothers. They live in the countryside near Edinburgh, but not even their record company is quite sure where.<br />
<br />
As I wait in the Edinburgh Film House café I'm almost expecting two versions of the Emperor from ''Star Wars'' to appear, beams shooting from their fingers. But two slightly scruffy, good-looking, resoundingly normal men in their mid-thirties walk in.<br />
<br />
"We really don't care about image," says Marcus, pointing out the obvious. "We decided that if the music is good enough we'd just put the records out and not bother with anything else."<br />
<br />
"Instrumental music is evocative. As soon as you attach a face to it, you tie it down," adds Mike.<br />
<br />
Ever since they started experimenting with tape machines as children the two have been obsessed with creating the perfect sound, which explains why tit takes them so long to complete an album. Over the three-and-a-half years it took them to make ''The Campfire Headphase'' they recorded more than 400 tracks, working by themselves six or seven days a week. Don't they fear losing touch with reality?<br />
<br />
"We aim to switch everthing off at six o'clock now," says Mike, who ahs been forced to change his working methos since he became a father in 2004. "For ''Geogaddi'' we worked until 4am every day and it was hellish, so we're trying to lighten up a bit for the good of our health and our family lives."<br />
<br />
"The problem is that we're control freaks," adds Marcus. "People think of us as a couple Scottish stoners who sit around and bang out a record every few years when we can be bothered. The opposite is true."<br />
<br />
They are, by their own admission, almost impossible to work with. Their record label, Warlp, regularly receives requests from famous artists to have Boards of Canada provide remixes, to which they almost always give a civil refusal. "It got to the point where I told Warp to turn down all requests for remixes unless they were from God or Beck'" says Marcus. "Beck called a few months later."<br />
<br />
The fact that their music is mostly electronic is largely a result of their inability to work collaboratibely. "When I was in school bands," says Mike, "I would create a minimalist electronic track, and then some guy would want to ruin it with a guitar solo."<br />
<br />
"The only way we could be a traditional four-piece band," muses Marcus, "is if we cloned ourselves. Then the bassit wouldn't complain about only playing one note every eight bars."<br />
<br />
It becomes apparent that Boards of Canada have a vision so singular that it puts them at odds with pretty much everything else going on in the modern world.<br />
<br />
''The Campfire Headphase'' has a timeless quality in its blend of melody and dissonnance, and despite being made mostly on traditional instruments it sounds so much more rich and imaginative than most contemporary pop music.<br />
<br />
As they talk about their favourite films - the psychadelic surf movie ''Crystal Voyager'', Antonioni's panoramic ''Zabriskie Point'' - Mike and Marcus come across as commited to their art and curious about life. "If all goes according to plan, everything we've done so far will be just one stage in our development," Mike says, "Boards of Canada is the tip of the iceberg."<br />
<br />
== Scans ==<br />
<gallery><br />
Image:BOC-the-times-28-oct-2005.jpg<br />
</gallery><br />
<br />
== External Links ==<br />
''[[wikipedia:The Times (London)|The Times]]'', 28 Oct 2005<br />
<br />
[[Category: Articles needing transcription]]<br />
[[Category: Interviews]]<br />
[[Category: The Campfire Headphase era]]</div>Maxrhttps://bocpages.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Two_for_the_No-Show&diff=6662Talk:Two for the No-Show2009-06-02T18:20:59Z<p>Maxr: Created page with 'I will be transcribing this article. -maxr'</p>
<hr />
<div>I will be transcribing this article. -maxr</div>Maxrhttps://bocpages.org/w/index.php?title=User:Maxr&diff=6661User:Maxr2009-06-02T18:19:52Z<p>Maxr: Created page with 'My name is Maxime and I currently live in Canada. I enjoy typing more than I should, and thus I've been transcribing article scans. I speak both french and english, and can provi...'</p>
<hr />
<div>My name is Maxime and I currently live in Canada. I enjoy typing more than I should, and thus I've been transcribing article scans. I speak both french and english, and can provide translation. So far, I've transcribbed [[Peering Out from Behind the Curtain]], [[The Last Secret of Pop]], [[Protect and Survive (interview)]]. I plan on transcribing all articles that currently need it. I have litte knowledge in editing these articles, and they might need some additional formatting.</div>Maxrhttps://bocpages.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Splendid_Isolation&diff=6660Talk:Splendid Isolation2009-06-02T18:11:57Z<p>Maxr: Blanked the page</p>
<hr />
<div></div>Maxrhttps://bocpages.org/w/index.php?title=Splendid_Isolation&diff=6659Splendid Isolation2009-06-02T18:11:33Z<p>Maxr: /* Text */</p>
<hr />
<div>"[[Splendid Isolation]]" by Neil Davenport<br />
<br />
== Bibliography ==<br />
* [http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife MetroLife section], 12 Oct 2005<br />
* ISSN:<br />
<br />
== Text ==<br />
{{Original}}<br />
Tune in to the other-worldly sound of Boards Of Canada<br />
<br />
Musicians often boast they're removed from the hub and froth of media-piloted trends. Yet few do so with as much conviction as Scots duo Boards Of Canada. Located in the rural Scottich Highlands, brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin (they are both called Sandison but Marcus uses his middle name) firmly believe that separation from civilisation is mandatory. <br />
'We go into a "studio lockdown",' explains Marcus, 'where the only umbilical cord we have to current culture is satellite TV or the Internet. It's something that allows us to switch off for long periods and create an alternative universe where our music exists.'<br />
The ends fully justify the means. Sicne breaking through in 1998 with their landmark full-length debut, Music Has The Right To Children, Boards Of Canada have taken analogue electronica on a solar expedition. Sparse yet eerily expansive keyboard signatures sound cut loose from the Earth's gravity, yet the effect is altogether more human and emotional than that description might suggest.<br />
After 2002's dense and symmetrical samples on Geogaddi, new album The Campfire Headphase is a deliberate return to the weird evocations of grainy Super-8s and Sesame Street heard on Music Has The Right To Children. Even the sleeve looks similar.<br />
'Yeah, exactly,' says Mike, 'we've come full circle. With Geogaddi it went pretty surreal and dark, and this record is like coming back into the fresh air again.'<br />
Yet The Campfire Headphase isn't the sound of the duo standing thematically or musically still. 'In itself, the new album has a theme,' continues Mike. 'It's based on one man's head trip, a kind of vintage American road trip that's basically just a hallucination. We were going for that kind of dry, laid-back, wide-open sound.'<br />
The American references are appropriate. As children, the brothres obsessed over American TV progreammes such as The Six Milion Dolar Man and dystopian sci-fi films The Andromeda Strain, Logan's Run and Silent Running. Such wonky soundtracks helped map out the Boards' wobbly, fluttering sound.<br />
Despite precocious geekiness, their formative years still included a conventional stint as a'proper' guitar band. And if Mike and Marcus are going 'full circle', it's fitting that they've dusted down their guitars for this album. 'It wasn't a big deal for us because we have a longer history as a guitar-based band,' says Mike. 'With each album it's a different facet of our sound.'<br />
Yet the guitars are only incidental - it's still the Boards' inmistakable brand of analogue psychedelia and it still sounds stretched and warped, magical and otherworldly. How do they do it? 'We just don't like clean sounds,' says Mike. 'We'Ve always loved making electronic music that doesn't sound typically perfect. I've always felt that recorded music seems to have something special when it's worn and damaged.'<br />
In 2005, no one comes close to replicating or bettering the Boards' imperfect purity. Electronica as a genre may have ceased to be exciting or beguiling years ago, but can The Campfire Headphase kick-start a fresh reappraisal? Don't expect to get any answers from Mike and Marcus. 'We avoid reading all reviews,' says Mike firmly, 'so we don't know what the world thinks of our music anyway.' Somehow, you kind of believe him.<br />
<br />
Brothers' gonna work it out...<br />
One the new album:<br />
Mike: 'We'd been writing throughout 2003 but the serious work on the new record began mid-2004. We'd both been travelling quite a bit and I'd been sketching tracks out in New Zealand where I was living for a while. We wanted to make a really catchy, spaced-out record.'<br />
On electronica:<br />
Mike: We're not huge fans of electronica specifically. Technology has made it so easy for anyone to get into producing music, especially electronic music, that the whole electronica scene has been diluted. It's allowing a lot of mediocre music to be released.'<br />
<br />
On maths:<br />
Marcus: 'It's a whole world of amazing patterns and coincidences. The more you apply maths to the world as we perceive it, the more fascinating it gets. And it has connections with the way the world is revealed when you strip half of your head away with psychedelics.'<br />
<br />
On being 'telepathic':<br />
Mike: 'We're pretty much both on the same wavelength al the time. We usually don't even have to use complete sentences to convey ideas to each other. We have a kind of shorthand musical language that would sound like total gobbledygook to anyone else.'<br />
<br />
''Neil Davenport''<br />
<br />
== Scans ==<br />
<gallery><br />
Image:BOC-metro-12-oct-2005.jpg<br />
</gallery><br />
<br />
== External Links ==<br />
* ''[http://www.metro.co.uk/ Metro]'', [http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife MetroLife section], 12 Oct 2005<br />
[http://www.barneum.com/twoism/viewtopic.php?t=191]<br />
<!--<br />
No ISSN it appears?<br />
http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/newspapers/record.ASP?lngMTitle=38021<br />
--><br />
<br />
[[Category: Articles needing transcription]]<br />
[[Category: Interviews]]<br />
[[Category: The Campfire Headphase era]]</div>Maxrhttps://bocpages.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Splendid_Isolation&diff=6658Talk:Splendid Isolation2009-06-02T17:16:25Z<p>Maxr: Created page with 'I will be transcribing this interview. -maxr'</p>
<hr />
<div>I will be transcribing this interview. -maxr</div>Maxrhttps://bocpages.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Protect_and_Survive_(interview)&diff=6657Talk:Protect and Survive (interview)2009-06-02T17:11:00Z<p>Maxr: Blanked the page</p>
<hr />
<div></div>Maxrhttps://bocpages.org/w/index.php?title=Protect_and_Survive_(interview)&diff=6656Protect and Survive (interview)2009-06-02T17:10:36Z<p>Maxr: /* Text */</p>
<hr />
<div>"[[Protect and Survive (interview)|Protect and Survive]]" by by Rob Young<br />
<br />
== Bibliography ==<br />
* ISSN: 0952-0686<br />
<br />
== Text ==<br />
{{original}}<br />
<br />
In a rare face to face interview at their Scottish retreat, ''Boards of Canada'' breakin their self-imposed isolation to scotch the myths that have coalesced around them. With the release of their third album in seven years, they explain the reasons for the artificial ageing and geometric twists to which they subject their music, and reflect on being part of the 'analogue-to-digital' generation. Words: Rob Young. Photography: Leon Chew<br />
<br />
<br />
The Bass Rock is barely visible in the late summer heat-mist, lying about three miles off the deserted coast near North Berwick. The crag rises 350 feet out of the turquoise sea, and faintly visible against its sheer cliff sides is a white lighthouse. A millenium and a half before the light was et on the rock at the beginning of the last century, a Lindisfarne monk, St Baldred of Bass, lived a hermit's existence alone on the island, shuttered in a rain-lashed cell to confront alone his god and, doubtless, his demons too. Today gannets are the island's sole visitors, as well as the occasional tourist boats ploughing through the surf to visity the martyr's chapel. As I crunch along the Ravensheugh Sands with Boards Of Canada's Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin, the guano-stained Rock takes on a mythical hue: the distance and the sea mist cause it to almost melt into thin air, the wraith of a giant white molar on the horizon. There's a Moby-Dick quality to it -- you could spend a lifetime staring at it but it would remain eternally out of reach.<br />
"When I was a kid, about five or six years old," Mike Sandison is saying, " a relative of mine had one of those tacky ceramic owls on their mantelpiece, and it had multifaceted diamante eyes. I as totally obsessed with those sparkly glass eyes, for ages. I felt like looking into them was like looking sideways though everything, right through time. That's what we're trying to do with you music."<br />
<br />
When you think about Boards Of Canada, the idea of hermits is never too far away. For the best par of a decade and a half nopw they have dwelt in what appears to be -- to a London/urban-centric media, anyway -- an isolated wilderness in Scotland (in fact, they've always lived within a half-hour's drive of the capital city Edinburgh, not in the Highlands, as is often reported). Their interviews have invariably been conducted by email. Since their wistful, queasily nostalgia-soaked electronic music began to appear in the mid-90s, they have only done a handful of face to face interviews, none of those on home turf. Careful managers of their own public image, even today their homes and studio are out of bounds, but they do willingly and generously drive us all over the stretch of coast an countryside that's close to the place they call home. Until recently they live in the Pentland Hills, south west of Edinburgh; without much fanfare they have moved eastwards since then, into the flatter terrain of East Lothian. "We're not far away from where we were before," explains Sandison, "we relocated, but we're trying to let that slip by without anyone knowing about it, because we felt that if we made a big deal of it, it would start that whole thing again about the geography being more important than the music."<br />
"I always got this feeling that people were saying, 'because they were surrounded by the Pentland Hills, this is why their music sounds this way'," sighs Eoin. "And I don't really like that, because it's almost like saying, 'you're just like anyone else, and it's just because you happen to be there'. That's unfair -- it's not giving you credit for actually just doing music the way you want it to be."<br />
For better or worse, the Boards' 'secrecy' has endowed them with enigmatic status; the relative media silence has opened a space in which fans can speculate, mythmake, invent and interpret to their hearts' content -- much of which happens in chatrooms and message boards, thankfully well out of harm's way. But the pair certainly monitor these discussions and while they don't take part in them, they do seem somewhat confounded by the kind of rumours that have got out. As Eoin says, "if there's no apparent facts or information about you, then what happens is stuff just floods in to fill that gap, and very often it's basically a flood of bullshit that fills in your silhouette. And we've really suffered from that."<br />
<br />
It's not as if these two aren't well travelled. Sandison once lived in London for a couple of years; they've lived in Edinburgh itself and, when they decide to take a break from their recording (and each other) to spend time with their partners, they're off travelling on the other side of the world -- Sandison mentions recent trips to France, Australia and New Zealand (where he's thinking of moving), while Eoin's considering a new life in Hong Kong with his Chinese girlfriend. Those are decisions still to be made, as their current live/work set-up is working well for them. "This whole project has come about with us living on the outskirts of Edinburgh," he says, "and for the last two decades we've been working on it from here, and we've had no reason to want to relocate to the city or to the south or anything, it's as simple as that. In fact, we actually find to some exten this so-called hermetic bubble that we live in is actually making it a lot easier for us to do our thing and not feel any urge to make it DJ friendly, or make it work for a certain social or club environment."<br />
Meeting these two objects of so much speculation, it's refreshing to discover they'er not the dysfunctional electronic droids you might expect. They're actually a deal more open, articulate and opinionated than many other musicians of their generations, and don't appear terribly secretive. A kung fu manual is prominently stuffed in ther back seat pocket of Eoin's car, and Sandison rabbits away as we motor through the Scottish countryside, eulogising about being a parent and at one point asking his wife to text him a photo of his baby daughter at the dinner table so that he can show us.<br />
They've broken cover to talk about ''The Campfire Headphase'', the latest in their very occasional series of records, and only their third album since ''Music Has The Right To Children'' (1998) and ''Geogaddi'' (2002). As they're at pains to point out, the long gaps between releases aren't because they're lazy or aloof, it's because of the perfectionism of theircraft. Six months of 2005 alone were spent on post-producing the album to get idea-germs into a state they call finished. "There are textures in waht we try to do," explains Eoin, "which borrow from certain sounds or eras - even in visual things that we do as well, artwork - to trigger somthing, almost a cascade. It's like a memory that someone has - even though it's artificial, they never even had the memory; it's just you're ageing a song. And then people feel, is that something familiar I knew from yers ago?"<br />
<br />
There's always been a warm, woody hue to BOC's music, but the dominant flavour has been synthesized on ''Campfire'', guitars have taken over: steel strings, rippling chords and plucked notes dappled with reverb. "Chromakey Dreamcoat" ends with a blend of hillbilly steel and keyboard swirls not unlike the original BBC Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy theme - a typically BOC reference to the organic science fiction of the 1970s they love so much. The duo's clunkily satisfying rhythms - often played on a kit by Sandison - and analogue drum machines still govern the downtempo flow, but it's geared down to a pace Sandison describes as "that 70s truckstop diner feel". "Satellite Anthem Icarus" is especially gorgeous, a scudding oceanic cruise, riding on the sound of waves crashing on a beach, a woman's muffled voice and electronic tropical peeps.<br />
"On this album it's interesting," says Sandison, "because we are really overtly playing riffs on guitars, and although we've aged it and made it more like it's been recorded 25 years ago or something, with each track that we've used the guitars on, we've put things in it which are impossible on a 1970s record. Sometimes we'll construct an entire song out of samples that we'll make, so we'll maybe take instruments and play parts or play notes and we'll make entire spans of notes out of sounds we really like, and then play them in ways that the original instrument couldn't have played. You could take a span of lots of notes on the guitar, and then you would play chords on that guitar by hitting them all at once, in a way that a real guitar could never be played. And then of course we would do a lot of other things to the guitar to really tweak it and make it sound very, very gnarly and damaged."<br />
The two of them spend most of their time together doing the spadework that yields the raw produce for their music, creating sounds with what they describe as a collection of 200 instruments - not only synths, but flutes, stringed instruments, guitars, exotic percussion - sampling them, twisting them like sugar candy, and the thing that makes them Boards Of Canada pieces more than anything else: artificially aging them. The songwriting is one thing, but the process of transforming the melodic ideas into the finished product is what takes time. Tunes can wait around several years in a demo state before undergoing the duo's deliberate degradation technique.<br />
"One thing we tried to do," pursues Eoin, "and we're trying to do more of, is a sense that you're hearing a piece of music that comes through the wringer a bit - it's definitely not coming literally. It's not just a guy standing in front of you with the latest keyboard workstation. There's a sense that you're listening to sa tune, but how many times has that been copied from tape to tape to tape... by the time it's reached you it's crumbled, it's turned into powder.<br />
"You hera about monks in the Middles ages using a pin to create a Bible or a piece of art, and they'll do it for 40 years in the dark underneath a monastery," he continues, " and they'll be blind by the time they've finished. And some people really appreciate art like that, because there's something really tragic about it. It's almost like it's more beautiful than any other art, because instead of it being someone comfortably painting something in a day, there's something absolutely tragic and destroyed about it. So I always think you can still go further up the run from 'beautiful music', and that's beautiful music that seems to come out of some tragedy or brokenness. It becomes even more beautiful, the shards if the sound coming through are even more vibrant and affecting."<br />
<br />
From the start, circumstances forced them to invent their own universe. Both born around 1970, they've been friends since they were toddlers, when their parents relocated to Canada to take up jobs in the construction industry. There, they were exposed to public education films on nature, science and the Earth, often narrated by Leslie Nielsen, made by the National Film Board of Canada. When they were around 13 years of age and living back in a bleak harbour town in the north of Scotland, they began "bullying" their friends into making experimental films with a Super-8 camera. "We'd say, 'This is waht you're going to do, because the other options are playing the Space Invaders machine down at the chip shop or breakin windows on phone boxes'," sandison says. To fit their pocket money budgets, the films involved time lapse, stop motion and 'sound to light' techniques. "We'd seen a lot of Norman McLaren animations while growing up," explains Eoin. At the same time Sandison, later joined by Eoin, began making music in various indie rock configurations. From the early 90s, university studies and unrewarding jobs were interleaved with more esoteric activities in the company of a large group of friends, artists, photographers, graphic designers and musicians, collectively known as Hexagon Sun. Their parties outgrew their homes in the Pentland Hills, spilling out into the woods. "It totally enhanced the experience," recalls Eoin. "Once you take it to an isolated, outdoor location, away from organisation, there's a sense of freedom that kicks in. It's sexier and less inhibited than an indoor event. You can have 50 or 100 people hanging out around fires, some rare music echoing around... the sound of two melodies clashing over one another, or maybe a melody to your left but a voice talking to your right, off through the trees. Doppler-shifting and filtering because of the wind or the random shapes around you. It creates a giddy, surreal sound that doesn't normally exist on records." In these unique outdoor communions, al arge part of Boards of Canada's sound aesthetic was forged. In 1996, after privately circulating cassette compilations of tracks they had been recording, Sandison and Eoin sent tapes to other labels including Skam in Manchester. Autechre's Sean Booth picked up on it immediately, and Skam released several BOC tracks before Warp swung into action and issued ''Music Has The Right To Children'' in 1998, with the distinctive treated cover image of a family Polaroid holiday snapshot with all the faces wiped blank. ''Geogaddi,'' appearing four years later, was decked with hexagonal, kaleidoscopic prisms that became something of a calling card. "I guess you could get a better idea of what these things symbolise by reading [Aldous Huxley's] ''The Doors Of Perception,''" says Eoin when I ask him about the significance of those shapes. "Also, I've always had an interest in the yamabushi of ancient Japan, the 'mountain men'. They used symbols as a way of having a willpower that would always outlive any challenge. They used repetitive hand symbols or drawn characters to create a neutral place they could visit mentally whenever they faced hardship. For us, Turquoise Hexagon Sun always returns us to a zone where we can throw off the baggage and begin again."<br />
<br />
Somewhere up in the Highlands, they tell me, lies a valley that's the last remaining site in the UK where radio signals, microwaves and mobile phone signals can't reach. An Eden such as this, free of the harmful of the harmful effects of technology and sheltered from penetration by foreign chatter, sounds like the kind of palce Boards Of Canada's music could happily live. A place where you might be able to start to observe the world directly, anew, unmediated by outside influence. In such places you can build your ark, rescue yourself from being dragged along with the flood. Most of the music they love and admire is made by folk who have built their own bubble, where the music lives in its own epoch, its own specially crafted box. The "Victorian fairly lights" and "looking-glass world" of fellow Scots The Cocteau Twins are one; DEvo, inventors of their own theatrical universe and whose early songs they admire because they sound like advertising jingles for washing powder, are another. They are currently enthusing about William Basinski's ''Disintergration Loops'' ("Funny enough, when we first heard that, we thought, 'We've got tapes like that ourselves' ") and Stevie Wonder's rapturous mid-70s funk - "that bit in "Living For The City" where there's the descending chords, and it'S all transposing all the way down, and it's just going chromatically all down the scale... I recognise something there where it feels like he's trying to translate something that is otherworldly, that's not about the mundane," explains Sandison.<br />
"There's usually a visual element in the tracks we write," he continues, "and it probably comes from an obsession with film and TV. When yyou're a kid, a three second long animation with rainbows morphing into A-Bomb blasts can be massively affecting and influential. I think you see these things more vividly when you're younger, but as an adult your brain starts to filter out it considers irrevelant background noise. The downside is that you become desensitised to a lot of things and that leads you to not really feel much at all."<br />
Boards Of Canada's music is awash with sadness at the loss of a child's vivid perception. It struggles constantly to regain that enhanced sensation of encountering the world afresh, while planting a nostalgia for the sounds and images of the particular time in which they grew up. They are addressing their own specific generation - you might call them the analogue-to-digital transfer generation - whose formative years straddled huge changes in geopolitics (the Cold War and its nuclea threat which hung over 80s teens had evaporated by the time they left college), domestic and ocomputer technology (typing in the 80s became word processing in the 90s), and the nature and role of the media. Hence their music's slathering with textual referents, deliberated sonic aides memoires that are almost recognisable but remain just out of memory's reach.<br />
"We could only exist in the short pocket of time when music has made the transition form analogue to digital," agrees Sandison. "There's this little moment where there's enough nostalgia attached to the former recording media and the faults that it had, that certain people will get it, and understand what we're doing. If there's sadness in the way we use memory," he goes on, "it's because the time you're focusing on has gone forever. I guess it's a theme we play on a lot, that bittersweet thing where you face up to the fact that certain chapters of you life are just Polaroids now."<br />
<br />
The faded turquoise and yellow packaging of ''The Campfire Headphase'' contains a gallery of Polaroid photos they've collected over the years, family snapshots digitally mildewed and rotted with similar artificial ageing techniques they use for their music. The idea, they tell me, is to create the feeling that you've just found all these pictues in someone else's old house and that the people shown in the pictures are al dead. As an aural analogy, they describe the degrading processo ntheir sound as introducing a "toxic, poisonous" element. Sandison articulates the fascination with the imperfect: "Even when we sound like we're being conventional, there's always something in it which is kind of dark, that's doing the bittersweet thing. Sometimes we deliberately construct songs to be pretty conventional sounding, and then we abuse them, we throw something in that's kind of a spike.<br />
"If you ever see these American makeover programmes where they get ordinary looking people and they give them these regulation whiter-than-white teeth and veneers and all that, quite often I find the finished product really sinister, because they've got these really symmetrical faces, with perfect teeth and everything, make-up and the hair. If you actually compare the before-and-after pictures, the person you could imagine being friends with is the one with squint teeth and everything and the gnarly face. And it's the same sort of thing with music and other art. If there's something a bit rough about it, it feels more personal to you, like something that belonged to you on a cassette tape that you've been cherishing for years, rather than something digital and perfect and straight. The drop-outs, the flutter on the tape and everything, you get used to where it happens."<br />
Eoin: "I think it's a reaction to mundanity. Britain, for example, is a safe place to live, and a lot of people in the rest of the world come here to live because it's better than were they are, the grass is green here than it is there. But when you've lived here for a long time, you can start to feel a crushing mundanity, you need strange things to bring you out of it, otherwise you start feeling like a corpse."<br />
Sandison elaborates, "I think we try to make music that's more like normal music that's head through a damaged mind, so you're hearing it diagonally..."<br />
Boards Of Canada's eccendtric orbits, their unstable tones and disorientating sonic additives are all carefully calculated effects. In conversation they'll often talk about chords coming in at weird angles and diagonals, zapping melodic expectations. As one of ''Geogaddi'''s song titles reminds us, "The Devil Is In The Dails": their mastery of numbers and geometry has its own part to play in the Confucian confusion.<br />
<br />
"You can use rules or set theory to dictate timings and note intervals", expands Sandison about their composition strategies. "For instance, you can imagine your melody to run vertically instead of horizontally, so that you're thinking of a vertical spiral, running on the spot. There's a thing you can calculate for plants called divergence, which is a ratio of complete turns of spiral leaf positions relative to the number of leaves in that spiral. In plants, this usually gives a Fibonacci number, which is pretty uncanny, but it's basically a natural law that's trying to create optimum distribution of leaf positions, to stop leaves from obsucring each other in sunlight. You can apply a similar idea to a vertical spiral of music, to calculate optimal temporal event positions in a pattern or texture. It doesn't always make for easy listening though," he adds, laughing.<br />
<br />
Time to puncture a few myths about Boards Of Canada. "The kind of thing that gets up my nose is when people describe us as 'approaching New Age' or soemthing like that," moans Sandison. "To me that's completly missing the point. If we do something that remotely sounds a bit like that, it's because we're actually doing it deliberately, we're doing almost as a pisstake."<br />
GoogleBoards Of Canada and you'll soon find fans with plenty of time on their hands, identifying all manner of psychedelic Easter eggs in the music: reversed samples and tapes, aural palindromes (sentences like ''"I've been gone about a week"'' that sound like the same when played forwards or in reverse) buried phrases that hint at paganism ("You Could eel The Sky" contains the words ''"a god with hooves"''). Titles like "Music Is Math", "A Is To B As B Is To C, and "The Smallest Weird Number" (the number 70, which they adopted for the name of their own label/production company, Music70) imply numerological sorcery; musical structures arranged, tuned and sequenced at root level according to mathematical equations such as the Fibonacci sequence and Golden Ratio. Someone's even found that the toal playing time of Geogaddi is 66:06, and it's total hard drive space when ripped to MP3 is 666 megabytes, etc. All of which leads to speculation that they are involved in in some kind of cultish activity - a belief that gathered pace with the release of their 2000 EP ''In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country'', which contained overt references to David Koresh's Branch Davidian community and its annihilation by the US military in 1993 during the Waco siege.<br />
"Not in the slightest," counters Sandison when I ask him for a definitive answer on their 'cult' status.<br />
"We're just purely coming at what we do from the angle at being interested in subjects. You get a lot of painters or film directors who are complete atheists who'll make films all about religion, or Christianity, not because they're obsessed with the subjects or they're actually evangelists, but just purely because it's something they're interested in for that project. It's exactly the same with us - we'll hit on some of these things, but at the end of the day we're just totally ordinary people that just happen to be making music."<br />
And why the particular focus on Waco? "We take a great interest in the spectrum of everything, religions and cults, anything connected to that," says Eoin. Because they are a break from the norm. So when you see something like that, a group of people doing their own thing, going away and living together like that... it's the fascination with that, and a sense of injustice..."<br />
"And the outrage at what happened," interjects Sandison.<br />
"I'm not a religious person," Eoin continues, "but what I felt seeing what happened there was asense of outrage - they're devoutly religious people, but what happened to them - were they just singled out because of this, and attacked? The victor always writes history, and the only history we know of David Koresh and those people is what's been written about by reference to things like what the FBI were investigating afterwards."<br />
"Which was why," Sandison swings back to the record in hand, "we thought we'd make a record that on the surface feels really sweet and very spacious and it'll be titled ''In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country,'' but what were these people doing in a beautiful place out in the country? They were getting shot and burned.. [Laughs] It's a typical thing that we would do..."<br />
Eoin: "Even when you go away and have that existence, something still chases you there, still follows you home. And that's the impression I get off that story."<br />
With every retreat form the world comes the need to protect and survive. Eoin once described a complicated solar alarm system he had installed in his house. Neighbourhood watch scheme broken down, has it? "No, it's just paranoia," he laughs. "No, when you've got things like master tapes going back to 1984, and irreplaceable musical equipment, honestly, you're gonna be paranoid. It's not really to do with past experiences, it's a kind of precautionary attitude, a ''Red Dawn'' attitude..."<br />
<br />
And so we take our leave of these hermits, as they sit and wait for someone to put knobs back on digital TVs to change the colour and contrast (newer technologies not necessarily being better than old); leave them to their fervent belief that they can inoculate their music with the mould of hte past, warding off the viral spread of mediocrity.<br />
"We're not even remotely religious people," repeats Sandison, "but I understand what that is about when you're trying to channel something that's more about the cogs behind the workings of the universe, and it feels like sometimes everything you're looking at is a simulation that's based on a much more geometric background. And a lot of the time, this machine that we are seeing, the world as it is, is so smooth and predictable, that even art has become really predictable. It's all following rues and patterns that have already been set by somebody who programmed it. But if you really stand back and look away from it, the potential's there for art and music to go into absolutely bizarre territories where everything is utterly fresh and weird and new. The challenge is to imagine: how about just stop where we are, and let's just for a minute try and backtrack a way up here, and imagine what would happened if, in 1982, music had taken this other branch on this side, and where would it be now, and what would it be sounding like now?" [] The Campfire Headphase ''is released this month on Warp''<br />
<br />
== Scans ==<br />
<gallery><br />
Image:Boc interview in the wire 01.jpg<br />
Image:Boc interview in the wire 02.jpg<br />
Image:Boc interview in the wire 03.jpg<br />
Image:Boc interview in the wire 04.jpg<br />
Image:Boc interview in the wire 05.jpg<br />
Image:Boc interview in the wire 06.jpg<br />
Image:Boc interview in the wire 07.jpg<br />
Image:Boc interview in the wire 08.jpg<br />
</gallery><br />
<br />
== External Links ==<br />
* ''[[wikipedia:The Wire (magazine)|The Wire]]'' [http://www.thewire.co.uk/back/2005_10.php Issue 260] (October 2005), pp. 40-47 [http://www.bungeebot.net/boc/wire/]<br />
<br />
[[Category: Articles needing transcription]]<br />
[[Category: Interviews]]<br />
[[Category: The Campfire Headphase era]]</div>Maxrhttps://bocpages.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Protect_and_Survive_(interview)&diff=6648Talk:Protect and Survive (interview)2009-06-01T23:25:57Z<p>Maxr: Created page with 'I will be transcribing this interview. -maxr'</p>
<hr />
<div>I will be transcribing this interview. -maxr</div>Maxrhttps://bocpages.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:The_Last_Secret_of_Pop&diff=6647Talk:The Last Secret of Pop2009-06-01T23:22:46Z<p>Maxr: </p>
<hr />
<div>I transcribed the scans. However, I don't speak dutch and can't really tell if I've misread any words. I'll just keep it here. -maxr<br />
<br />
Invloeden<br />
<br />
aptopmuzikanten hebben het maar makkeliijk: ze weten precies wat ze willen en hoe ze het gaan doen. Mike en Marcus worden heen en weer geslingerd tussen gitaar en computer, tussen akoestische en elektronische muziek, tussen oud en nieuw, tussen folk en avant-garde. Op hun nieuwe cd ''The Campfire Headphase'' versmelten melancholische gitaren met chroomkleurige beats en synths. 'We voelen duideliijk de behoefte om belde wegen in te slaan,' bekent Mike. 'Idegere dag ligt ons hart ergens anders.' Hun invloeden lopen uiteen van klassieke muziek tot hiphop en van psych-folk uit de jaren zestig en zeventig tot de rare maatsoorten van de ''native Americans'', de indianen. Ze zijn allebei klazziek geschoold op de piano en spelen gitaar. Mike is de beste drummer van de twee, Marcus' eerste instrument in een band was basgitaar. Tijdens de twee uur dat we met hen spraken, tekenden we de volgende namen op: Julian Cope, Bob Dylan, Pixies, Cocteau Twins, Phil Spector, Wim Wenders, HR Giger, The Polyphonic Spree, Sufjan Stevens, The Incredible String Band, Butterscotch Rum, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, John Denver, Joy Division, The New Scientist (tijdschrift), ''Zabriskie Point'', Jeroen Bosch, Aphex Twin, Autchre, My Bloody Valentine, Talk Talk, Stevie Wonder, Radiohead, Bibio, Fennesz, Alias, Boom Bip, cLOUDDEAD, Odd Nosdam, William Baskinski's ''The Disintegration Loops I-IV'', 'Maar,', voegde Mike er op een gegeven moment aan toen, 'ik kan hier een lijst van veertig namen geven en dan nog heb je niet één procent van de mensen die ons geïnspired hebben.' Waar ze beslist ''niet'' naar luisteren: folktronica, tecnopuristen en 'al die honderen Autechre-klonen zonder ideeën van zichzelf.'<br />
<br />
<br />
No nooit spraken ze met een Nederlandse journalist. Ze spreken sowieso eigenlijk nooit. Optreden doen ze sinds hun entree in 1998 gemiddeld één keer per drie jaar. Hetzelfde tempo houden ze met hun albums aan. Ze wonen en werken teruggetrokken in de bossen van de Schotse Pentland Hills. Boards Of Canada: het laatse van de pop. Ze voegden weer en hoofdstuk aan hun mythe toe: ''The Campfire Headphase''. Koen Poolman reisde af naar Schotland om zijn helden te onmoeten.<br />
door Koen Poolman<br />
<br />
Laten we bij het eind beginnen: <br />
de Radiohead-vraag. Zonder Boards of Canada's ''Music Has The Right To Children'' (1998) had ''Kid A'' (2000) heel anders geklonken luidt de mare. Mike en Marcus aarzelen. 'Dat zou ik niet durven zeggen.' 'Dat is niet eerlijk ten opzichte van hen'. 'Alsof ze anders geen geweldige plaat hadden gemaakt.' 'Misschien hebben ze wel goed naar Aphex Twin en Autechre geluisterd.' Nee, dat succes willen ze niet claimen. Dat Tom Yorke een bewonderaar is van hun warme, broeierige elektronica, is genoeg. ''Kid A'' en ''Amnesiac'' vinden ze mooie platen. Ook U2 schijnt fan te zijn. Dat laat ze dan weer koud. De roem ze gestolen worden. Feit is dat ''Music Has The Right To Children'' en opvolger ''Geogaddi'' (2002) -- beide met 200.000 vekochte cd's Aphex Twin en Nightmares On Wax de bestsellers in de experimentele Warp-catalogus -- talloze bands en producers hebben geïnspireerd.<br />
<br />
Het zijn van die platen die jarenlang meegaan en steeds beter worden. Ze logenstraffen het cliché van elektronische muziek als kille, cleane, mechanische, sciencefiction-achtige muziek voor de wereld van morgen. Hier is een groep die haar best doet haar geluid zo ouderwets, gamme en zelfs 'beschadigd' mogelijk te maken, die sich liever haar onbezorgde jeugd herinnert dan droomt van een leven tussen robots, die gitaren, fluiten, windorgels, drums, percussie, analoge synthesizers en aftandse taperecorders verkiest boven de nieuwste software, die voortdurend in foly sferen lijkten te verkeren, die verplicht tot luistere en die de perfectie afzweert. Menselijke muziek is niet ongenaakbaar. Geen kloppende pulse, maar een brok in de keel. Een lichte hapering. Een traan.<br />
En dan: een huivering. Je hoort dingen die je eerst niet hoorde. Stemmen, boodschappen, hallucinaties. Wie in de caleidoscopische wereld van Boards of Canada duikt, ontdekt sporen van occultisme, religieuze cults, spionagenetten, numerologie, mathematische concepten... Ze zitten verstopt in titles, artwork, samples, de lengte van de tracks, her aantal tracks, in talloze achterwaarts afgespeelde stemmen, zelfs in heuse ''audio palindromen:'' zinnetjes die voor- en achtenwaarts afgespeeld identiek zijn. ''The Devil Is In The Details'' heete een van de nummers van ''Geogaddi''. De cd telde 23 tracks (een mystiek geta lvoor occultisten), duurde 66 minuten en 6 seconden en was 666 Mb groot. Bijrollen: David Koresh, leide van de Branch Davidians-sekte in Waco, en Pan, de 'god with hooves', heidense god der weiden en bossen. Eerst zie je ze niet, dan lijken ze opeens overal te zitten. De magie van Boards of Canada - opererend vanuit een afgelegen woongemenschap in de bossen van de Schotse Pentland Hills, onder Edinburgh, waar ze hun eigen studio hebben - kree langzaam een zwart randje. En al die jaren weigerden ze naar buiten te treden. Ze deden slechts een handvol interviews over de e-mail en stonden, na hun stille entree met ''Music Has The Right To Children'', drie keer op een podium.<br />
Een enigma.<br />
<br />
Nu hebben ze dan eindelijk ingestemd met een face to face interview. Eén per land, twee uur lang. Ze hebben een hoop ult te leggen. Over hun nieuwe album ''The Campfire Headphase'' bijvoobeeld, maar ook over de wilde verhalen die het mysterie Boards of Canada zijn gaan omgeven. Ze wilen bewijzen dat ze 'ordinary blokes' zijn en geen 'magiërs die mensenoggers brengen op een bergtop.' De mythe heeft een loopje met ze genomen, beseft Mike. 'Als je zoland uit de media wegblijft, gaan de mensen vanzelf de gaten in je verhaal opvullen.'<br />
Mike is Michael Sandison, 34 jaar, vader vna een dochtertje van één. Hij oogt vermoeld. Lijdt aan slapeloosheld en depressies. Draagt een zwarte een zwarte truim spijkerboek en gympen. Baardje van een week. Onopvallend. Marcus Eion (32) is knapper, sportiever ook. Hij blikt een ferven snowboarder. Getrimd baardje, het haar met gel in model gehouden. De ring om zijn vinger zegt dat hij vorig jaar getrouwd is. Op zijn T-shirt prijken de namen van weirdo-rappers Boom Bip en Dose One. Mike is een vlotte prater. Marcus is iets bedachtzamer, geeft uitleg bij Mike's verhaal.<br />
'Het grootste misverstand,' gaat Mike verder waar hij begonnen is, 'is onze humor. Veel mensen missen onze ironie. Ze nemen alles wat wij doen veel te letterlijk.' Ze zijn, zegt hij bijna veronschuldigend, gewoon geïnteresseerd in oude culturen, religieuze uitspattingen, wetenschappelijke vraagstukken, alles wat afwijkt van de norm. Meer moeten we er niet achter zoeken. En nee, ze zijn beslist geen 'failed techno band', zoals ze wel eens lezen op internetfora van IDM-diehards. Ze hebben noit ''intelligent dance music'' willen maken. 'Eigenlijk zijn we nooit geïnteresseerd geweest in dancemuziek, techno, of wat dan ook. Die wereld staat heel ver van de onze af. Van kinds of aan hebben we ieder instrument opgepakt dat voor het grijpen lag en er een hoop herrie meegemaakt. Wij zijn geen technokids.'<br />
<br />
Enter: ''The Campfire Headphase''. Weer zo'n ongepoetste juweel met intieme synths, beats en, voor het eerst, gitaarloops die, goed tegen het licht gehouden, langzaam beint te glinsteren, Met het licht reflecteert ook het neeld van een klassieke roadtrip door het oue Amerika, kriskras door de tijd. Titels als ''Dayvan Cowboy, 84 Pontiac Dream'' en ''Ataronchronon'' (een ooude indianenstam) verraden iets van de bedoeling.<br />
<br />
'De basis,' legt Mike uit, 'is een fantasie, een ''mind trip''. Je zit ergens in een kamp in het bos, ''spaced out'' rond het kampvuur. Het is donker, je bent alleen, je sluit de ogen en je fantaseert over het Amerika van de achttiende eeuw. Je verliest je tijdsbesef. Uren worden dagen, weken. Er gebeuren vreemde dingen, onverklaarbare dingen, sprongen in de tijd, transformaties, een beetje surrealistisch, zonder dat je het als zodanig ervaart. He is een droom, je ben écht die cowboy. Totdat de muziek ineens overgaat, zoals in ''84 Pontiac Dream''. Ke ontwaakt, je hoort stemmem om je heen, de regen komt met bakken uit de hemet, je zit ergens in Central Park in de verte hoor je iemand op een akoestische gitaar spelen en je weet bij God niet hoe je hier gekomen bent.' Marcus: 'Complete chaos, een wereld zonder logica, dat idee. Ken je de film ''Zabrieskie Point?'' Voor mij heeft deze plaat dezelfde sfeer. Het is een krankzinnige ''roadmovie''. Er gebeurt van alles wat niet logisch is, je probeert er een lijn in te ontdekken, een verklaring te vinden, maar aan het eind van de film weet je nog steeds niet wat je er nu eigenlijk gebeurd is.' Mike: 'De centrale vraag is: hoeveel van deze votrok zich in een hallucinatie? Wie wel eens een psychedelische ervaring heeft gehad, weet dat zoiets niet letterlijk na te vertellen is, het verandert ieder moment.'<br />
''Sherbet Head'', zo'n miniatuurtje waarvan Boards of Canada er meer heeft, en vaak hele mooie, verwoodt de psychedlische ervaring misschien nog wel het best: een hoofd vol sorbetijs. Daas, wauws. Een beetje duizelig. Lichte tinteling. Was de inktzwarte voorganger ''Geogaddi'' een ''bad trip, The Campfire Headphase'' is zijn tepenhanger; de ''good trip.''<br />
<br />
''Geogaddi'' endigde met ''Corsair,'' 'het licht aan het einde van de tunnel'; aan het einde van de ''good trip'' wacht een ''downer.'' De laatste drie tracks gaan diep, héél diep. Marcus: 'Daardoor blijft het langer hangen.' Mike: 'Ik zou nooit lets kunnen maken dat helemaal optimistisch is.' Vooral het afsluitende ''Farewell Fire,'' een pastorale orgeldrone, grijpt naar de keel. Ze willen niet zeggen voor wie het geschreven is, maar het kan alleen maar een dierbare geweest zijn die os overleden.<br />
Mike vertelt: '''Farewell Fire'' is Marcus op keyboards, meer niet. Hij heeft het in één nachtelijke sessie gemaakt. Er zitten momenten in dat het haprt en het echt voelt als iemand die van verdriet niet meer in staat is om goed te spelen. Dat kun je met geprogrammeerde muziek nooit bereiken. Ook al is het een elektroniksch stuk, het klinkt heel menselijk, hatverscheurend. Het moment dat het even stopt, is alsof er naar adem gehapt moet worden, als een stem die even zwijgt.' Marcus: 'Veel mensen die elektronische muziek maken gaan ervan uit dat die steriel en mechanisch moet ziljn... en futuristisch [cynisch lachje]é Dat is heel eenvoudig, het enige wat je hoeft te doen is de apparatuur aan te zetten. De kunst is om die synthetische klanken een emotie mee te geven, alsof het een stem is.'<br />
Een synthlijn, licht Mike toe, wordt geschreven also het een zanglijn is, een zanglijn die bijna vals is. 'De beste zangers hebben een beperkte stem. Zo'n stem als van Bob Dylan, zo nasaal, beven, nooit helemaal zuiver, is verre an compleet, maar zit bastensvol karakter. Als je een sessiezanger zou vragen een van zijn songs te zingen, dan zou het technisch perfect zijn, maar zielloos, zonder leven. DAt is precies wat wij onszelf steeds voorhouden: het mag niet perfect zijn. We stoppen er met opzet fouten en beschadigde geluiden in om de muziek te laten ademen.'<br />
<br />
Wie voor het eerst een plaat van Boards of Canada hoort, zal zich verbazen over het 'zingende' geluid op de achtergrond, alsof de opnameband niet helemaad strak liep. Dat is precies wat er aan de hand is. Het duo zweert bij het geluid van oude cassettebandjes die niet meer zo goed afspelen, waarvan het geluid af en toe wegvalt, of is afgevlakt, die to langzaam gaan, of juist net iets te snel. He geeft de opname een magisch tintje, vinden ze. Het voert hen terug naar de tijd dat ze zelf nog bandjes draaiden, naar hun verloren jeugd. Debuut-lp ''Twoism'' (1995) klonk als een mispersing, alsof het gat niet precies in het midden zat. ''Slow This Bird Down'', op de nieuwe cd, heeft dit ook. De 'zingende gitaar' in ''Chromakey Dreamcoat'' is pogenomen op het strand met de verrotste taperecorder die Marcus kon vinden. Hij heeft ook een digitale. Gebrulkt le zelden. De moldie van ''Julie And Candy'' (op ''Geogaddi'') werd opgenomen met een paar fluiten en vergolgens eindeloos heen en weer gestuurd tusen de ingebouwde microfoons van twee tapedecks totdat er niets meer dan een luide, mistige galm, een soort misthoorn, overbleef.<br />
Veel, bijna alles, wat je op hun platen hoort, komt van een fluit, een gitaar, een piano, een percussie-instrument, een windorgel of een ander exotisch instrument, maar de geluiden worden dermate lang 'behandeld' dat ze zelden als dusdanig herkenbaar zijn. Het lijken allemaal synthesizergeluiden. Hoe langer je een geluid bewerkt, hoe synthesischer het klinkt, legt Marcus uit. Hun synthesizers zijn trouwens ook ''vintage:'' oude analoge modellen met knarsende en krakende geluiden.<br />
<br />
Noem hun werkwijze nooit nostalgisch; Marcus heeft er een hekel aan. Retro, nog zo'n woord. Te gemakkelijk, vindt hij. 'Wij refereren aan iets uit het verleden, iets tragisch of iets moois dat verloren is gegaan, we proberen dat terug te halen, maar daar stoppen we niet, we proberen het ''verder'' te brengen, ons voor te stellen wat ervan geworden zou zijn als het nog steeds zou bestaan. We kopiëren het verleden niet, we herschrijvenm het, we negeren de loop die de geschiedenis heeft genomen. We gaan terug naar een bepaald moment in tjid en plaats en slaan dan een altenatieve weg in. We zeggen tegen elkaar: ''Make it 1978 and then take it somewhere.'' Hoe had de muziek van nu geklonken als we toen met z'n allen die andere weg waren ingeslagen? Een soort parallelle wereld.' Mike: 'Alsof de nineties nooit hebben plaatsgevonden, zoiets. Waar zouden de wereld en de muziek zijn als we die tijd hadden overslagen?'<br />
De nineties, voor de goed orde, staan met hun schreeuwerige MTV-cultuur, hun ongebreilde hedonisme en alsmaar verdergaande globalisatie voor alles wat fout is volgens het teruggetrokken levende duo.<br />
Ze geloven heilig in een 'sideways culture'. Marcus: 'De meeste mensen nemen de wereld zoals zij is, ze staan nooit stil bij de vraag hoe de wereld er had kunnen uitzien als we niet met z'n allen door een tunnel waren gegaan. Als je kijkt naar de huidige staat van de muziek en je beschouwt de wortels van die muziek, dan wordt die weg automatisch gezien als de enige die de muziek had kunnen afleggen. Niemand realiseert zich dat die aanname bepalend is voor wat ze doen. Ze volgen gewoon dat pad. Zie het als een gang ledereen staat middenin de gang, de uitgang lonkt. Ze beschouwen de situatie en wéten: we móeten aan het eind van de gang zien te komen. Wat wij proberen te doen is ons voor te stellen dat er naast die gang nóg een gang is en dat je die gang wellicht via een geheime doorgang kunt bereiken.'<br />
<br />
Mike toont zich een groot bewonderaar van Jeroen Bosch (1450-1516), de diepreligieuze schilder wiens werk stilistisch noch thematisch aansloot bij stromingen uit zijn tijd. In tegenstelling tot het serene werk van zijn tijdgenoten ging het fantastische werk van Bosch over angst, afschuw en rampspoed. 'Zijn werk zat vol vreemde, spookachitge elementen,' doceert hij, 'elementen waarvoor geen verklaring was. Het waren fantasieën. Zijn werk was surrealistisch voordat het surrealisme was uitgevonden. Zijn verbeelding was de doorgang naar een andere wereld. Er zitten elementen in zijn werk die or niet zouden moeten zitten, inconsequenties, en juist die maken zijn werk zo sterk, zo aangrijpend.' Hij trekt een parallel met ''Music Has The Right To Children'', waarop naïeve kinderstemmetjes botsen met atonale geluiden, chroomkleurige beats en dissonante melodieën. 'Die kinderstemmetjes brengen je van je stuk, ze horen niet thuis in zulke duistere muziek. Je wéét het gewoon niet. Maar het grijpt je wel aan.'<br />
'Als je schilderijen zou maken van wat er volgens ons op onze platen gebeurt,' zegt Mike, en hij verontschuldigt zich bij voorbaat voor de pretentie die in deze uitspraak besloten ligt, 'dan zouden dat hele surrealistische werken worden. Er zou niks van kloppen. En toch zou je het niet hoeven uitleggen.' <br />
Marcus: 'Als je het moet uitleggen, is het geen kunst meer.'<br />
<br />
Tuig een plaat op met verborgen boodschappen over God en Satan en stervelingen die geloven dat zij afgezant van een van beiden zijn, en je eindigt met een altaar. Zo noemt Marcus het vorige album ''Geogaddi,'' een altaar. Hij zegt het lichtelijk smalend. Op internet curculeren de wildste theorieën en analyses over de inmiddets drie jaaroude plaat. Over David Koresh en zijn Branch Davidians, aan wie het nummer 1969 n de ep ''In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country'' zouden zijn gewijd (klopt). Over de adaptatie van de gulden snede en bijzondere cijferreeksen zoals de Fibonacci-reeks in notenschema's en songstructuren (klopt). Over links naar het werk van Berthol Brecht (onzin). Over samples van uitzendingen van spionagediensten in de Koude Oorlog (klopt). Over satanisme (onzin). Over audio palindromen ('de techniek staat voor niks').<br />
<br />
Over de albumtitel, die zoiets als De Woeste Aarde zou betekenen (stilzwijgen). Dat laatste laten ze graag open. Er moet nog wel iets te raden overblijven.<br />
Ald die 'dingetjes', zoals Mike ze noemt, plaatsen de instrumentale muziek in een context, ze brengen een lijn aan, een concept, zo je wilt. 'Zolang je bij concept maar niet denkt aan een plaat over de regels van het schaakspel.'<br />
Op ''Geogaddi'' waren de 'dingetjes' ontsproten uit de donkerste krochten van hun ziel, op al hun andere platen kun je ze herleiden tot ee verlangen naar hun jeugd - het Leitmotiv in dit verhaal. De verloren jeugd, de tijd dat gevoel dat iedere adolescent langzaam kwijtraakt. 'Als ik depressief ben, en ik heb een lange geschiedenis van depressis,' bekent Mike, 'dan zoek ik altijd troost in mijn kinderjaren. Die weemoed is altijd aanwezig in onze muziek.'<br />
Eén ding wil hij nog over ''Geogaddi'' kwijt: 'Het was een project, ''It's its own thing.'' Een claustrogobische trip door een wereld vol paranoia en duisternis. Veel mensen verwarren de plaat met de mens. Wij zijn geen doemdenkers.'<br />
'Vergeet niet,' zegt hij even later, 'dat we in de studio zaten toen 9/11 gebeurde. De laatste vijf maanden van ''Geogaddi'' vielen samen met de nasleep van 9/11. Het was een angstige tijd, het voelde alsof we terugkeerden naar de Koude Oorlog. Opeens bekroop me weer de angst die ik als kind al gevoeld had voor de atoombom. Ik denk dat iedereen van onze generatie dat gevoel wel kent. We ontkwamen er niet aan, het drukte ons gemoed. De toon werd steeds beklemmender. De sfeer, de samples, het heeft er allemaal mee te maken.' 'Bovendien,' gaat hij verder, 'ging ik zelf door een moeilijke periode. Het was een klotejaar.'<br />
<br />
'Nu, vier jaar later,' neemt Marcust het over, 'lijkt die dreiging van 9/11 permanent geworden. De wereld lijkt permanent veranderd, blijvend onveiliger. Meer chaos en duisternis en paranoia. Als je dat dag in dag uit ervaart, ga je je vanzelf afvragen: hoe kunnen we hieraan ontsnappen? Hoe kunnen we die realitelt vergeten?' Mike: 'In plaats van mee te gaan in de psychose kun je ook een uitvlucht zoeken.' Toeval of niet, in dezelfde periode luisterde hij graag naar de eerste plaat van positivo's The Polyphonic Spree. 'Ik dacht: ik wil ook weer lets hoopvols maken'<br />
En zo werd het idee voor ''The Campfire Headphase'' Geboren: ze zouden teruggaan naar de tijd dat hun muziek nog simpel escapisme was. Terug naar ''Twoism'', het debuut met zijn gekke zingende geluid. '''Twoism'' is waarschijnlijk de minst politieke plaat die we gemaakt hebben. Het is muziek om bij weg te dromen. Ook al is je leven klote en haat je je werk, als je de plaat opzet en je laat meevoeren door de melodieën, vergeet je al je ellende. Dat hebben we nu ook wee proberen te creëren: een luchtebel waarin je kunt opstijgen en wegzweven. Weg van alles. De nieuwe plaat heeft geen geheime agenda. Het enige wat hij zegt is: ''fuck all this stuff,'' zet het nieuws uit, zeg die klotebaan op, maak dat je wegkomt uit de stad, neem de tijd om eens terug te denken aan gelukkiger tijden. ledereen heeft wel een jaar in zijn hoofd, de beste zomer van zijn leven. Dat is ons doel: we bieden je een venster naar de beste zomer van je leven.'<br />
Marcus: 'Zie het als een hulpmiddel. Een tijdmachine. Een privétijdmachine. Onze muziek werkt niet in de openbare ruimte, zij spreekt tot één luisteraar tehelijk. Het is muziek om in je eentje naar te luisteren. Om in weg te kruipen. We bieden je een veilige haven.'<br />
Mike: 'A place to go.'<br />
Dan realiseert Mike ineens iets: 'Nu ik er zo over nadenk, dit is iets wat wij als vanzelfsprend beschouwen, zozeer zelfs dat we ons niet kunnen voorstellen dat er mensen zijn die iets anders zouden willen bereiken met hun muziek. Maar veel mensen die urban muziek maken, of dat nu r&b of iets anders is, die denken precies het tegenovergestelde. Ze zeggen bijna: wat we ook doen, het moet wel van deze wereld zijn, het moet het hier en nu representeren, het mag niet te veel afwijken. Het moet geschikt zijn om in Gap gedraaid te worden. Muziek is voor mij een ''escape from Gap.'' Als ik een kreldingwinkel binnenloop, denk ik al gauw: fucking hell, ik zou wel iemand iets kunnen aandoen, ik moet hier zo snel mogelijk weer weg terug naar mijn fantasiewereld.'<br />
<br />
Terug naar de bosen van de Pentland Hills. Terug naar zijn vriendin en zijn dochtertje. En terug naar zijn broer. Want na enig aandringen willen ze het wel toegeven: Mike Sandison en Marcus Eion zijn broers. Eione - speek uit: lan - is Marcus' tweede voornaam. Ze hebben het tien jaar lang geheimgehouden. Het deot er niet toe, vinden ze. Het verhaal is de muziek, niet de mensen. De mythe vervaagt, de muziek blijft. Niemand kent ze, niemand heeft ze ooit zien optreden, niemand heeft ooit een advertentie of een videoclip of een tv-optreden van ze gezien (die bestaan niet), niemand weet wat ze precies denken, maar 200.000 eenzame zielen herkennen hun stille verdriet. Hun verlangen baarde de mooiste muziek van de laatste tien jaar. Vraag het maar aan Thom Yorke.<br />
<br />
<br />
Twoism (1995, reissue 2002)<br />
In eigen beheer ultgerbracht debuut (oplage: 200). Acht nummers vol vreemde, dromerige, ambienteske, iet valse elektronica. Alsof het gat van de lp net naast het midden zat. Invloeden van Aphex Twin en Autechre zijn nog duidelijk hoorbaar. Via die laatsten belandde de lp bij het Skam-label uit Manchester. Zeven jaar later werd de lp, die inmiddels 500 euro op eBay opbracht, heruitgebracht, als enige van alle eigenbeheer-lp's en cassettes tot nu toe. Het duo speelt met het idee om ook ''Boc Maxima'' (1996) nog eens fatsoenlijk uit te brengen. Tot nut toe blijft de kluis met Music 70-demo's hermetisch gesloten.<br />
<br />
Hi Scores (1996)<br />
Mini-lp voor Skam. De eerste zes nummers die normaal verkrilgbaar waren. Dromerige elektronica, abstracte Autechre-beats en electro. Classics: ''Everything You Do Is A Balloon,'' waarvan de melodie in een droom to Marcus kwam, en ''Turquoise Hexagon Sun'' (later ook op ''MHTRTC).''<br />
<br />
Music Has The Right To Children (1998)<br />
Debuut voor Warp. Bij verschijnen nauwelijks opgemerkt, nu een klassieker bunnen de elektronishce muziek en het vertrekpunt voor subgenres als indietronica en folktronica. De plaat met de kinderstemmetjes. Ze praten en tellent wat op en af, voor- en achteruit. Mellow beats, nostalgische synths, psychedelische en intieme, soms folky sferen, hemelse melodieën. De mooiste: ''Roygbiv'' (2:28) en ''Olson'' (1:24), van die typische BOC-miniatuurtjes die de gaten tussen de 'echte' nummers vullen en elgenlijk hun voorkeur genieten. Het zijn synthesizermelodieën die je aan het eind van een tv-serie zou kunnen horen, als de titelrol in beeld verschijnt. Chill-out-hit: ''Aquarius.'' Zilj: 'Een plaat voor in de openlucht, op een koude, zonnige dag.'<br />
<br />
In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country (2000)<br />
'Come and live with us... in a religious community in a beautiful place out in the country.' Een uinodiging van DAvid Koresh en zijn Branch Davidians-sekte in Waco. Naast de titeltrack verwijst ook ''Amo Bishop Roden'' naar de sekte; het is de naam van een afvallig sktelid. Haar beeltenis priljkt op de achterkant van de cd, Koresh's oog priemt binnenin. Classic: ''Kid For Today.'' Maar de hele EP (4 tracks, 24 minuten) is briljant.<br />
<br />
Geogaddi (2002)<br />
Inktzwarte plaat. Duister, sinister, bijna duivels. Maar toch ook weer heel melodieus en organisch. Barstenswvol geheime boodschappen, verwijzingen, mathematische concepten en getallensymboliek. ''Music is Math'' vergondigen ze aan het begin. In ''1969'' duiken de Branch Davidains weere op. Het nummer duurt 4:19. Op 19 april 1993 voltrok zich de slachtpartij in Waco. Achter elk detail schuilt een betekenis, zo lijkt het. Wie zijn platen graag achterstevoren draait, heeft aan ''Geogaddi'' een goede. In ''You Could Feel The Sky'' hoor je ineedns 'a god with hooves'; in ''A Is To B as B Is To C'' openbaren zich zowaar ''audio palindromen:'' 'all you love we' wordt 'we love you all' en 'I've been gone about a week' blijft exact hetzelfde! Vreemde, verontrustende plaat, ''Gyroscope'' kwam tot Marcus in een nachtmerrie, en dat is het: een nachtemerrie. Zij: 'Een claustrofobische trip door een wereld vol duisternis en paranoia met aan het eind een sprankje hoop.' Een journalist: 'Muziek als een spiraal of een fractal die gedetaileerder wordt naarmate je er dieper in gaat.' Het is de cd die de Schotten voor het eerst brede erkenning oplevert en ook in OOR tot een van de beste tien cd's van dat jaar gekozen wordt. Hitje: ''1969.''<br />
<br />
The Campfire Headphase (2005)<br />
De nieuwe. Hij stelt niet teleur. 'een echte Boards Of Canada-plaat' vinden ze zelf, met elementen van ''Twoism'' en ''MHTRTC'' en subtiel ingebrachte gitaarloops. Gerdoomde roadtrip door het oude Amerika. Van minder donker dan ''Geogaddi''. De ''good trip'' na de ''bad trip.'' Nog nooit klonken ze zo opgewekt als in ''Peacock Tail,'' hun 'Stevie Wonder-nummer' (Marcus). Pas op voor de slottrits: een zware depressie ligt op de loer.<br />
<br />
<br />
Orbital?<br />
De makers van ''Chime, Belfast'' en ''Halcyon + On + On'' waren ook broers. Op het donkere podium droegen ze van die karakteristieke mijnwerkerslampjes, waarmee ze hun sequencers en samplers uitlichtten. Hun eerste platen waren oké, vinden Mike en Marcus, maar om nu ais tweed Orbital door het leven te moeten gaan... nee. Dus verzwegen ze toen ze bij Warp tekenden hun familieband. Tien jaar lang verstopte Marcus zich achter zijn tweede voornaam, Eion. Mike: 'Op alle Orbital-platen stond: written by Hartnoll & Hartnoll. Dat vonden we zo suf.' Ze wilden anoniem door het leven gaan en geen verhalen over 'de muzikale familie Sandison'. Ze hebben nog twee broers; die maken ook muziek. De één woont in Autralië, de ander in Londen. Mike en Marcus wonen in een kleineleefgemeenschap in de Schotse Pentland Hills, onder Edinburgh. Hun kinderjaren brachten ze door in Londen en Calgary. Daar zagen ze op tv de natuurdocumentaires van The National Film Board Of Canada. Vandaar. Overigens dreigt ook Mike te gaan uitvliegen. Zijn vriendin had een baan bij een designbureau in Auckland, Nieuw-Zeeland en wil graag terug. Mike twijfelt. Boards Of Canada zou een breedbandband moeten worden, terwijl het jammen zo essentieel is voor hun muziek. Er loopt altijd een taperecorder mee in de studio. Maar voor alles is een oplossing, zegt Marcus stellig. 'Ik zeg altijd: laat je niet door mij weerhouden, doe het! We doen dit al zolang als ik me kan herinneren [Mike sinds 1980, Marcus sinds 1986] en het is nooit een reden geweest om onze dromen niet na te jagen. Als ik zou denken dat ik ergens anders een gelukkiger leven kan opbouwen, dan zou ik me niet laten weehouden door de muziek. Daarom hab ik tegen Mike gezegd: ik wil er niet tussenkomen. Als jij het echt wilt, dan beschouw ik het niet als het einde, nee, dan beschouw ik het als een nieuwe uitdaging.' Uitdagingen genoeg, voorlopig. Ze hebben plannen voor soloprojecten. Ze zijn in onderhandeling over een soundtrack van een grote film. Ze zijn alweer aan een nieuwe Boards Of Canada-plaat begonnen (ze hebben nog een contract voor drie albums bij Warp). Mike: 'De volgende plaat zal voor iedereen als een shock komen. Dit verwacht niemand van ons.' En er zijn zowaar plannen voor wat liveshows met band in het voorjaar. Maar dat gerucht ging drie jaar geleden ook. Sinsdien zwegen ze.</div>Maxrhttps://bocpages.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:The_Last_Secret_of_Pop&diff=6646Talk:The Last Secret of Pop2009-06-01T23:20:27Z<p>Maxr: </p>
<hr />
<div>I transcribed the scans. However, I don't speak dutch and can't really tell if I've misread any words. I'll just keep it here. -maxr<br />
<br />
Invloeden<br />
<br />
aptopmuzikanten hebben het maar makkeliijk: ze weten precies wat ze willen en hoe ze het gaan doen. Mike en Marcus worden heen en weer geslingerd tussen gitaar en computer, tussen akoestische en elektronische muziek, tussen oud en nieuw, tussen folk en avant-garde. Op hun nieuwe cd ''The Campfire Headphase'' versmelten melancholische gitaren met chroomkleurige beats en synths. 'We voelen duideliijk de behoefte om belde wegen in te slaan,' bekent Mike. 'Idegere dag ligt ons hart ergens anders.' Hun invloeden lopen uiteen van klassieke muziek tot hiphop en van psych-folk uit de jaren zestig en zeventig tot de rare maatsoorten van de ''native Americans'', de indianen. Ze zijn allebei klazziek geschoold op de piano en spelen gitaar. Mike is de beste drummer van de twee, Marcus' eerste instrument in een band was basgitaar. Tijdens de twee uur dat we met hen spraken, tekenden we de volgende namen op: Julian Cope, Bob Dylan, Pixies, Cocteau Twins, Phil Spector, Wim Wenders, HR Giger, The Polyphonic Spree, Sufjan Stevens, The Incredible String Band, Butterscotch Rum, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, John Denver, Joy Division, The New Scientist (tijdschrift), ''Zabriskie Point'', Jeroen Bosch, Aphex Twin, Autchre, My Bloody Valentine, Talk Talk, Stevie Wonder, Radiohead, Bibio, Fennesz, Alias, Boom Bip, cLOUDDAD, Odd Nosdam, William Baskinski's ''The Disintegration Loops I-IV'', 'Maar,', voegde Mike er op een gegeven moment aan toen, 'ik kan hier een lijst van veertig namen geven en dan nog heb je niet één procent van de mensen die ons geïnspired hebben.' Waar ze beslist ''niet'' naar luisteren: folktronica, tecnopuristen en 'al die honderen Autechre-klonen zonder ideeën van zichzelf.'<br />
<br />
<br />
No nooit spraken ze met een Nederlandse journalist. Ze spreken sowieso eigenlijk nooit. Optreden doen ze sinds hun entree in 1998 gemiddeld één keer per drie jaar. Hetzelfde tempo houden ze met hun albums aan. Ze wonen en werken teruggetrokken in de bossen van de Schotse Pentland Hills. Boards Of Canada: het laatse van de pop. Ze voegden weer en hoofdstuk aan hun mythe toe: ''The Campfire Headphase''. Koen Poolman reisde af naar Schotland om zijn helden te onmoeten.<br />
door Koen Poolman<br />
<br />
Laten we bij het eind beginnen: <br />
de Radiohead-vraag. Zonder Boards of Canada's ''Music Has The Right To Children'' (1998) had ''Kid A'' (2000) heel anders geklonken luidt de mare. Mike en Marcus aarzelen. 'Dat zou ik niet durven zeggen.' 'Dat is niet eerlijk ten opzichte van hen'. 'Alsof ze anders geen geweldige plaat hadden gemaakt.' 'Misschien hebben ze wel goed naar Aphex Twin en Autechre geluisterd.' Nee, dat succes willen ze niet claimen. Dat Tom Yorke een bewonderaar is van hun warme, broeierige elektronica, is genoeg. ''Kid A'' en ''Amnesiac'' vinden ze mooie platen. Ook U2 schijnt fan te zijn. Dat laat ze dan weer koud. De roem ze gestolen worden. Feit is dat ''Music Has The Right To Children'' en opvolger ''Geogaddi'' (2002) -- beide met 200.000 vekochte cd's Aphex Twin en Nightmares On Wax de bestsellers in de experimentele Warp-catalogus -- talloze bands en producers hebben geïnspireerd.<br />
<br />
Het zijn van die platen die jarenlang meegaan en steeds beter worden. Ze logenstraffen het cliché van elektronische muziek als kille, cleane, mechanische, sciencefiction-achtige muziek voor de wereld van morgen. Hier is een groep die haar best doet haar geluid zo ouderwets, gamme en zelfs 'beschadigd' mogelijk te maken, die sich liever haar onbezorgde jeugd herinnert dan droomt van een leven tussen robots, die gitaren, fluiten, windorgels, drums, percussie, analoge synthesizers en aftandse taperecorders verkiest boven de nieuwste software, die voortdurend in foly sferen lijkten te verkeren, die verplicht tot luistere en die de perfectie afzweert. Menselijke muziek is niet ongenaakbaar. Geen kloppende pulse, maar een brok in de keel. Een lichte hapering. Een traan.<br />
En dan: een huivering. Je hoort dingen die je eerst niet hoorde. Stemmen, boodschappen, hallucinaties. Wie in de caleidoscopische wereld van Boards of Canada duikt, ontdekt sporen van occultisme, religieuze cults, spionagenetten, numerologie, mathematische concepten... Ze zitten verstopt in titles, artwork, samples, de lengte van de tracks, her aantal tracks, in talloze achterwaarts afgespeelde stemmen, zelfs in heuse ''audio palindromen:'' zinnetjes die voor- en achtenwaarts afgespeeld identiek zijn. ''The Devil Is In The Details'' heete een van de nummers van ''Geogaddi''. De cd telde 23 tracks (een mystiek geta lvoor occultisten), duurde 66 minuten en 6 seconden en was 666 Mb groot. Bijrollen: David Koresh, leide van de Branch Davidians-sekte in Waco, en Pan, de 'god with hooves', heidense god der weiden en bossen. Eerst zie je ze niet, dan lijken ze opeens overal te zitten. De magie van Boards of Canada - opererend vanuit een afgelegen woongemenschap in de bossen van de Schotse Pentland Hills, onder Edinburgh, waar ze hun eigen studio hebben - kree langzaam een zwart randje. En al die jaren weigerden ze naar buiten te treden. Ze deden slechts een handvol interviews over de e-mail en stonden, na hun stille entree met ''Music Has The Right To Children'', drie keer op een podium.<br />
Een enigma.<br />
<br />
Nu hebben ze dan eindelijk ingestemd met een face to face interview. Eén per land, twee uur lang. Ze hebben een hoop ult te leggen. Over hun nieuwe album ''The Campfire Headphase'' bijvoobeeld, maar ook over de wilde verhalen die het mysterie Boards of Canada zijn gaan omgeven. Ze wilen bewijzen dat ze 'ordinary blokes' zijn en geen 'magiërs die mensenoggers brengen op een bergtop.' De mythe heeft een loopje met ze genomen, beseft Mike. 'Als je zoland uit de media wegblijft, gaan de mensen vanzelf de gaten in je verhaal opvullen.'<br />
Mike is Michael Sandison, 34 jaar, vader vna een dochtertje van één. Hij oogt vermoeld. Lijdt aan slapeloosheld en depressies. Draagt een zwarte een zwarte truim spijkerboek en gympen. Baardje van een week. Onopvallend. Marcus Eion (32) is knapper, sportiever ook. Hij blikt een ferven snowboarder. Getrimd baardje, het haar met gel in model gehouden. De ring om zijn vinger zegt dat hij vorig jaar getrouwd is. Op zijn T-shirt prijken de namen van weirdo-rappers Boom Bip en Dose One. Mike is een vlotte prater. Marcus is iets bedachtzamer, geeft uitleg bij Mike's verhaal.<br />
'Het grootste misverstand,' gaat Mike verder waar hij begonnen is, 'is onze humor. Veel mensen missen onze ironie. Ze nemen alles wat wij doen veel te letterlijk.' Ze zijn, zegt hij bijna veronschuldigend, gewoon geïnteresseerd in oude culturen, religieuze uitspattingen, wetenschappelijke vraagstukken, alles wat afwijkt van de norm. Meer moeten we er niet achter zoeken. En nee, ze zijn beslist geen 'failed techno band', zoals ze wel eens lezen op internetfora van IDM-diehards. Ze hebben noit ''intelligent dance music'' willen maken. 'Eigenlijk zijn we nooit geïnteresseerd geweest in dancemuziek, techno, of wat dan ook. Die wereld staat heel ver van de onze af. Van kinds of aan hebben we ieder instrument opgepakt dat voor het grijpen lag en er een hoop herrie meegemaakt. Wij zijn geen technokids.'<br />
<br />
Enter: ''The Campfire Headphase''. Weer zo'n ongepoetste juweel met intieme synths, beats en, voor het eerst, gitaarloops die, goed tegen het licht gehouden, langzaam beint te glinsteren, Met het licht reflecteert ook het neeld van een klassieke roadtrip door het oue Amerika, kriskras door de tijd. Titels als ''Dayvan Cowboy, 84 Pontiac Dream'' en ''Ataronchronon'' (een ooude indianenstam) verraden iets van de bedoeling.<br />
<br />
'De basis,' legt Mike uit, 'is een fantasie, een ''mind trip''. Je zit ergens in een kamp in het bos, ''spaced out'' rond het kampvuur. Het is donker, je bent alleen, je sluit de ogen en je fantaseert over het Amerika van de achttiende eeuw. Je verliest je tijdsbesef. Uren worden dagen, weken. Er gebeuren vreemde dingen, onverklaarbare dingen, sprongen in de tijd, transformaties, een beetje surrealistisch, zonder dat je het als zodanig ervaart. He is een droom, je ben écht die cowboy. Totdat de muziek ineens overgaat, zoals in ''84 Pontiac Dream''. Ke ontwaakt, je hoort stemmem om je heen, de regen komt met bakken uit de hemet, je zit ergens in Central Park in de verte hoor je iemand op een akoestische gitaar spelen en je weet bij God niet hoe je hier gekomen bent.' Marcus: 'Complete chaos, een wereld zonder logica, dat idee. Ken je de film ''Zabrieskie Point?'' Voor mij heeft deze plaat dezelfde sfeer. Het is een krankzinnige ''roadmovie''. Er gebeurt van alles wat niet logisch is, je probeert er een lijn in te ontdekken, een verklaring te vinden, maar aan het eind van de film weet je nog steeds niet wat je er nu eigenlijk gebeurd is.' Mike: 'De centrale vraag is: hoeveel van deze votrok zich in een hallucinatie? Wie wel eens een psychedelische ervaring heeft gehad, weet dat zoiets niet letterlijk na te vertellen is, het verandert ieder moment.'<br />
''Sherbet Head'', zo'n miniatuurtje waarvan Boards of Canada er meer heeft, en vaak hele mooie, verwoodt de psychedlische ervaring misschien nog wel het best: een hoofd vol sorbetijs. Daas, wauws. Een beetje duizelig. Lichte tinteling. Was de inktzwarte voorganger ''Geogaddi'' een ''bad trip, The Campfire Headphase'' is zijn tepenhanger; de ''good trip.''<br />
<br />
''Geogaddi'' endigde met ''Corsair,'' 'het licht aan het einde van de tunnel'; aan het einde van de ''good trip'' wacht een ''downer.'' De laatste drie tracks gaan diep, héél diep. Marcus: 'Daardoor blijft het langer hangen.' Mike: 'Ik zou nooit lets kunnen maken dat helemaal optimistisch is.' Vooral het afsluitende ''Farewell Fire,'' een pastorale orgeldrone, grijpt naar de keel. Ze willen niet zeggen voor wie het geschreven is, maar het kan alleen maar een dierbare geweest zijn die os overleden.<br />
Mike vertelt: '''Farewell Fire'' is Marcus op keyboards, meer niet. Hij heeft het in één nachtelijke sessie gemaakt. Er zitten momenten in dat het haprt en het echt voelt als iemand die van verdriet niet meer in staat is om goed te spelen. Dat kun je met geprogrammeerde muziek nooit bereiken. Ook al is het een elektroniksch stuk, het klinkt heel menselijk, hatverscheurend. Het moment dat het even stopt, is alsof er naar adem gehapt moet worden, als een stem die even zwijgt.' Marcus: 'Veel mensen die elektronische muziek maken gaan ervan uit dat die steriel en mechanisch moet ziljn... en futuristisch [cynisch lachje]é Dat is heel eenvoudig, het enige wat je hoeft te doen is de apparatuur aan te zetten. De kunst is om die synthetische klanken een emotie mee te geven, alsof het een stem is.'<br />
Een synthlijn, licht Mike toe, wordt geschreven also het een zanglijn is, een zanglijn die bijna vals is. 'De beste zangers hebben een beperkte stem. Zo'n stem als van Bob Dylan, zo nasaal, beven, nooit helemaal zuiver, is verre an compleet, maar zit bastensvol karakter. Als je een sessiezanger zou vragen een van zijn songs te zingen, dan zou het technisch perfect zijn, maar zielloos, zonder leven. DAt is precies wat wij onszelf steeds voorhouden: het mag niet perfect zijn. We stoppen er met opzet fouten en beschadigde geluiden in om de muziek te laten ademen.'<br />
<br />
Wie voor het eerst een plaat van Boards of Canada hoort, zal zich verbazen over het 'zingende' geluid op de achtergrond, alsof de opnameband niet helemaad strak liep. Dat is precies wat er aan de hand is. Het duo zweert bij het geluid van oude cassettebandjes die niet meer zo goed afspelen, waarvan het geluid af en toe wegvalt, of is afgevlakt, die to langzaam gaan, of juist net iets te snel. He geeft de opname een magisch tintje, vinden ze. Het voert hen terug naar de tijd dat ze zelf nog bandjes draaiden, naar hun verloren jeugd. Debuut-lp ''Twoism'' (1995) klonk als een mispersing, alsof het gat niet precies in het midden zat. ''Slow This Bird Down'', op de nieuwe cd, heeft dit ook. De 'zingende gitaar' in ''Chromakey Dreamcoat'' is pogenomen op het strand met de verrotste taperecorder die Marcus kon vinden. Hij heeft ook een digitale. Gebrulkt le zelden. De moldie van ''Julie And Candy'' (op ''Geogaddi'') werd opgenomen met een paar fluiten en vergolgens eindeloos heen en weer gestuurd tusen de ingebouwde microfoons van twee tapedecks totdat er niets meer dan een luide, mistige galm, een soort misthoorn, overbleef.<br />
Veel, bijna alles, wat je op hun platen hoort, komt van een fluit, een gitaar, een piano, een percussie-instrument, een windorgel of een ander exotisch instrument, maar de geluiden worden dermate lang 'behandeld' dat ze zelden als dusdanig herkenbaar zijn. Het lijken allemaal synthesizergeluiden. Hoe langer je een geluid bewerkt, hoe synthesischer het klinkt, legt Marcus uit. Hun synthesizers zijn trouwens ook ''vintage:'' oude analoge modellen met knarsende en krakende geluiden.<br />
<br />
Noem hun werkwijze nooit nostalgisch; Marcus heeft er een hekel aan. Retro, nog zo'n woord. Te gemakkelijk, vindt hij. 'Wij refereren aan iets uit het verleden, iets tragisch of iets moois dat verloren is gegaan, we proberen dat terug te halen, maar daar stoppen we niet, we proberen het ''verder'' te brengen, ons voor te stellen wat ervan geworden zou zijn als het nog steeds zou bestaan. We kopiëren het verleden niet, we herschrijvenm het, we negeren de loop die de geschiedenis heeft genomen. We gaan terug naar een bepaald moment in tjid en plaats en slaan dan een altenatieve weg in. We zeggen tegen elkaar: ''Make it 1978 and then take it somewhere.'' Hoe had de muziek van nu geklonken als we toen met z'n allen die andere weg waren ingeslagen? Een soort parallelle wereld.' Mike: 'Alsof de nineties nooit hebben plaatsgevonden, zoiets. Waar zouden de wereld en de muziek zijn als we die tijd hadden overslagen?'<br />
De nineties, voor de goed orde, staan met hun schreeuwerige MTV-cultuur, hun ongebreilde hedonisme en alsmaar verdergaande globalisatie voor alles wat fout is volgens het teruggetrokken levende duo.<br />
Ze geloven heilig in een 'sideways culture'. Marcus: 'De meeste mensen nemen de wereld zoals zij is, ze staan nooit stil bij de vraag hoe de wereld er had kunnen uitzien als we niet met z'n allen door een tunnel waren gegaan. Als je kijkt naar de huidige staat van de muziek en je beschouwt de wortels van die muziek, dan wordt die weg automatisch gezien als de enige die de muziek had kunnen afleggen. Niemand realiseert zich dat die aanname bepalend is voor wat ze doen. Ze volgen gewoon dat pad. Zie het als een gang ledereen staat middenin de gang, de uitgang lonkt. Ze beschouwen de situatie en wéten: we móeten aan het eind van de gang zien te komen. Wat wij proberen te doen is ons voor te stellen dat er naast die gang nóg een gang is en dat je die gang wellicht via een geheime doorgang kunt bereiken.'<br />
<br />
Mike toont zich een groot bewonderaar van Jeroen Bosch (1450-1516), de diepreligieuze schilder wiens werk stilistisch noch thematisch aansloot bij stromingen uit zijn tijd. In tegenstelling tot het serene werk van zijn tijdgenoten ging het fantastische werk van Bosch over angst, afschuw en rampspoed. 'Zijn werk zat vol vreemde, spookachitge elementen,' doceert hij, 'elementen waarvoor geen verklaring was. Het waren fantasieën. Zijn werk was surrealistisch voordat het surrealisme was uitgevonden. Zijn verbeelding was de doorgang naar een andere wereld. Er zitten elementen in zijn werk die or niet zouden moeten zitten, inconsequenties, en juist die maken zijn werk zo sterk, zo aangrijpend.' Hij trekt een parallel met ''Music Has The Right To Children'', waarop naïeve kinderstemmetjes botsen met atonale geluiden, chroomkleurige beats en dissonante melodieën. 'Die kinderstemmetjes brengen je van je stuk, ze horen niet thuis in zulke duistere muziek. Je wéét het gewoon niet. Maar het grijpt je wel aan.'<br />
'Als je schilderijen zou maken van wat er volgens ons op onze platen gebeurt,' zegt Mike, en hij verontschuldigt zich bij voorbaat voor de pretentie die in deze uitspraak besloten ligt, 'dan zouden dat hele surrealistische werken worden. Er zou niks van kloppen. En toch zou je het niet hoeven uitleggen.' <br />
Marcus: 'Als je het moet uitleggen, is het geen kunst meer.'<br />
<br />
Tuig een plaat op met verborgen boodschappen over God en Satan en stervelingen die geloven dat zij afgezant van een van beiden zijn, en je eindigt met een altaar. Zo noemt Marcus het vorige album ''Geogaddi,'' een altaar. Hij zegt het lichtelijk smalend. Op internet curculeren de wildste theorieën en analyses over de inmiddets drie jaaroude plaat. Over David Koresh en zijn Branch Davidians, aan wie het nummer 1969 n de ep ''In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country'' zouden zijn gewijd (klopt). Over de adaptatie van de gulden snede en bijzondere cijferreeksen zoals de Fibonacci-reeks in notenschema's en songstructuren (klopt). Over links naar het werk van Berthol Brecht (onzin). Over samples van uitzendingen van spionagediensten in de Koude Oorlog (klopt). Over satanisme (onzin). Over audio palindromen ('de techniek staat voor niks').<br />
<br />
Over de albumtitel, die zoiets als De Woeste Aarde zou betekenen (stilzwijgen). Dat laatste laten ze graag open. Er moet nog wel iets te raden overblijven.<br />
Ald die 'dingetjes', zoals Mike ze noemt, plaatsen de instrumentale muziek in een context, ze brengen een lijn aan, een concept, zo je wilt. 'Zolang je bij concept maar niet denkt aan een plaat over de regels van het schaakspel.'<br />
Op ''Geogaddi'' waren de 'dingetjes' ontsproten uit de donkerste krochten van hun ziel, op al hun andere platen kun je ze herleiden tot ee verlangen naar hun jeugd - het Leitmotiv in dit verhaal. De verloren jeugd, de tijd dat gevoel dat iedere adolescent langzaam kwijtraakt. 'Als ik depressief ben, en ik heb een lange geschiedenis van depressis,' bekent Mike, 'dan zoek ik altijd troost in mijn kinderjaren. Die weemoed is altijd aanwezig in onze muziek.'<br />
Eén ding wil hij nog over ''Geogaddi'' kwijt: 'Het was een project, ''It's its own thing.'' Een claustrogobische trip door een wereld vol paranoia en duisternis. Veel mensen verwarren de plaat met de mens. Wij zijn geen doemdenkers.'<br />
'Vergeet niet,' zegt hij even later, 'dat we in de studio zaten toen 9/11 gebeurde. De laatste vijf maanden van ''Geogaddi'' vielen samen met de nasleep van 9/11. Het was een angstige tijd, het voelde alsof we terugkeerden naar de Koude Oorlog. Opeens bekroop me weer de angst die ik als kind al gevoeld had voor de atoombom. Ik denk dat iedereen van onze generatie dat gevoel wel kent. We ontkwamen er niet aan, het drukte ons gemoed. De toon werd steeds beklemmender. De sfeer, de samples, het heeft er allemaal mee te maken.' 'Bovendien,' gaat hij verder, 'ging ik zelf door een moeilijke periode. Het was een klotejaar.'<br />
<br />
'Nu, vier jaar later,' neemt Marcust het over, 'lijkt die dreiging van 9/11 permanent geworden. De wereld lijkt permanent veranderd, blijvend onveiliger. Meer chaos en duisternis en paranoia. Als je dat dag in dag uit ervaart, ga je je vanzelf afvragen: hoe kunnen we hieraan ontsnappen? Hoe kunnen we die realitelt vergeten?' Mike: 'In plaats van mee te gaan in de psychose kun je ook een uitvlucht zoeken.' Toeval of niet, in dezelfde periode luisterde hij graag naar de eerste plaat van positivo's The Polyphonic Spree. 'Ik dacht: ik wil ook weer lets hoopvols maken'<br />
En zo werd het idee voor ''The Campfire Headphase'' Geboren: ze zouden teruggaan naar de tijd dat hun muziek nog simpel escapisme was. Terug naar ''Twoism'', het debuut met zijn gekke zingende geluid. '''Twoism'' is waarschijnlijk de minst politieke plaat die we gemaakt hebben. Het is muziek om bij weg te dromen. Ook al is je leven klote en haat je je werk, als je de plaat opzet en je laat meevoeren door de melodieën, vergeet je al je ellende. Dat hebben we nu ook wee proberen te creëren: een luchtebel waarin je kunt opstijgen en wegzweven. Weg van alles. De nieuwe plaat heeft geen geheime agenda. Het enige wat hij zegt is: ''fuck all this stuff,'' zet het nieuws uit, zeg die klotebaan op, maak dat je wegkomt uit de stad, neem de tijd om eens terug te denken aan gelukkiger tijden. ledereen heeft wel een jaar in zijn hoofd, de beste zomer van zijn leven. Dat is ons doel: we bieden je een venster naar de beste zomer van je leven.'<br />
Marcus: 'Zie het als een hulpmiddel. Een tijdmachine. Een privétijdmachine. Onze muziek werkt niet in de openbare ruimte, zij spreekt tot één luisteraar tehelijk. Het is muziek om in je eentje naar te luisteren. Om in weg te kruipen. We bieden je een veilige haven.'<br />
Mike: 'A place to go.'<br />
Dan realiseert Mike ineens iets: 'Nu ik er zo over nadenk, dit is iets wat wij als vanzelfsprend beschouwen, zozeer zelfs dat we ons niet kunnen voorstellen dat er mensen zijn die iets anders zouden willen bereiken met hun muziek. Maar veel mensen die urban muziek maken, of dat nu r&b of iets anders is, die denken precies het tegenovergestelde. Ze zeggen bijna: wat we ook doen, het moet wel van deze wereld zijn, het moet het hier en nu representeren, het mag niet te veel afwijken. Het moet geschikt zijn om in Gap gedraaid te worden. Muziek is voor mij een ''escape from Gap.'' Als ik een kreldingwinkel binnenloop, denk ik al gauw: fucking hell, ik zou wel iemand iets kunnen aandoen, ik moet hier zo snel mogelijk weer weg terug naar mijn fantasiewereld.'<br />
<br />
Terug naar de bosen van de Pentland Hills. Terug naar zijn vriendin en zijn dochtertje. En terug naar zijn broer. Want na enig aandringen willen ze het wel toegeven: Mike Sandison en Marcus Eion zijn broers. Eione - speek uit: lan - is Marcus' tweede voornaam. Ze hebben het tien jaar lang geheimgehouden. Het deot er niet toe, vinden ze. Het verhaal is de muziek, niet de mensen. De mythe vervaagt, de muziek blijft. Niemand kent ze, niemand heeft ze ooit zien optreden, niemand heeft ooit een advertentie of een videoclip of een tv-optreden van ze gezien (die bestaan niet), niemand weet wat ze precies denken, maar 200.000 eenzame zielen herkennen hun stille verdriet. Hun verlangen baarde de mooiste muziek van de laatste tien jaar. Vraag het maar aan Thom Yorke.<br />
<br />
<br />
Twoism (1995, reissue 2002)<br />
In eigen beheer ultgerbracht debuut (oplage: 200). Acht nummers vol vreemde, dromerige, ambienteske, iet valse elektronica. Alsof het gat van de lp net naast het midden zat. Invloeden van Aphex Twin en Autechre zijn nog duidelijk hoorbaar. Via die laatsten belandde de lp bij het Skam-label uit Manchester. Zeven jaar later werd de lp, die inmiddels 500 euro op eBay opbracht, heruitgebracht, als enige van alle eigenbeheer-lp's en cassettes tot nu toe. Het duo speelt met het idee om ook ''Boc Maxima'' (1996) nog eens fatsoenlijk uit te brengen. Tot nut toe blijft de kluis met Music 70-demo's hermetisch gesloten.<br />
<br />
Hi Scores (1996)<br />
Mini-lp voor Skam. De eerste zes nummers die normaal verkrilgbaar waren. Dromerige elektronica, abstracte Autechre-beats en electro. Classics: ''Everything You Do Is A Balloon,'' waarvan de melodie in een droom to Marcus kwam, en ''Turquoise Hexagon Sun'' (later ook op ''MHTRTC).''<br />
<br />
Music Has The Right To Children (1998)<br />
Debuut voor Warp. Bij verschijnen nauwelijks opgemerkt, nu een klassieker bunnen de elektronishce muziek en het vertrekpunt voor subgenres als indietronica en folktronica. De plaat met de kinderstemmetjes. Ze praten en tellent wat op en af, voor- en achteruit. Mellow beats, nostalgische synths, psychedelische en intieme, soms folky sferen, hemelse melodieën. De mooiste: ''Roygbiv'' (2:28) en ''Olson'' (1:24), van die typische BOC-miniatuurtjes die de gaten tussen de 'echte' nummers vullen en elgenlijk hun voorkeur genieten. Het zijn synthesizermelodieën die je aan het eind van een tv-serie zou kunnen horen, als de titelrol in beeld verschijnt. Chill-out-hit: ''Aquarius.'' Zilj: 'Een plaat voor in de openlucht, op een koude, zonnige dag.'<br />
<br />
In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country (2000)<br />
'Come and live with us... in a religious community in a beautiful place out in the country.' Een uinodiging van DAvid Koresh en zijn Branch Davidians-sekte in Waco. Naast de titeltrack verwijst ook ''Amo Bishop Roden'' naar de sekte; het is de naam van een afvallig sktelid. Haar beeltenis priljkt op de achterkant van de cd, Koresh's oog priemt binnenin. Classic: ''Kid For Today.'' Maar de hele EP (4 tracks, 24 minuten) is briljant.<br />
<br />
Geogaddi (2002)<br />
Inktzwarte plaat. Duister, sinister, bijna duivels. Maar toch ook weer heel melodieus en organisch. Barstenswvol geheime boodschappen, verwijzingen, mathematische concepten en getallensymboliek. ''Music is Math'' vergondigen ze aan het begin. In ''1969'' duiken de Branch Davidains weere op. Het nummer duurt 4:19. Op 19 april 1993 voltrok zich de slachtpartij in Waco. Achter elk detail schuilt een betekenis, zo lijkt het. Wie zijn platen graag achterstevoren draait, heeft aan ''Geogaddi'' een goede. In ''You Could Feel The Sky'' hoor je ineedns 'a god with hooves'; in ''A Is To B as B Is To C'' openbaren zich zowaar ''audio palindromen:'' 'all you love we' wordt 'we love you all' en 'I've been gone about a week' blijft exact hetzelfde! Vreemde, verontrustende plaat, ''Gyroscope'' kwam tot Marcus in een nachtmerrie, en dat is het: een nachtemerrie. Zij: 'Een claustrofobische trip door een wereld vol duisternis en paranoia met aan het eind een sprankje hoop.' Een journalist: 'Muziek als een spiraal of een fractal die gedetaileerder wordt naarmate je er dieper in gaat.' Het is de cd die de Schotten voor het eerst brede erkenning oplevert en ook in OOR tot een van de beste tien cd's van dat jaar gekozen wordt. Hitje: ''1969.''<br />
<br />
The Campfire Headphase (2005)<br />
De nieuwe. Hij stelt niet teleur. 'een echte Boards Of Canada-plaat' vinden ze zelf, met elementen van ''Twoism'' en ''MHTRTC'' en subtiel ingebrachte gitaarloops. Gerdoomde roadtrip door het oude Amerika. Van minder donker dan ''Geogaddi''. De ''good trip'' na de ''bad trip.'' Nog nooit klonken ze zo opgewekt als in ''Peacock Tail,'' hun 'Stevie Wonder-nummer' (Marcus). Pas op voor de slottrits: een zware depressie ligt op de loer.<br />
<br />
<br />
Orbital?<br />
De makers van ''Chime, Belfast'' en ''Halcyon + On + On'' waren ook broers. Op het donkere podium droegen ze van die karakteristieke mijnwerkerslampjes, waarmee ze hun sequencers en samplers uitlichtten. Hun eerste platen waren oké, vinden Mike en Marcus, maar om nu ais tweed Orbital door het leven te moeten gaan... nee. Dus verzwegen ze toen ze bij Warp tekenden hun familieband. Tien jaar lang verstopte Marcus zich achter zijn tweede voornaam, Eion. Mike: 'Op alle Orbital-platen stond: written by Hartnoll & Hartnoll. Dat vonden we zo suf.' Ze wilden anoniem door het leven gaan en geen verhalen over 'de muzikale familie Sandison'. Ze hebben nog twee broers; die maken ook muziek. De één woont in Autralië, de ander in Londen. Mike en Marcus wonen in een kleineleefgemeenschap in de Schotse Pentland Hills, onder Edinburgh. Hun kinderjaren brachten ze door in Londen en Calgary. Daar zagen ze op tv de natuurdocumentaires van The National Film Board Of Canada. Vandaar. Overigens dreigt ook Mike te gaan uitvliegen. Zijn vriendin had een baan bij een designbureau in Auckland, Nieuw-Zeeland en wil graag terug. Mike twijfelt. Boards Of Canada zou een breedbandband moeten worden, terwijl het jammen zo essentieel is voor hun muziek. Er loopt altijd een taperecorder mee in de studio. Maar voor alles is een oplossing, zegt Marcus stellig. 'Ik zeg altijd: laat je niet door mij weerhouden, doe het! We doen dit al zolang als ik me kan herinneren [Mike sinds 1980, Marcus sinds 1986] en het is nooit een reden geweest om onze dromen niet na te jagen. Als ik zou denken dat ik ergens anders een gelukkiger leven kan opbouwen, dan zou ik me niet laten weehouden door de muziek. Daarom hab ik tegen Mike gezegd: ik wil er niet tussenkomen. Als jij het echt wilt, dan beschouw ik het niet als het einde, nee, dan beschouw ik het als een nieuwe uitdaging.' Uitdagingen genoeg, voorlopig. Ze hebben plannen voor soloprojecten. Ze zijn in onderhandeling over een soundtrack van een grote film. Ze zijn alweer aan een nieuwe Boards Of Canada-plaat begonnen (ze hebben nog een contract voor drie albums bij Warp). Mike: 'De volgende plaat zal voor iedereen als een shock komen. Dit verwacht niemand van ons.' En er zijn zowaar plannen voor wat liveshows met band in het voorjaar. Maar dat gerucht ging drie jaar geleden ook. Sinsdien zwegen ze.</div>Maxrhttps://bocpages.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:The_Last_Secret_of_Pop&diff=6644Talk:The Last Secret of Pop2009-06-01T12:41:55Z<p>Maxr: Created page with 'I will be transcribing this interview. However, I don't speak dutch, so I can't provide a translation. -maxr'</p>
<hr />
<div>I will be transcribing this interview. However, I don't speak dutch, so I can't provide a translation. -maxr</div>Maxrhttps://bocpages.org/w/index.php?title=Peering_Out_from_Behind_the_Curtain&diff=6590Peering Out from Behind the Curtain2009-05-29T18:37:44Z<p>Maxr: Undo revision 6587 by Maxr (Talk)</p>
<hr />
<div>'''"Peering Out from Behind the Curtain"''' was an [[interview]] by Steve Marchese that appeared in ''RE:UP'' magazine, Manual 09, around January 2006. Photos within the article are credited to [[Peter Iain Campbell]].<br />
<br />
== Bibliography ==<br />
"Peering Out from Behind the Curtain" by Steve Marchese<br />
<br />
RE:UP Manual 09 (~Jan 2006), pp. 28-31,86<br />
<br />
== Article text ==<br />
{{original}}<br />
Edinburgh has a hangover. The normal din of this bustling university city remains eerily suppressed by a combination of the preceding night's partying and a cold front quickly descending from the North. The streets are empty save some churchgoers and a stray dog. An old man in a faded suit hands lunch menus to nobody. The museum set up as a meeting point with Boards of Canada--brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin-- is still closed and won't open to the public for at least another hour. I am sitting in the middle of an unfamiliar place, waiting to meet two virtually faceless musicians with whom I have yet to directly speak. Could this scene be completly engineered or am I thinking too much into it? Yet for some reason, I know there couldn't be a more perfect start to a day highlighted by a sit-down with Boards of Canada.<br />
<br />
The development of mystery and rumor is certainly nothing new to contemporary music. Stories of Paul McCartney's death surfaced after the Beatles released their thirteenth record. In 1989, nearly 15 years after the formation of Judas Priest, the metal band was put on trial (and eventually exonerated) after a double suicide allegedly caused by hidden messages like "try suicide" and "do it, do it" on the record ''Stained Cross''. And although testaments to Pink Floyd's ''Dark Side of the Moon'' functioning as a second, synchronizing soundtrack to ''The Wizard of Oz'' started surfacing online in 1994, rumors of this pairing can be traced all the way back to 1979.<br />
<br />
What Differentiates Boards of Canada from the rest of this smallish pantheon of mythologized artists, however, is the speed by which the duo have been able to invent and disseminate such intrigue. Much of it has to do with a pious and enthusiastic fan base, but in just a short time (over the release of only 3 full-length LPs) rumors--and some truths--have spread far and wide about the duo's religious proclivities, their use of embedded messages in tracks (sometimes known as backmasking) and secret tracks made anonymously for major pop stars.<br />
<br />
Most of the speculation gained momentum due to the pair's reluctance to do face-to-face interviews. But now that they've surfaced in promotion of their new LP, ''The Campfire Headphase'', it seems a lot of the conjecture has been systematically addressed in intervies online and recent features in European magazines ''The Wire'' and ''Groove''. Even a fleeting peek behind the curtain shows them not to be the circuit-obsessed techno Bedouins protrayed by the media- but rather, a pair of well-adjusted, hugely likeable brothers who do not only finish each other's sentences, but who have also applied an admirable do-it-yourself philosophy to their unique pursuit of artistic perfection.<br />
<br />
"There's never been a coordinated plan to engineer a blockade around who and what we are," says Mike Sandison, easing back into a chair at the coffee house where we finally decided to meet. "We wanted to make music that stood out on its own as an entity inside its own bubble. In the early stages we kind of felt like if we were going to out in magazines an start posing for photographs we'd spoil that."<br />
<br />
And while the pair have managed to maintain an easy pastoral obscurity that is suprisingly only 40 minutes outside of Edinburgh by car, their music has gained increasing popularity worldwide- making it more difficult to stay hidden in the periphery of the limelight. "One of the worst things we've found is that by being kind of absent, people have a tendency to fill in the gaps." says Marcus Eoin (Eoin being his middle name, the two have recently revealed that they are in fact brothers). "When there's a hole, people will just make things up, it isn't so much that we're trying to be secretive. We just don't feel an eed to sell ourselves. As far as we're concerned it's not part of what we do. People write about us like we're these mountain hermits who just won't talk to anybody and we [wonder]; Where did that come from? We never said that to anyone."<br />
<br />
People think of us as being one way," continues Mike. "We'd like to go out on tour in spandex and breathe fire but we just can't do that because we're supposed to be something else entirely," he jokes, duckin out of the sunlight that just surfaced through the quickly dissolving clouds. However, with a long day of interviews ahead it seems Sandison won't be able to get out of the light just yet. With the release of ''The Campfire Headphase'', Boards of Canada have agreed to be willing participants in their largest press push in quite some time, prompting many to wonder, why now? "Isolation can get negative at times," continues Mike, "because you start to feel like you're being arrogant or that we're doing it because we hate people os much. But it's not like that at all, It's more about the fact that we don't want to ruin the art by making our lives more important than the music. Because our lives are just like that of any other artist: we're just trying to create something special."<br />
<br />
In a way it seems like the self-sequestered twosome have enthusiastically embraced the chance to finally speak out, exploding from topic to topic like barges of fireworks wired together with small lengths of fuse. In mood, tone and content, a conversation with Boards of Canada barely echoes the consistency that governs their recordings. Instead it jumps from random subjects like Ted Nugent, Noriega (the dictator, not the MC), and an internet free lifestyle to Jerry Lewis films and trans-Atlantic politics with an effortless flow that defies the misinformed online reports of a disdain aimed at journalists. What captures my attention almost immediately is not how art(??? couldn't make this out) late the two are--I expected that considering the intricate language and presentation of their music--but how approachable and open they seem to almost any inquiry. A list of talking points I had prepared the night before is totally disregarded as the conversation steers itself amost invisibly toward one of the biggest questions that will be asked all day: Why haven't they played live in over 3 years?<br />
<br />
Opening up a long stretch of conversation on the subject, Mike takes the lead "We've been under a lot of pressure to play of course," he confirms. "One of the things that comes through from the big boss man [Warp Records] is offers from festivals. Usually our respons to that is that we would be more comfortable playing a small venue that would suit what we do. Our live show as it was had ah eavy reliance on visuals--we were using video projections and monitors--and secretly over the last 3 years since we last played a gig we've started to develop a different show. We expanded the band and have friends who are part of the potential group if we go out on the road again. And we do intend to go out and play again but at the moment what we want to do is at odds with the offers coming in to play alongside bands like Foo Fighters and people like that."<br />
<br />
Marcus, the quieter but by no means less passionate of the two, finishes Mike's thought and addresses more specifically what it is about Boards of Canada's sound that makes the prospect of a live show do tricky. "You've got to know the limitations of the music that you make. I always think of our music as being a lot more like headphone music, a brain music that you can drift into," he says. "So the idea of playing on a stage where you may be coming on just before a massive set by The Chemical Brothers doesn't sound like it would work. Earlier on though, when we were in transition from working with Skam to working with Warp, we did a couple of gigs that were label showcases with Warp artists. We have massive respect for guys like Squarepusher and Aphex Twin but we found ourselves doing shows with these guys and they were so full-on electronic and really full of energy. It wasn't really what we wanted to do at the time."<br />
<br />
Finishing Marcus' thought, Mike chimes in for one last comment, the thought of which will certainly become fan-boy fodder for neo-prog and electronica lovers the world over. "It might have suited us better to be put on a bill beside Tortoise or somebody like that. And you never know, we still could end up doing it one day."<br />
<br />
Talk of the new record conveniently follows, revolving around the idea for Boards of Canada that is perhaps their most important reord to date. In so many ways ''The Campfire Headphase'' marks a musical evolution for the brothers, but what makes it a truly compellin listen is its adherence to the band's emerging modus opreandi: To move forward--both technologically and philosophically--while maintaining a strong connection to the past. This time, in palce of the numerological Easter eggs and hidden Branch Daviddian references, Boards of Canada have enmeshed their music within the trappings of live instrumentation, placing them squarely in the middle of an intersection with infinite roads trailing outward. "A little part [of using the guitars] on the new album is to open up the scope for what we want to do in the future," comments Mike. "There's kind of a destiny for where the music is going to go but we haven't managed to do it yet. Maybe the new record will kind of open the door for future options."<br />
<br />
"It doesn't necessarily mean the next album will be a Deep Purple record," adds Marcus jokingly. The brothers have an unexpectedly wry sense of humor that comes as a pleasant surprise given the melancholy and often ominous tones of their music. "We could go and make a record that's really electronic but we know now that we've got a platform to go in any direction we want. We're trying to make sure that people don't define us purely as an electronic band."<br />
<br />
Being defined by labels or pidgeonholed to a particular scene or genre are two things that both Sandison brothers agree are detrimental to their music making. "We don't buy into anything," declares Marcus. "When there's something that we're really into we still try to have some objectivity about it."<br />
<br />
"We're sort of cultural nomads," supports Mike. "I don't see us in part of a group - social or musical." Their publicly released records all bear an undeniable trademark of textured ambience and reworked hip-hop breaks and-like it or not-the winning combination has led to considerable praise by electronic music fans. But privately, hidden away in their private studio (which is rumored to house hundreds of rare and irreplaceable instruments), are thousands of tracks of organic, acoustic and experimental music that they hope to one day release under various pseudonyms. It's just one of a number of examples during the conversation that show both brother's love of simple, organic instrumentation.<br />
<br />
Mike elaborates, "People may be surprised to hear that of the demos that get sent to us, we truly love the ones that are really homemade, sort of crap and unfinished. The ones that are rough around the edges. The demos that are really slick electronica-type things are the ones that get listened to once and put on the shelves."<br />
<br />
"The thing with electronic music these days," says Marcus, "is that so much of it nowadays can be really good but it's so studio-based. So the moment you try and take it out, it's either played back form the laptop or a mess for someone who isn't able to play it live. The laptop performance thing has never been something that's appealed to us."<br />
<br />
Continuing on the live element, Mike tells a story that will certainly add to an increase in message board chatter, "I think it's commetable that people are creating software to do that because at least it's better than someone turning up to a show and pressing play on a .wav file. We know a guy who is a very high profile electronic producer in Britain - very famous in some electronic circles - and he played a show in Glasgow one time and he told us that he had just played a cassette and stood on stage pretending to press buttons. And he thought it was funny. We were laughing but also horrified at the same time."<br />
<br />
The mixture of humor, honesty, passion and creativity is something revealed only by meeting these two self-confessed reclusive artists in person. Instead, all most of us have to objectively evaluate about Boards of Canada is their music. It's a scenario the brothers have worked very hard to cultivate. Most importantly, however, and perhaps the chief reason they've surfaced for this brief set of interviews--besides dispelling myths of course--is to reveal that they are musicians with purpose and that music is but one way for them to achieve that purpose. "If you had to vaguely approximate a purpose behind our music," summarizes Marcus, "for me it would be like we are soundtracking the alternative place you might be right now. You wouldn't be dead but you'd just be in a different world; everything would be quite alien, so you'd wonder what would the music be like. What would you be hearing?" He continues, "I think perhaps the theme of what we're doing is instead of looking forward we are looking backward to the positivity that you might have had as a child. And we want to take it as a fuel and be inspired by it. I think of myself as the kind of person that even when I'm 80 I'll still be listening to weird music and playing computer games. I don't want to be the kind of person that gives up on youth." It's a sentiment shared by both brothers and, I'm sure, by most of the enthusiastic fans who hope to be listening to the "weird" music of Boards of Canada far into their eighties as well.<br />
<br />
<br />
Boards of Canada on...<br />
Spirituality<br />
Marcus: You have to allow some spiritual element when making music. But we don't mean that in any kind of mumbo jumbo faux religious way, because some people have misquoted us and made us sound like a couple of magicians or something. A lot of musicians don't seem to have that spiritual element because they are just working when they make music. Like they have another agenda and are doing it for other reasons. But the most interesting musicians seem to be the ones that are tying to go somewhere else with their music. A bit like he whole escapist or science fiction fantasy thing, it's the ones that look at music and think: how could things be different?<br />
<br />
Fan expectations<br />
Mike: When you are signed to a label like Warp, you know that there's an audience of people out there buying [your music]. You can try to ignore it and try to imagine there's no one listening but there is always a feeling in the back of your mind that you have certain things to live up to regarding production standards. You wouldn't be able to get away with putting out an album with an 18-minute long ambient track in the middle of all pop and soul tracks. That's the kind of thing we do on our old tapes. We wouldn't have gotten shit aobut it and we would have just done it. It wouldn't have mattered. But now we have these considerations because we're putting out records that force use to think aobut the average person who buys them.<br />
<br />
Living in Canada<br />
Marcus: At the particular age we were at when we lived in Canada you are more likely to notice the differences between where you come from and where you're visiting. The things that out like TV and music, the way people dress are the things that you carry with you when you leave that place. I thik it's been imprinted on us. For us, it was a very specific time--1979 to 1980 North American media culture--that left like a ghostly shadow that sort of stuck to us. We came away form there with a memory of the palce that was nostalgic to the extent that we've been trying to get back there ever since. Not geographically, but more like a feeling. By making music that makes you travel to that place.<br />
<br />
Fatherhood<br />
Mike: Now I find that a lot of the depression about losing my childhood has gone by the wayside because I'm able to go back there with my little daughter. Kids do a lot of interesting things that you kind of vaguely remember doing yourself but have shutoff as an adult. You start to realize that life doesn't have to be about being completly conscious of the universe's problems. It can be really fulfilling if you just concentrate on a little microscopic version of life that a child sees. As a parent you have no choice but to occasionally lose yourself in a child's world like The Jungle Book of something. It's a bit like what we do with our music. It's like saying to yourself that just for this hour I'm gonna switch off all the crap in the world and lose myself in an alternative world. Like a good book or something. It's kind of how we see what we do with our records. Although it's becoming increasingly difficult the older we get. It's much harder to not put our political beliefs into the music.<br />
<br />
Stevie Wonder<br />
Marcus: I know it sounds strange to say it but I've always thought of Stevie Wonder as an electronic artist. A lot of his bass line were done on synths. He's done project albums like ''The Secret Life of Plants'' that are all synthesizers, all done with keyboards. You wouldn't describe him as rock and it's too lazy to describe him as R&B or soul. To me, it's electronic but it's absolutely organic. Here you have incredible singing, incredible tunes, and amazing use of keyboards. Sometimes I step back and think aobut the sound of Stevie in the '70s and it shoes just how different electronic music can be.<br />
<br />
Remixing Beck<br />
Mike: We were already huge fans of Beck's music and friends with the guys form Anticon. Dose and I are big penpals. I think Beck's producers asked the Anticon guys if they had a contact for us and the next thing we know we get a letter asking us to do [this remix of] Beck's. We said that we'd love to hear the track first and see what it's like and I said to Marcus at one stage that if this track is really slow and empty we'll do it.<br />
Marcus: I actually told Warp six months earlier to don't call us about remixes unless it's Beck or God.<br />
<br />
== Images ==<br />
Scans of the magazine article were provided by [[Twoism (forum)|Twoism]] user [[nlogax (person)|nlogax]].<br />
<gallery><br />
Image:Reup.gif|Cover<br />
Image:reup-01.jpg|Page 28<br />
Image:reup-02.jpg|Page 29<br />
Image:reup-03.jpg|Page 30<br />
Image:reup-04.jpg|Page 31<br />
Image:reup-05.jpg|Page 86<br />
</gallery><br />
<br />
== Blog entry ==<br />
The author posted an entry about the interview on his blog, Scissorkick. The post included an mp3 of the ''[[A Few Old Tunes]]'' track "[[Sequoia]]". The mp3 is the same as from previously known leaks; it is not a new or better quality copy.<br />
<br />
== External links ==<br />
* [http://reupmag.com/ RE:UP Magazine]<br />
** [http://www.merchline.com/reup/productdisplay.5077.p.htm Back issue ordering]<br />
* [http://www.scissorkick.com/2006/01/boc-in-reup.html Author's blog entry]<br />
<br />
[[Category: Interviews]]<br />
[[Category: Articles needing transcription]]<br />
[[Category: The Campfire Headphase era]]</div>Maxrhttps://bocpages.org/w/index.php?title=Peering_Out_from_Behind_the_Curtain&diff=6589Peering Out from Behind the Curtain2009-05-29T18:37:22Z<p>Maxr: Undo revision 6588 by Maxr (Talk)</p>
<hr />
<div>'''"Peering Out from Behind the Curtain"''' was an [[interview]] by Steve Marchese that appeared in ''RE:UP'' magazine, Manual 09, around January 2006. Photos within the article are credited to [[Peter Iain Campbell]].<br />
<br />
== Bibliography ==<br />
"Peering Out from Behind the Curtain" by Steve Marchese<br />
<br />
RE:UP Manual 09 (~Jan 2006), pp. 28-31,86<br />
<br />
== Article text ==<br />
{{original}}<br />
Edinburgh has a hangover. The normal din of this bustling university city remains eerily suppressed by a combination of the preceding night's partying and a cold front quickly descending from the North. The streets are empty save some churchgoers and a stray dog. An old man in a faded suit hands lunch menus to nobody. The museum set up as a meeting point with Boards of Canada--brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin-- is still closed and won't open to the public for at least another hour. I am sitting in the middle of an unfamiliar place, waiting to meet two virtually faceless musicians with whom I have yet to directly speak. Could this scene be completly engineered or am I thinking too much into it? Yet for some reason, I know there couldn't be a more perfect start to a day highlighted by a sit-down with Boards of Canada.<br />
<br />
The development of mystery and rumor is certainly nothing new to contemporary music. Stories of Paul McCartney's death surfaced after the Beatles released their thirteenth record. In 1989, nearly 15 years after the formation of Judas Priest, the metal band was put on trial (and eventually exonerated) after a double suicide allegedly caused by hidden messages like "try suicide" and "do it, do it" on the record ''Stained Cross''. And although testaments to Pink Floyd's ''Dark Side of the Moon'' functioning as a second, synchronizing soundtrack to ''The Wizard of Oz'' started surfacing online in 1994, rumors of this pairing can be traced all the way back to 1979.<br />
<br />
What Differentiates Boards of Canada from the rest of this smallish pantheon of mythologized artists, however, is the speed by which the duo have been able to invent and disseminate such intrigue. Much of it has to do with a pious and enthusiastic fan base, but in just a short time (over the release of only 3 full-length LPs) rumors--and some truths--have spread far and wide about the duo's religious proclivities, their use of embedded messages in tracks (sometimes known as backmasking) and secret tracks made anonymously for major pop stars.<br />
<br />
Most of the speculation gained momentum due to the pair's reluctance to do face-to-face interviews. But now that they've surfaced in promotion of their new LP, ''The Campfire Headphase'', it seems a lot of the conjecture has been systematically addressed in intervies online and recent features in European magazines ''The Wire'' and ''Groove''. Even a fleeting peek behind the curtain shows them not to be the circuit-obsessed techno Bedouins protrayed by the media- but rather, a pair of well-adjusted, hugely likeable brothers who do not only finish each other's sentences, but who have also applied an admirable do-it-yourself philosophy to their unique pursuit of artistic perfection.<br />
<br />
"There's never been a coordinated plan to engineer a blockade around who and what we are," says Mike Sandison, easing back into a chair at the coffee house where we finally decided to meet. "We wanted to make music that stood out on its own as an entity inside its own bubble. In the early stages we kind of felt like if we were going to out in magazines an start posing for photographs we'd spoil that."<br />
<br />
And while the pair have managed to maintain an easy pastoral obscurity that is suprisingly only 40 minutes outside of Edinburgh by car, their music has gained increasing popularity worldwide- making it more difficult to stay hidden in the periphery of the limelight. "One of the worst things we've found is that by being kind of absent, people have a tendency to fill in the gaps." says Marcus Eoin (Eoin being his middle name, the two have recently revealed that they are in fact brothers). "When there's a hole, people will just make things up, it isn't so much that we're trying to be secretive. We just don't feel an eed to sell ourselves. As far as we're concerned it's not part of what we do. People write about us like we're these mountain hermits who just won't talk to anybody and we [wonder]; Where did that come from? We never said that to anyone."<br />
<br />
People think of us as being one way," continues Mike. "We'd like to go out on tour in spandex and breathe fire but we just can't do that because we're supposed to be something else entirely," he jokes, duckin out of the sunlight that just surfaced through the quickly dissolving clouds. However, with a long day of interviews ahead it seems Sandison won't be able to get out of the light just yet. With the release of ''The Campfire Headphase'', Boards of Canada have agreed to be willing participants in their largest press push in quite some time, prompting many to wonder, why now? "Isolation can get negative at times," continues Mike, "because you start to feel like you're being arrogant or that we're doing it because we hate people os much. But it's not like that at all, It's more about the fact that we don't want to ruin the art by making our lives more important than the music. Because our lives are just like that of any other artist: we're just trying to create something special."<br />
<br />
In a way it seems like the self-sequestered twosome have enthusiastically embraced the chance to finally speak out, exploding from topic to topic like barges of fireworks wired together with small lengths of fuse. In mood, tone and content, a conversation with Boards of Canada barely echoes the consistency that governs their recordings. Instead it jumps from random subjects like Ted Nugent, Noriega (the dictator, not the MC), and an internet free lifestyle to Jerry Lewis films and trans-Atlantic politics with an effortless flow that defies the misinformed online reports of a disdain aimed at journalists. What captures my attention almost immediately is not how art(??? couldn't make this out) late the two are--I expected that considering the intricate language and presentation of their music--but how approachable and open they seem to almost any inquiry. A list of talking points I had prepared the night before is totally disregarded as the conversation steers itself amost invisibly toward one of the biggest questions that will be asked all day: Why haven't they played live in over 3 years?<br />
<br />
Opening up a long stretch of conversation on the subject, Mike takes the lead "We've been under a lot of pressure to play of course," he confirms. "One of the things that comes through from the big boss man [Warp Records] is offers from festivals. Usually our respons to that is that we would be more comfortable playing a small venue that would suit what we do. Our live show as it was had ah eavy reliance on visuals--we were using video projections and monitors--and secretly over the last 3 years since we last played a gig we've started to develop a different show. We expanded the band and have friends who are part of the potential group if we go out on the road again. And we do intend to go out and play again but at the moment what we want to do is at odds with the offers coming in to play alongside bands like Foo Fighters and people like that."<br />
<br />
Marcus, the quieter but by no means less passionate of the two, finishes Mike's thought and addresses more specifically what it is about Boards of Canada's sound that makes the prospect of a live show do tricky. "You've got to know the limitations of the music that you make. I always think of our music as being a lot more like headphone music, a brain music that you can drift into," he says. "So the idea of playing on a stage where you may be coming on just before a massive set by The Chemical Brothers doesn't sound like it would work. Earlier on though, when we were in transition from working with Skam to working with Warp, we did a couple of gigs that were label showcases with Warp artists. We have massive respect for guys like Squarepusher and Aphex Twin but we found ourselves doing shows with these guys and they were so full-on electronic and really full of energy. It wasn't really what we wanted to do at the time."<br />
<br />
Finishing Marcus' thought, Mike chimes in for one last comment, the thought of which will certainly become fan-boy fodder for neo-prog and electronica lovers the world over. "It might have suited us better to be put on a bill beside Tortoise or somebody like that. And you never know, we still could end up doing it one day."<br />
<br />
Talk of the new record conveniently follows, revolving around the idea for Boards of Canada that is perhaps their most important reord to date. In so many ways ''The Campfire Headphase'' marks a musical evolution for the brothers, but what makes it a truly compellin listen is its adherence to the band's emerging modus opreandi: To move forward--both technologically and philosophically--while maintaining a strong connection to the past. This time, in palce of the numerological Easter eggs and hidden Branch Daviddian references, Boards of Canada have enmeshed their music within the trappings of live instrumentation, placing them squarely in the middle of an intersection with infinite roads trailing outward. "A little part [of using the guitars] on the new album is to open up the scope for what we want to do in the future," comments Mike. "There's kind of a destiny for where the music is going to go but we haven't managed to do it yet. Maybe the new record will kind of open the door for future options."<br />
<br />
"It doesn't necessarily mean the next album will be a Deep Purple record," adds Marcus jokingly. The brothers have an unexpectedly wry sense of humor that comes as a pleasant surprise given the melancholy and often ominous tones of their music. "We could go and make a record that's really electronic but we know now that we've got a platform to go in any direction we want. We're trying to make sure that people don't define us purely as an electronic band."<br />
<br />
Being defined by labels or pidgeonholed to a particular scene or genre are two things that both Sandison brothers agree are detrimental to their music making. "We don't buy into anything," declares Marcus. "When there's something that we're really into we still try to have some objectivity about it."<br />
<br />
"We're sort of cultural nomads," supports Mike. "I don't see us in part of a group - social or musical." Their publicly released records all bear an undeniable trademark of textured ambience and reworked hip-hop breaks and-like it or not-the winning combination has led to considerable praise by electronic music fans. But privately, hidden away in their private studio (which is rumored to house hundreds of rare and irreplaceable instruments), are thousands of tracks of organic, acoustic and experimental music that they hope to one day release under various pseudonyms. It's just one of a number of examples during the conversation that show both brother's love of simple, organic instrumentation.<br />
<br />
Mike elaborates, "People may be surprised to hear that of the demos that get sent to us, we truly love the ones that are really homemade, sort of crap and unfinished. The ones that are rough around the edges. The demos that are really slick electronica-type things are the ones that get listened to once and put on the shelves."<br />
<br />
"The thing with electronic music these days," says Marcus, "is that so much of it nowadays can be really good but it's so studio-based. So the moment you try and take it out, it's either played back form the laptop or a mess for someone who isn't able to play it live. The laptop performance thing has never been something that's appealed to us."<br />
<br />
Continuing on the live element, Mike tells a story that will certainly add to an increase in message board chatter, "I think it's commetable that people are creating software to do that because at least it's better than someone turning up to a show and pressing play on a .wav file. We know a guy who is a very high profile electronic producer in Britain - very famous in some electronic circles - and he played a show in Glasgow one time and he told us that he had just played a cassette and stood on stage pretending to press buttons. And he thought it was funny. We were laughing but also horrified at the same time."<br />
<br />
The mixture of humor, honesty, passion and creativity is something revealed only by meeting these two self-confessed reclusive artists in person. Instead, all most of us have to objectively evaluate about Boards of Canada is their music. It's a scenario the brothers have worked very hard to cultivate. Most importantly, however, and perhaps the chief reason they've surfaced for this brief set of interviews--besides dispelling myths of course--is to reveal that they are musicians with purpose and that music is but one way for them to achieve that purpose. "If you had to vaguely approximate a purpose behind our music," summarizes Marcus, "for me it would be like we are soundtracking the alternative place you might be right now. You wouldn't be dead but you'd just be in a different world; everything would be quite alien, so you'd wonder what would the music be like. What would you be hearing?" He continues, "I think perhaps the theme of what we're doing is instead of looking forward we are looking backward to the positivity that you might have had as a child. And we want to take it as a fuel and be inspired by it. I think of myself as the kind of person that even when I'm 80 I'll still be listening to weird music and playing computer games. I don't want to be the kind of person that gives up on youth." It's a sentiment shared by both brothers and, I'm sure, by most of the enthusiastic fans who hope to be listening to the "weird" music of Boards of Canada far into their eighties as well.<br />
<br />
<br />
Boards of Canada on...<br />
Spirituality<br />
Marcus: You have to allow some spiritual element when making music. But we don't mean that in any kind of mumbo jumbo faux religious way, because some people have misquoted us and made us sound like a couple of magicians or something. A lot of musicians don't seem to have that spiritual element because they are just working when they make music. Like they have another agenda and are doing it for other reasons. But the most interesting musicians seem to be the ones that are tying to go somewhere else with their music. A bit like he whole escapist or science fiction fantasy thing, it's the ones that look at music and think: how could things be different?<br />
<br />
Fan expectations<br />
Mike: When you are signed to a label like Warp, you know that there's an audience of people out there buying [your music]. You can try to ignore it and try to imagine there's no one listening but there is always a feeling in the back of your mind that you have certain things to live up to regarding production standards. You wouldn't be able to get away with putting out an album with an 18-minute long ambient track in the middle of all pop and soul tracks. That's the kind of thing we do on our old tapes. We wouldn't have gotten shit aobut it and we would have just done it. It wouldn't have mattered. But now we have these considerations because we're putting out records that force use to think aobut the average person who buys them.<br />
<br />
Living in Canada<br />
Marcus: At the particular age we were at when we lived in Canada you are more likely to notice the differences between where you come from and where you're visiting. The things that out like TV and music, the way people dress are the things that you carry with you when you leave that place. I thik it's been imprinted on us. For us, it was a very specific time--1979 to 1980 North American media culture--that left like a ghostly shadow that sort of stuck to us. We came away form there with a memory of the palce that was nostalgic to the extent that we've been trying to get back there ever since. Not geographically, but more like a feeling. By making music that makes you travel to that place.<br />
<br />
Fatherhood<br />
Mike: Now I find that a lot of the depression about losing my childhood has gone by the wayside because I'm able to go back there with my little daughter. Kids do a lot of interesting things that you kind of vaguely remember doing yourself but have shutoff as an adult. You start to realize that life doesn't have to be about being completly conscious of the universe's problems. It can be really fulfilling if you just concentrate on a little microscopic version of life that a child sees. As a parent you have no choice but to occasionally lose yourself in a child's world like The Jungle Book of something. It's a bit like what we do with our music. It's like saying to yourself that just for this hour I'm gonna switch off all the crap in the world and lose myself in an alternative world. Like a good book or something. It's kind of how we see what we do with our records. Although it's becoming increasingly difficult the older we get. It's much harder to not put our political beliefs into the music.<br />
<br />
Stevie Wonder<br />
Marcus: I know it sounds strange to say it but I've always thought of Stevie Wonder as an electronic artist. A lot of his bass line were done on synths. He's done project albums like ''The Secret Life of Plants'' that are all synthesizers, all done with keyboards. You wouldn't describe him as rock and it's too lazy to describe him as R&B or soul. To me, it's electronic but it's absolutely organic. Here you have incredible singing, incredible tunes, and amazing use of keyboards. Sometimes I step back and think aobut the sound of Stevie in the '70s and it shoes just how different electronic music can be.<br />
<br />
Remixing Beck<br />
Mike: We were already huge fans of Beck's music and friends with the guys form Anticon. Dose and I are big penpals. I think Beck's producers asked the Anticon guys if they had a contact for us and the next thing we know we get a letter asking us to do [this remix of] Beck's. We said that we'd love to hear the track first and see what it's like and I said to Marcus at one stage that if this track is really slow and empty we'll do it.<br />
Marcus: I actually told Warp six months earlier to don't call us about remixes unless it's Beck or God.<br />
<br />
== Images ==<br />
Scans of the magazine article were provided by [[Twoism (forum)|Twoism]] user [[nlogax (person)|nlogax]].<br />
<gallery><br />
Image:Reup.gif|Cover<br />
Image:reup-02.jpg|Page 28<br />
Image:reup-01.jpg|Page 29<br />
Image:reup-03.jpg|Page 30<br />
Image:reup-04.jpg|Page 31<br />
Image:reup-05.jpg|Page 86<br />
</gallery><br />
<br />
== Blog entry ==<br />
The author posted an entry about the interview on his blog, Scissorkick. The post included an mp3 of the ''[[A Few Old Tunes]]'' track "[[Sequoia]]". The mp3 is the same as from previously known leaks; it is not a new or better quality copy.<br />
<br />
== External links ==<br />
* [http://reupmag.com/ RE:UP Magazine]<br />
** [http://www.merchline.com/reup/productdisplay.5077.p.htm Back issue ordering]<br />
* [http://www.scissorkick.com/2006/01/boc-in-reup.html Author's blog entry]<br />
<br />
[[Category: Interviews]]<br />
[[Category: Articles needing transcription]]<br />
[[Category: The Campfire Headphase era]]</div>Maxrhttps://bocpages.org/w/index.php?title=Peering_Out_from_Behind_the_Curtain&diff=6588Peering Out from Behind the Curtain2009-05-29T18:35:52Z<p>Maxr: /* Images */</p>
<hr />
<div>'''"Peering Out from Behind the Curtain"''' was an [[interview]] by Steve Marchese that appeared in ''RE:UP'' magazine, Manual 09, around January 2006. Photos within the article are credited to [[Peter Iain Campbell]].<br />
<br />
== Bibliography ==<br />
"Peering Out from Behind the Curtain" by Steve Marchese<br />
<br />
RE:UP Manual 09 (~Jan 2006), pp. 28-31,86<br />
<br />
== Article text ==<br />
{{original}}<br />
Edinburgh has a hangover. The normal din of this bustling university city remains eerily suppressed by a combination of the preceding night's partying and a cold front quickly descending from the North. The streets are empty save some churchgoers and a stray dog. An old man in a faded suit hands lunch menus to nobody. The museum set up as a meeting point with Boards of Canada--brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin-- is still closed and won't open to the public for at least another hour. I am sitting in the middle of an unfamiliar place, waiting to meet two virtually faceless musicians with whom I have yet to directly speak. Could this scene be completly engineered or am I thinking too much into it? Yet for some reason, I know there couldn't be a more perfect start to a day highlighted by a sit-down with Boards of Canada.<br />
<br />
The development of mystery and rumor is certainly nothing new to contemporary music. Stories of Paul McCartney's death surfaced after the Beatles released their thirteenth record. In 1989, nearly 15 years after the formation of Judas Priest, the metal band was put on trial (and eventually exonerated) after a double suicide allegedly caused by hidden messages like "try suicide" and "do it, do it" on the record ''Stained Cross''. And although testaments to Pink Floyd's ''Dark Side of the Moon'' functioning as a second, synchronizing soundtrack to ''The Wizard of Oz'' started surfacing online in 1994, rumors of this pairing can be traced all the way back to 1979.<br />
<br />
What Differentiates Boards of Canada from the rest of this smallish pantheon of mythologized artists, however, is the speed by which the duo have been able to invent and disseminate such intrigue. Much of it has to do with a pious and enthusiastic fan base, but in just a short time (over the release of only 3 full-length LPs) rumors--and some truths--have spread far and wide about the duo's religious proclivities, their use of embedded messages in tracks (sometimes known as backmasking) and secret tracks made anonymously for major pop stars.<br />
<br />
Most of the speculation gained momentum due to the pair's reluctance to do face-to-face interviews. But now that they've surfaced in promotion of their new LP, ''The Campfire Headphase'', it seems a lot of the conjecture has been systematically addressed in intervies online and recent features in European magazines ''The Wire'' and ''Groove''. Even a fleeting peek behind the curtain shows them not to be the circuit-obsessed techno Bedouins protrayed by the media- but rather, a pair of well-adjusted, hugely likeable brothers who do not only finish each other's sentences, but who have also applied an admirable do-it-yourself philosophy to their unique pursuit of artistic perfection.<br />
<br />
"There's never been a coordinated plan to engineer a blockade around who and what we are," says Mike Sandison, easing back into a chair at the coffee house where we finally decided to meet. "We wanted to make music that stood out on its own as an entity inside its own bubble. In the early stages we kind of felt like if we were going to out in magazines an start posing for photographs we'd spoil that."<br />
<br />
And while the pair have managed to maintain an easy pastoral obscurity that is suprisingly only 40 minutes outside of Edinburgh by car, their music has gained increasing popularity worldwide- making it more difficult to stay hidden in the periphery of the limelight. "One of the worst things we've found is that by being kind of absent, people have a tendency to fill in the gaps." says Marcus Eoin (Eoin being his middle name, the two have recently revealed that they are in fact brothers). "When there's a hole, people will just make things up, it isn't so much that we're trying to be secretive. We just don't feel an eed to sell ourselves. As far as we're concerned it's not part of what we do. People write about us like we're these mountain hermits who just won't talk to anybody and we [wonder]; Where did that come from? We never said that to anyone."<br />
<br />
People think of us as being one way," continues Mike. "We'd like to go out on tour in spandex and breathe fire but we just can't do that because we're supposed to be something else entirely," he jokes, duckin out of the sunlight that just surfaced through the quickly dissolving clouds. However, with a long day of interviews ahead it seems Sandison won't be able to get out of the light just yet. With the release of ''The Campfire Headphase'', Boards of Canada have agreed to be willing participants in their largest press push in quite some time, prompting many to wonder, why now? "Isolation can get negative at times," continues Mike, "because you start to feel like you're being arrogant or that we're doing it because we hate people os much. But it's not like that at all, It's more about the fact that we don't want to ruin the art by making our lives more important than the music. Because our lives are just like that of any other artist: we're just trying to create something special."<br />
<br />
In a way it seems like the self-sequestered twosome have enthusiastically embraced the chance to finally speak out, exploding from topic to topic like barges of fireworks wired together with small lengths of fuse. In mood, tone and content, a conversation with Boards of Canada barely echoes the consistency that governs their recordings. Instead it jumps from random subjects like Ted Nugent, Noriega (the dictator, not the MC), and an internet free lifestyle to Jerry Lewis films and trans-Atlantic politics with an effortless flow that defies the misinformed online reports of a disdain aimed at journalists. What captures my attention almost immediately is not how art(??? couldn't make this out) late the two are--I expected that considering the intricate language and presentation of their music--but how approachable and open they seem to almost any inquiry. A list of talking points I had prepared the night before is totally disregarded as the conversation steers itself amost invisibly toward one of the biggest questions that will be asked all day: Why haven't they played live in over 3 years?<br />
<br />
Opening up a long stretch of conversation on the subject, Mike takes the lead "We've been under a lot of pressure to play of course," he confirms. "One of the things that comes through from the big boss man [Warp Records] is offers from festivals. Usually our respons to that is that we would be more comfortable playing a small venue that would suit what we do. Our live show as it was had ah eavy reliance on visuals--we were using video projections and monitors--and secretly over the last 3 years since we last played a gig we've started to develop a different show. We expanded the band and have friends who are part of the potential group if we go out on the road again. And we do intend to go out and play again but at the moment what we want to do is at odds with the offers coming in to play alongside bands like Foo Fighters and people like that."<br />
<br />
Marcus, the quieter but by no means less passionate of the two, finishes Mike's thought and addresses more specifically what it is about Boards of Canada's sound that makes the prospect of a live show do tricky. "You've got to know the limitations of the music that you make. I always think of our music as being a lot more like headphone music, a brain music that you can drift into," he says. "So the idea of playing on a stage where you may be coming on just before a massive set by The Chemical Brothers doesn't sound like it would work. Earlier on though, when we were in transition from working with Skam to working with Warp, we did a couple of gigs that were label showcases with Warp artists. We have massive respect for guys like Squarepusher and Aphex Twin but we found ourselves doing shows with these guys and they were so full-on electronic and really full of energy. It wasn't really what we wanted to do at the time."<br />
<br />
Finishing Marcus' thought, Mike chimes in for one last comment, the thought of which will certainly become fan-boy fodder for neo-prog and electronica lovers the world over. "It might have suited us better to be put on a bill beside Tortoise or somebody like that. And you never know, we still could end up doing it one day."<br />
<br />
Talk of the new record conveniently follows, revolving around the idea for Boards of Canada that is perhaps their most important reord to date. In so many ways ''The Campfire Headphase'' marks a musical evolution for the brothers, but what makes it a truly compellin listen is its adherence to the band's emerging modus opreandi: To move forward--both technologically and philosophically--while maintaining a strong connection to the past. This time, in palce of the numerological Easter eggs and hidden Branch Daviddian references, Boards of Canada have enmeshed their music within the trappings of live instrumentation, placing them squarely in the middle of an intersection with infinite roads trailing outward. "A little part [of using the guitars] on the new album is to open up the scope for what we want to do in the future," comments Mike. "There's kind of a destiny for where the music is going to go but we haven't managed to do it yet. Maybe the new record will kind of open the door for future options."<br />
<br />
"It doesn't necessarily mean the next album will be a Deep Purple record," adds Marcus jokingly. The brothers have an unexpectedly wry sense of humor that comes as a pleasant surprise given the melancholy and often ominous tones of their music. "We could go and make a record that's really electronic but we know now that we've got a platform to go in any direction we want. We're trying to make sure that people don't define us purely as an electronic band."<br />
<br />
Being defined by labels or pidgeonholed to a particular scene or genre are two things that both Sandison brothers agree are detrimental to their music making. "We don't buy into anything," declares Marcus. "When there's something that we're really into we still try to have some objectivity about it."<br />
<br />
"We're sort of cultural nomads," supports Mike. "I don't see us in part of a group - social or musical." Their publicly released records all bear an undeniable trademark of textured ambience and reworked hip-hop breaks and-like it or not-the winning combination has led to considerable praise by electronic music fans. But privately, hidden away in their private studio (which is rumored to house hundreds of rare and irreplaceable instruments), are thousands of tracks of organic, acoustic and experimental music that they hope to one day release under various pseudonyms. It's just one of a number of examples during the conversation that show both brother's love of simple, organic instrumentation.<br />
<br />
Mike elaborates, "People may be surprised to hear that of the demos that get sent to us, we truly love the ones that are really homemade, sort of crap and unfinished. The ones that are rough around the edges. The demos that are really slick electronica-type things are the ones that get listened to once and put on the shelves."<br />
<br />
"The thing with electronic music these days," says Marcus, "is that so much of it nowadays can be really good but it's so studio-based. So the moment you try and take it out, it's either played back form the laptop or a mess for someone who isn't able to play it live. The laptop performance thing has never been something that's appealed to us."<br />
<br />
Continuing on the live element, Mike tells a story that will certainly add to an increase in message board chatter, "I think it's commetable that people are creating software to do that because at least it's better than someone turning up to a show and pressing play on a .wav file. We know a guy who is a very high profile electronic producer in Britain - very famous in some electronic circles - and he played a show in Glasgow one time and he told us that he had just played a cassette and stood on stage pretending to press buttons. And he thought it was funny. We were laughing but also horrified at the same time."<br />
<br />
The mixture of humor, honesty, passion and creativity is something revealed only by meeting these two self-confessed reclusive artists in person. Instead, all most of us have to objectively evaluate about Boards of Canada is their music. It's a scenario the brothers have worked very hard to cultivate. Most importantly, however, and perhaps the chief reason they've surfaced for this brief set of interviews--besides dispelling myths of course--is to reveal that they are musicians with purpose and that music is but one way for them to achieve that purpose. "If you had to vaguely approximate a purpose behind our music," summarizes Marcus, "for me it would be like we are soundtracking the alternative place you might be right now. You wouldn't be dead but you'd just be in a different world; everything would be quite alien, so you'd wonder what would the music be like. What would you be hearing?" He continues, "I think perhaps the theme of what we're doing is instead of looking forward we are looking backward to the positivity that you might have had as a child. And we want to take it as a fuel and be inspired by it. I think of myself as the kind of person that even when I'm 80 I'll still be listening to weird music and playing computer games. I don't want to be the kind of person that gives up on youth." It's a sentiment shared by both brothers and, I'm sure, by most of the enthusiastic fans who hope to be listening to the "weird" music of Boards of Canada far into their eighties as well.<br />
<br />
<br />
Boards of Canada on...<br />
Spirituality<br />
Marcus: You have to allow some spiritual element when making music. But we don't mean that in any kind of mumbo jumbo faux religious way, because some people have misquoted us and made us sound like a couple of magicians or something. A lot of musicians don't seem to have that spiritual element because they are just working when they make music. Like they have another agenda and are doing it for other reasons. But the most interesting musicians seem to be the ones that are tying to go somewhere else with their music. A bit like he whole escapist or science fiction fantasy thing, it's the ones that look at music and think: how could things be different?<br />
<br />
Fan expectations<br />
Mike: When you are signed to a label like Warp, you know that there's an audience of people out there buying [your music]. You can try to ignore it and try to imagine there's no one listening but there is always a feeling in the back of your mind that you have certain things to live up to regarding production standards. You wouldn't be able to get away with putting out an album with an 18-minute long ambient track in the middle of all pop and soul tracks. That's the kind of thing we do on our old tapes. We wouldn't have gotten shit aobut it and we would have just done it. It wouldn't have mattered. But now we have these considerations because we're putting out records that force use to think aobut the average person who buys them.<br />
<br />
Living in Canada<br />
Marcus: At the particular age we were at when we lived in Canada you are more likely to notice the differences between where you come from and where you're visiting. The things that out like TV and music, the way people dress are the things that you carry with you when you leave that place. I thik it's been imprinted on us. For us, it was a very specific time--1979 to 1980 North American media culture--that left like a ghostly shadow that sort of stuck to us. We came away form there with a memory of the palce that was nostalgic to the extent that we've been trying to get back there ever since. Not geographically, but more like a feeling. By making music that makes you travel to that place.<br />
<br />
Fatherhood<br />
Mike: Now I find that a lot of the depression about losing my childhood has gone by the wayside because I'm able to go back there with my little daughter. Kids do a lot of interesting things that you kind of vaguely remember doing yourself but have shutoff as an adult. You start to realize that life doesn't have to be about being completly conscious of the universe's problems. It can be really fulfilling if you just concentrate on a little microscopic version of life that a child sees. As a parent you have no choice but to occasionally lose yourself in a child's world like The Jungle Book of something. It's a bit like what we do with our music. It's like saying to yourself that just for this hour I'm gonna switch off all the crap in the world and lose myself in an alternative world. Like a good book or something. It's kind of how we see what we do with our records. Although it's becoming increasingly difficult the older we get. It's much harder to not put our political beliefs into the music.<br />
<br />
Stevie Wonder<br />
Marcus: I know it sounds strange to say it but I've always thought of Stevie Wonder as an electronic artist. A lot of his bass line were done on synths. He's done project albums like ''The Secret Life of Plants'' that are all synthesizers, all done with keyboards. You wouldn't describe him as rock and it's too lazy to describe him as R&B or soul. To me, it's electronic but it's absolutely organic. Here you have incredible singing, incredible tunes, and amazing use of keyboards. Sometimes I step back and think aobut the sound of Stevie in the '70s and it shoes just how different electronic music can be.<br />
<br />
Remixing Beck<br />
Mike: We were already huge fans of Beck's music and friends with the guys form Anticon. Dose and I are big penpals. I think Beck's producers asked the Anticon guys if they had a contact for us and the next thing we know we get a letter asking us to do [this remix of] Beck's. We said that we'd love to hear the track first and see what it's like and I said to Marcus at one stage that if this track is really slow and empty we'll do it.<br />
Marcus: I actually told Warp six months earlier to don't call us about remixes unless it's Beck or God.<br />
<br />
== Images ==<br />
Scans of the magazine article were provided by [[Twoism (forum)|Twoism]] user [[nlogax (person)|nlogax]].<br />
<gallery><br />
Image:Reup.gif|Cover<br />
Image:reup-01.jpg|Page 28<br />
Image:reup-21.jpg|Page 29<br />
Image:reup-03.jpg|Page 30<br />
Image:reup-04.jpg|Page 31<br />
Image:reup-05.jpg|Page 86<br />
</gallery><br />
<br />
== Blog entry ==<br />
The author posted an entry about the interview on his blog, Scissorkick. The post included an mp3 of the ''[[A Few Old Tunes]]'' track "[[Sequoia]]". The mp3 is the same as from previously known leaks; it is not a new or better quality copy.<br />
<br />
== External links ==<br />
* [http://reupmag.com/ RE:UP Magazine]<br />
** [http://www.merchline.com/reup/productdisplay.5077.p.htm Back issue ordering]<br />
* [http://www.scissorkick.com/2006/01/boc-in-reup.html Author's blog entry]<br />
<br />
[[Category: Interviews]]<br />
[[Category: Articles needing transcription]]<br />
[[Category: The Campfire Headphase era]]</div>Maxrhttps://bocpages.org/w/index.php?title=Peering_Out_from_Behind_the_Curtain&diff=6587Peering Out from Behind the Curtain2009-05-29T18:35:19Z<p>Maxr: /* Images */</p>
<hr />
<div>'''"Peering Out from Behind the Curtain"''' was an [[interview]] by Steve Marchese that appeared in ''RE:UP'' magazine, Manual 09, around January 2006. Photos within the article are credited to [[Peter Iain Campbell]].<br />
<br />
== Bibliography ==<br />
"Peering Out from Behind the Curtain" by Steve Marchese<br />
<br />
RE:UP Manual 09 (~Jan 2006), pp. 28-31,86<br />
<br />
== Article text ==<br />
{{original}}<br />
Edinburgh has a hangover. The normal din of this bustling university city remains eerily suppressed by a combination of the preceding night's partying and a cold front quickly descending from the North. The streets are empty save some churchgoers and a stray dog. An old man in a faded suit hands lunch menus to nobody. The museum set up as a meeting point with Boards of Canada--brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin-- is still closed and won't open to the public for at least another hour. I am sitting in the middle of an unfamiliar place, waiting to meet two virtually faceless musicians with whom I have yet to directly speak. Could this scene be completly engineered or am I thinking too much into it? Yet for some reason, I know there couldn't be a more perfect start to a day highlighted by a sit-down with Boards of Canada.<br />
<br />
The development of mystery and rumor is certainly nothing new to contemporary music. Stories of Paul McCartney's death surfaced after the Beatles released their thirteenth record. In 1989, nearly 15 years after the formation of Judas Priest, the metal band was put on trial (and eventually exonerated) after a double suicide allegedly caused by hidden messages like "try suicide" and "do it, do it" on the record ''Stained Cross''. And although testaments to Pink Floyd's ''Dark Side of the Moon'' functioning as a second, synchronizing soundtrack to ''The Wizard of Oz'' started surfacing online in 1994, rumors of this pairing can be traced all the way back to 1979.<br />
<br />
What Differentiates Boards of Canada from the rest of this smallish pantheon of mythologized artists, however, is the speed by which the duo have been able to invent and disseminate such intrigue. Much of it has to do with a pious and enthusiastic fan base, but in just a short time (over the release of only 3 full-length LPs) rumors--and some truths--have spread far and wide about the duo's religious proclivities, their use of embedded messages in tracks (sometimes known as backmasking) and secret tracks made anonymously for major pop stars.<br />
<br />
Most of the speculation gained momentum due to the pair's reluctance to do face-to-face interviews. But now that they've surfaced in promotion of their new LP, ''The Campfire Headphase'', it seems a lot of the conjecture has been systematically addressed in intervies online and recent features in European magazines ''The Wire'' and ''Groove''. Even a fleeting peek behind the curtain shows them not to be the circuit-obsessed techno Bedouins protrayed by the media- but rather, a pair of well-adjusted, hugely likeable brothers who do not only finish each other's sentences, but who have also applied an admirable do-it-yourself philosophy to their unique pursuit of artistic perfection.<br />
<br />
"There's never been a coordinated plan to engineer a blockade around who and what we are," says Mike Sandison, easing back into a chair at the coffee house where we finally decided to meet. "We wanted to make music that stood out on its own as an entity inside its own bubble. In the early stages we kind of felt like if we were going to out in magazines an start posing for photographs we'd spoil that."<br />
<br />
And while the pair have managed to maintain an easy pastoral obscurity that is suprisingly only 40 minutes outside of Edinburgh by car, their music has gained increasing popularity worldwide- making it more difficult to stay hidden in the periphery of the limelight. "One of the worst things we've found is that by being kind of absent, people have a tendency to fill in the gaps." says Marcus Eoin (Eoin being his middle name, the two have recently revealed that they are in fact brothers). "When there's a hole, people will just make things up, it isn't so much that we're trying to be secretive. We just don't feel an eed to sell ourselves. As far as we're concerned it's not part of what we do. People write about us like we're these mountain hermits who just won't talk to anybody and we [wonder]; Where did that come from? We never said that to anyone."<br />
<br />
People think of us as being one way," continues Mike. "We'd like to go out on tour in spandex and breathe fire but we just can't do that because we're supposed to be something else entirely," he jokes, duckin out of the sunlight that just surfaced through the quickly dissolving clouds. However, with a long day of interviews ahead it seems Sandison won't be able to get out of the light just yet. With the release of ''The Campfire Headphase'', Boards of Canada have agreed to be willing participants in their largest press push in quite some time, prompting many to wonder, why now? "Isolation can get negative at times," continues Mike, "because you start to feel like you're being arrogant or that we're doing it because we hate people os much. But it's not like that at all, It's more about the fact that we don't want to ruin the art by making our lives more important than the music. Because our lives are just like that of any other artist: we're just trying to create something special."<br />
<br />
In a way it seems like the self-sequestered twosome have enthusiastically embraced the chance to finally speak out, exploding from topic to topic like barges of fireworks wired together with small lengths of fuse. In mood, tone and content, a conversation with Boards of Canada barely echoes the consistency that governs their recordings. Instead it jumps from random subjects like Ted Nugent, Noriega (the dictator, not the MC), and an internet free lifestyle to Jerry Lewis films and trans-Atlantic politics with an effortless flow that defies the misinformed online reports of a disdain aimed at journalists. What captures my attention almost immediately is not how art(??? couldn't make this out) late the two are--I expected that considering the intricate language and presentation of their music--but how approachable and open they seem to almost any inquiry. A list of talking points I had prepared the night before is totally disregarded as the conversation steers itself amost invisibly toward one of the biggest questions that will be asked all day: Why haven't they played live in over 3 years?<br />
<br />
Opening up a long stretch of conversation on the subject, Mike takes the lead "We've been under a lot of pressure to play of course," he confirms. "One of the things that comes through from the big boss man [Warp Records] is offers from festivals. Usually our respons to that is that we would be more comfortable playing a small venue that would suit what we do. Our live show as it was had ah eavy reliance on visuals--we were using video projections and monitors--and secretly over the last 3 years since we last played a gig we've started to develop a different show. We expanded the band and have friends who are part of the potential group if we go out on the road again. And we do intend to go out and play again but at the moment what we want to do is at odds with the offers coming in to play alongside bands like Foo Fighters and people like that."<br />
<br />
Marcus, the quieter but by no means less passionate of the two, finishes Mike's thought and addresses more specifically what it is about Boards of Canada's sound that makes the prospect of a live show do tricky. "You've got to know the limitations of the music that you make. I always think of our music as being a lot more like headphone music, a brain music that you can drift into," he says. "So the idea of playing on a stage where you may be coming on just before a massive set by The Chemical Brothers doesn't sound like it would work. Earlier on though, when we were in transition from working with Skam to working with Warp, we did a couple of gigs that were label showcases with Warp artists. We have massive respect for guys like Squarepusher and Aphex Twin but we found ourselves doing shows with these guys and they were so full-on electronic and really full of energy. It wasn't really what we wanted to do at the time."<br />
<br />
Finishing Marcus' thought, Mike chimes in for one last comment, the thought of which will certainly become fan-boy fodder for neo-prog and electronica lovers the world over. "It might have suited us better to be put on a bill beside Tortoise or somebody like that. And you never know, we still could end up doing it one day."<br />
<br />
Talk of the new record conveniently follows, revolving around the idea for Boards of Canada that is perhaps their most important reord to date. In so many ways ''The Campfire Headphase'' marks a musical evolution for the brothers, but what makes it a truly compellin listen is its adherence to the band's emerging modus opreandi: To move forward--both technologically and philosophically--while maintaining a strong connection to the past. This time, in palce of the numerological Easter eggs and hidden Branch Daviddian references, Boards of Canada have enmeshed their music within the trappings of live instrumentation, placing them squarely in the middle of an intersection with infinite roads trailing outward. "A little part [of using the guitars] on the new album is to open up the scope for what we want to do in the future," comments Mike. "There's kind of a destiny for where the music is going to go but we haven't managed to do it yet. Maybe the new record will kind of open the door for future options."<br />
<br />
"It doesn't necessarily mean the next album will be a Deep Purple record," adds Marcus jokingly. The brothers have an unexpectedly wry sense of humor that comes as a pleasant surprise given the melancholy and often ominous tones of their music. "We could go and make a record that's really electronic but we know now that we've got a platform to go in any direction we want. We're trying to make sure that people don't define us purely as an electronic band."<br />
<br />
Being defined by labels or pidgeonholed to a particular scene or genre are two things that both Sandison brothers agree are detrimental to their music making. "We don't buy into anything," declares Marcus. "When there's something that we're really into we still try to have some objectivity about it."<br />
<br />
"We're sort of cultural nomads," supports Mike. "I don't see us in part of a group - social or musical." Their publicly released records all bear an undeniable trademark of textured ambience and reworked hip-hop breaks and-like it or not-the winning combination has led to considerable praise by electronic music fans. But privately, hidden away in their private studio (which is rumored to house hundreds of rare and irreplaceable instruments), are thousands of tracks of organic, acoustic and experimental music that they hope to one day release under various pseudonyms. It's just one of a number of examples during the conversation that show both brother's love of simple, organic instrumentation.<br />
<br />
Mike elaborates, "People may be surprised to hear that of the demos that get sent to us, we truly love the ones that are really homemade, sort of crap and unfinished. The ones that are rough around the edges. The demos that are really slick electronica-type things are the ones that get listened to once and put on the shelves."<br />
<br />
"The thing with electronic music these days," says Marcus, "is that so much of it nowadays can be really good but it's so studio-based. So the moment you try and take it out, it's either played back form the laptop or a mess for someone who isn't able to play it live. The laptop performance thing has never been something that's appealed to us."<br />
<br />
Continuing on the live element, Mike tells a story that will certainly add to an increase in message board chatter, "I think it's commetable that people are creating software to do that because at least it's better than someone turning up to a show and pressing play on a .wav file. We know a guy who is a very high profile electronic producer in Britain - very famous in some electronic circles - and he played a show in Glasgow one time and he told us that he had just played a cassette and stood on stage pretending to press buttons. And he thought it was funny. We were laughing but also horrified at the same time."<br />
<br />
The mixture of humor, honesty, passion and creativity is something revealed only by meeting these two self-confessed reclusive artists in person. Instead, all most of us have to objectively evaluate about Boards of Canada is their music. It's a scenario the brothers have worked very hard to cultivate. Most importantly, however, and perhaps the chief reason they've surfaced for this brief set of interviews--besides dispelling myths of course--is to reveal that they are musicians with purpose and that music is but one way for them to achieve that purpose. "If you had to vaguely approximate a purpose behind our music," summarizes Marcus, "for me it would be like we are soundtracking the alternative place you might be right now. You wouldn't be dead but you'd just be in a different world; everything would be quite alien, so you'd wonder what would the music be like. What would you be hearing?" He continues, "I think perhaps the theme of what we're doing is instead of looking forward we are looking backward to the positivity that you might have had as a child. And we want to take it as a fuel and be inspired by it. I think of myself as the kind of person that even when I'm 80 I'll still be listening to weird music and playing computer games. I don't want to be the kind of person that gives up on youth." It's a sentiment shared by both brothers and, I'm sure, by most of the enthusiastic fans who hope to be listening to the "weird" music of Boards of Canada far into their eighties as well.<br />
<br />
<br />
Boards of Canada on...<br />
Spirituality<br />
Marcus: You have to allow some spiritual element when making music. But we don't mean that in any kind of mumbo jumbo faux religious way, because some people have misquoted us and made us sound like a couple of magicians or something. A lot of musicians don't seem to have that spiritual element because they are just working when they make music. Like they have another agenda and are doing it for other reasons. But the most interesting musicians seem to be the ones that are tying to go somewhere else with their music. A bit like he whole escapist or science fiction fantasy thing, it's the ones that look at music and think: how could things be different?<br />
<br />
Fan expectations<br />
Mike: When you are signed to a label like Warp, you know that there's an audience of people out there buying [your music]. You can try to ignore it and try to imagine there's no one listening but there is always a feeling in the back of your mind that you have certain things to live up to regarding production standards. You wouldn't be able to get away with putting out an album with an 18-minute long ambient track in the middle of all pop and soul tracks. That's the kind of thing we do on our old tapes. We wouldn't have gotten shit aobut it and we would have just done it. It wouldn't have mattered. But now we have these considerations because we're putting out records that force use to think aobut the average person who buys them.<br />
<br />
Living in Canada<br />
Marcus: At the particular age we were at when we lived in Canada you are more likely to notice the differences between where you come from and where you're visiting. The things that out like TV and music, the way people dress are the things that you carry with you when you leave that place. I thik it's been imprinted on us. For us, it was a very specific time--1979 to 1980 North American media culture--that left like a ghostly shadow that sort of stuck to us. We came away form there with a memory of the palce that was nostalgic to the extent that we've been trying to get back there ever since. Not geographically, but more like a feeling. By making music that makes you travel to that place.<br />
<br />
Fatherhood<br />
Mike: Now I find that a lot of the depression about losing my childhood has gone by the wayside because I'm able to go back there with my little daughter. Kids do a lot of interesting things that you kind of vaguely remember doing yourself but have shutoff as an adult. You start to realize that life doesn't have to be about being completly conscious of the universe's problems. It can be really fulfilling if you just concentrate on a little microscopic version of life that a child sees. As a parent you have no choice but to occasionally lose yourself in a child's world like The Jungle Book of something. It's a bit like what we do with our music. It's like saying to yourself that just for this hour I'm gonna switch off all the crap in the world and lose myself in an alternative world. Like a good book or something. It's kind of how we see what we do with our records. Although it's becoming increasingly difficult the older we get. It's much harder to not put our political beliefs into the music.<br />
<br />
Stevie Wonder<br />
Marcus: I know it sounds strange to say it but I've always thought of Stevie Wonder as an electronic artist. A lot of his bass line were done on synths. He's done project albums like ''The Secret Life of Plants'' that are all synthesizers, all done with keyboards. You wouldn't describe him as rock and it's too lazy to describe him as R&B or soul. To me, it's electronic but it's absolutely organic. Here you have incredible singing, incredible tunes, and amazing use of keyboards. Sometimes I step back and think aobut the sound of Stevie in the '70s and it shoes just how different electronic music can be.<br />
<br />
Remixing Beck<br />
Mike: We were already huge fans of Beck's music and friends with the guys form Anticon. Dose and I are big penpals. I think Beck's producers asked the Anticon guys if they had a contact for us and the next thing we know we get a letter asking us to do [this remix of] Beck's. We said that we'd love to hear the track first and see what it's like and I said to Marcus at one stage that if this track is really slow and empty we'll do it.<br />
Marcus: I actually told Warp six months earlier to don't call us about remixes unless it's Beck or God.<br />
<br />
== Images ==<br />
Scans of the magazine article were provided by [[Twoism (forum)|Twoism]] user [[nlogax (person)|nlogax]].<br />
<gallery><br />
Image:Reup.gif|Cover<br />
Image:reup-02.jpg|Page 28<br />
Image:reup-01.jpg|Page 29<br />
Image:reup-03.jpg|Page 30<br />
Image:reup-04.jpg|Page 31<br />
Image:reup-05.jpg|Page 86<br />
</gallery><br />
<br />
== Blog entry ==<br />
The author posted an entry about the interview on his blog, Scissorkick. The post included an mp3 of the ''[[A Few Old Tunes]]'' track "[[Sequoia]]". The mp3 is the same as from previously known leaks; it is not a new or better quality copy.<br />
<br />
== External links ==<br />
* [http://reupmag.com/ RE:UP Magazine]<br />
** [http://www.merchline.com/reup/productdisplay.5077.p.htm Back issue ordering]<br />
* [http://www.scissorkick.com/2006/01/boc-in-reup.html Author's blog entry]<br />
<br />
[[Category: Interviews]]<br />
[[Category: Articles needing transcription]]<br />
[[Category: The Campfire Headphase era]]</div>Maxrhttps://bocpages.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Peering_Out_from_Behind_the_Curtain&diff=6438Talk:Peering Out from Behind the Curtain2009-05-25T21:31:13Z<p>Maxr: Blanked the page</p>
<hr />
<div></div>Maxrhttps://bocpages.org/w/index.php?title=Peering_Out_from_Behind_the_Curtain&diff=6437Peering Out from Behind the Curtain2009-05-25T21:30:52Z<p>Maxr: /* Article text */</p>
<hr />
<div>'''"Peering Out from Behind the Curtain"''' was an [[interview]] by Steve Marchese that appeared in ''RE:UP'' magazine, Manual 09, around January 2006. Photos within the article are credited to [[Peter Iain Campbell]].<br />
<br />
== Bibliography ==<br />
"Peering Out from Behind the Curtain" by Steve Marchese<br />
<br />
RE:UP Manual 09 (~Jan 2006), pp. 28-31,86<br />
<br />
== Article text ==<br />
{{original}}<br />
Edinburgh has a hangover. The normal din of this bustling university city remains eerily suppressed by a combination of the preceding night's partying and a cold front quickly descending from the North. The streets are empty save some churchgoers and a stray dog. An old man in a faded suit hands lunch menus to nobody. The museum set up as a meeting point with Boards of Canada--brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin-- is still closed and won't open to the public for at least another hour. I am sitting in the middle of an unfamiliar place, waiting to meet two virtually faceless musicians with whom I have yet to directly speak. Could this scene be completly engineered or am I thinking too much into it? Yet for some reason, I know there couldn't be a more perfect start to a day highlighted by a sit-down with Boards of Canada.<br />
<br />
The development of mystery and rumor is certainly nothing new to contemporary music. Stories of Paul McCartney's death surfaced after the Beatles released their thirteenth record. In 1989, nearly 15 years after the formation of Judas Priest, the metal band was put on trial (and eventually exonerated) after a double suicide allegedly caused by hidden messages like "try suicide" and "do it, do it" on the record ''Stained Cross''. And although testaments to Pink Floyd's ''Dark Side of the Moon'' functioning as a second, synchronizing soundtrack to ''The Wizard of Oz'' started surfacing online in 1994, rumors of this pairing can be traced all the way back to 1979.<br />
<br />
What Differentiates Boards of Canada from the rest of this smallish pantheon of mythologized artists, however, is the speed by which the duo have been able to invent and disseminate such intrigue. Much of it has to do with a pious and enthusiastic fan base, but in just a short time (over the release of only 3 full-length LPs) rumors--and some truths--have spread far and wide about the duo's religious proclivities, their use of embedded messages in tracks (sometimes known as backmasking) and secret tracks made anonymously for major pop stars.<br />
<br />
Most of the speculation gained momentum due to the pair's reluctance to do face-to-face interviews. But now that they've surfaced in promotion of their new LP, ''The Campfire Headphase'', it seems a lot of the conjecture has been systematically addressed in intervies online and recent features in European magazines ''The Wire'' and ''Groove''. Even a fleeting peek behind the curtain shows them not to be the circuit-obsessed techno Bedouins protrayed by the media- but rather, a pair of well-adjusted, hugely likeable brothers who do not only finish each other's sentences, but who have also applied an admirable do-it-yourself philosophy to their unique pursuit of artistic perfection.<br />
<br />
"There's never been a coordinated plan to engineer a blockade around who and what we are," says Mike Sandison, easing back into a chair at the coffee house where we finally decided to meet. "We wanted to make music that stood out on its own as an entity inside its own bubble. In the early stages we kind of felt like if we were going to out in magazines an start posing for photographs we'd spoil that."<br />
<br />
And while the pair have managed to maintain an easy pastoral obscurity that is suprisingly only 40 minutes outside of Edinburgh by car, their music has gained increasing popularity worldwide- making it more difficult to stay hidden in the periphery of the limelight. "One of the worst things we've found is that by being kind of absent, people have a tendency to fill in the gaps." says Marcus Eoin (Eoin being his middle name, the two have recently revealed that they are in fact brothers). "When there's a hole, people will just make things up, it isn't so much that we're trying to be secretive. We just don't feel an eed to sell ourselves. As far as we're concerned it's not part of what we do. People write about us like we're these mountain hermits who just won't talk to anybody and we [wonder]; Where did that come from? We never said that to anyone."<br />
<br />
People think of us as being one way," continues Mike. "We'd like to go out on tour in spandex and breathe fire but we just can't do that because we're supposed to be something else entirely," he jokes, duckin out of the sunlight that just surfaced through the quickly dissolving clouds. However, with a long day of interviews ahead it seems Sandison won't be able to get out of the light just yet. With the release of ''The Campfire Headphase'', Boards of Canada have agreed to be willing participants in their largest press push in quite some time, prompting many to wonder, why now? "Isolation can get negative at times," continues Mike, "because you start to feel like you're being arrogant or that we're doing it because we hate people os much. But it's not like that at all, It's more about the fact that we don't want to ruin the art by making our lives more important than the music. Because our lives are just like that of any other artist: we're just trying to create something special."<br />
<br />
In a way it seems like the self-sequestered twosome have enthusiastically embraced the chance to finally speak out, exploding from topic to topic like barges of fireworks wired together with small lengths of fuse. In mood, tone and content, a conversation with Boards of Canada barely echoes the consistency that governs their recordings. Instead it jumps from random subjects like Ted Nugent, Noriega (the dictator, not the MC), and an internet free lifestyle to Jerry Lewis films and trans-Atlantic politics with an effortless flow that defies the misinformed online reports of a disdain aimed at journalists. What captures my attention almost immediately is not how art(??? couldn't make this out) late the two are--I expected that considering the intricate language and presentation of their music--but how approachable and open they seem to almost any inquiry. A list of talking points I had prepared the night before is totally disregarded as the conversation steers itself amost invisibly toward one of the biggest questions that will be asked all day: Why haven't they played live in over 3 years?<br />
<br />
Opening up a long stretch of conversation on the subject, Mike takes the lead "We've been under a lot of pressure to play of course," he confirms. "One of the things that comes through from the big boss man [Warp Records] is offers from festivals. Usually our respons to that is that we would be more comfortable playing a small venue that would suit what we do. Our live show as it was had ah eavy reliance on visuals--we were using video projections and monitors--and secretly over the last 3 years since we last played a gig we've started to develop a different show. We expanded the band and have friends who are part of the potential group if we go out on the road again. And we do intend to go out and play again but at the moment what we want to do is at odds with the offers coming in to play alongside bands like Foo Fighters and people like that."<br />
<br />
Marcus, the quieter but by no means less passionate of the two, finishes Mike's thought and addresses more specifically what it is about Boards of Canada's sound that makes the prospect of a live show do tricky. "You've got to know the limitations of the music that you make. I always think of our music as being a lot more like headphone music, a brain music that you can drift into," he says. "So the idea of playing on a stage where you may be coming on just before a massive set by The Chemical Brothers doesn't sound like it would work. Earlier on though, when we were in transition from working with Skam to working with Warp, we did a couple of gigs that were label showcases with Warp artists. We have massive respect for guys like Squarepusher and Aphex Twin but we found ourselves doing shows with these guys and they were so full-on electronic and really full of energy. It wasn't really what we wanted to do at the time."<br />
<br />
Finishing Marcus' thought, Mike chimes in for one last comment, the thought of which will certainly become fan-boy fodder for neo-prog and electronica lovers the world over. "It might have suited us better to be put on a bill beside Tortoise or somebody like that. And you never know, we still could end up doing it one day."<br />
<br />
Talk of the new record conveniently follows, revolving around the idea for Boards of Canada that is perhaps their most important reord to date. In so many ways ''The Campfire Headphase'' marks a musical evolution for the brothers, but what makes it a truly compellin listen is its adherence to the band's emerging modus opreandi: To move forward--both technologically and philosophically--while maintaining a strong connection to the past. This time, in palce of the numerological Easter eggs and hidden Branch Daviddian references, Boards of Canada have enmeshed their music within the trappings of live instrumentation, placing them squarely in the middle of an intersection with infinite roads trailing outward. "A little part [of using the guitars] on the new album is to open up the scope for what we want to do in the future," comments Mike. "There's kind of a destiny for where the music is going to go but we haven't managed to do it yet. Maybe the new record will kind of open the door for future options."<br />
<br />
"It doesn't necessarily mean the next album will be a Deep Purple record," adds Marcus jokingly. The brothers have an unexpectedly wry sense of humor that comes as a pleasant surprise given the melancholy and often ominous tones of their music. "We could go and make a record that's really electronic but we know now that we've got a platform to go in any direction we want. We're trying to make sure that people don't define us purely as an electronic band."<br />
<br />
Being defined by labels or pidgeonholed to a particular scene or genre are two things that both Sandison brothers agree are detrimental to their music making. "We don't buy into anything," declares Marcus. "When there's something that we're really into we still try to have some objectivity about it."<br />
<br />
"We're sort of cultural nomads," supports Mike. "I don't see us in part of a group - social or musical." Their publicly released records all bear an undeniable trademark of textured ambience and reworked hip-hop breaks and-like it or not-the winning combination has led to considerable praise by electronic music fans. But privately, hidden away in their private studio (which is rumored to house hundreds of rare and irreplaceable instruments), are thousands of tracks of organic, acoustic and experimental music that they hope to one day release under various pseudonyms. It's just one of a number of examples during the conversation that show both brother's love of simple, organic instrumentation.<br />
<br />
Mike elaborates, "People may be surprised to hear that of the demos that get sent to us, we truly love the ones that are really homemade, sort of crap and unfinished. The ones that are rough around the edges. The demos that are really slick electronica-type things are the ones that get listened to once and put on the shelves."<br />
<br />
"The thing with electronic music these days," says Marcus, "is that so much of it nowadays can be really good but it's so studio-based. So the moment you try and take it out, it's either played back form the laptop or a mess for someone who isn't able to play it live. The laptop performance thing has never been something that's appealed to us."<br />
<br />
Continuing on the live element, Mike tells a story that will certainly add to an increase in message board chatter, "I think it's commetable that people are creating software to do that because at least it's better than someone turning up to a show and pressing play on a .wav file. We know a guy who is a very high profile electronic producer in Britain - very famous in some electronic circles - and he played a show in Glasgow one time and he told us that he had just played a cassette and stood on stage pretending to press buttons. And he thought it was funny. We were laughing but also horrified at the same time."<br />
<br />
The mixture of humor, honesty, passion and creativity is something revealed only by meeting these two self-confessed reclusive artists in person. Instead, all most of us have to objectively evaluate about Boards of Canada is their music. It's a scenario the brothers have worked very hard to cultivate. Most importantly, however, and perhaps the chief reason they've surfaced for this brief set of interviews--besides dispelling myths of course--is to reveal that they are musicians with purpose and that music is but one way for them to achieve that purpose. "If you had to vaguely approximate a purpose behind our music," summarizes Marcus, "for me it would be like we are soundtracking the alternative place you might be right now. You wouldn't be dead but you'd just be in a different world; everything would be quite alien, so you'd wonder what would the music be like. What would you be hearing?" He continues, "I think perhaps the theme of what we're doing is instead of looking forward we are looking backward to the positivity that you might have had as a child. And we want to take it as a fuel and be inspired by it. I think of myself as the kind of person that even when I'm 80 I'll still be listening to weird music and playing computer games. I don't want to be the kind of person that gives up on youth." It's a sentiment shared by both brothers and, I'm sure, by most of the enthusiastic fans who hope to be listening to the "weird" music of Boards of Canada far into their eighties as well.<br />
<br />
<br />
Boards of Canada on...<br />
Spirituality<br />
Marcus: You have to allow some spiritual element when making music. But we don't mean that in any kind of mumbo jumbo faux religious way, because some people have misquoted us and made us sound like a couple of magicians or something. A lot of musicians don't seem to have that spiritual element because they are just working when they make music. Like they have another agenda and are doing it for other reasons. But the most interesting musicians seem to be the ones that are tying to go somewhere else with their music. A bit like he whole escapist or science fiction fantasy thing, it's the ones that look at music and think: how could things be different?<br />
<br />
Fan expectations<br />
Mike: When you are signed to a label like Warp, you know that there's an audience of people out there buying [your music]. You can try to ignore it and try to imagine there's no one listening but there is always a feeling in the back of your mind that you have certain things to live up to regarding production standards. You wouldn't be able to get away with putting out an album with an 18-minute long ambient track in the middle of all pop and soul tracks. That's the kind of thing we do on our old tapes. We wouldn't have gotten shit aobut it and we would have just done it. It wouldn't have mattered. But now we have these considerations because we're putting out records that force use to think aobut the average person who buys them.<br />
<br />
Living in Canada<br />
Marcus: At the particular age we were at when we lived in Canada you are more likely to notice the differences between where you come from and where you're visiting. The things that out like TV and music, the way people dress are the things that you carry with you when you leave that place. I thik it's been imprinted on us. For us, it was a very specific time--1979 to 1980 North American media culture--that left like a ghostly shadow that sort of stuck to us. We came away form there with a memory of the palce that was nostalgic to the extent that we've been trying to get back there ever since. Not geographically, but more like a feeling. By making music that makes you travel to that place.<br />
<br />
Fatherhood<br />
Mike: Now I find that a lot of the depression about losing my childhood has gone by the wayside because I'm able to go back there with my little daughter. Kids do a lot of interesting things that you kind of vaguely remember doing yourself but have shutoff as an adult. You start to realize that life doesn't have to be about being completly conscious of the universe's problems. It can be really fulfilling if you just concentrate on a little microscopic version of life that a child sees. As a parent you have no choice but to occasionally lose yourself in a child's world like The Jungle Book of something. It's a bit like what we do with our music. It's like saying to yourself that just for this hour I'm gonna switch off all the crap in the world and lose myself in an alternative world. Like a good book or something. It's kind of how we see what we do with our records. Although it's becoming increasingly difficult the older we get. It's much harder to not put our political beliefs into the music.<br />
<br />
Stevie Wonder<br />
Marcus: I know it sounds strange to say it but I've always thought of Stevie Wonder as an electronic artist. A lot of his bass line were done on synths. He's done project albums like ''The Secret Life of Plants'' that are all synthesizers, all done with keyboards. You wouldn't describe him as rock and it's too lazy to describe him as R&B or soul. To me, it's electronic but it's absolutely organic. Here you have incredible singing, incredible tunes, and amazing use of keyboards. Sometimes I step back and think aobut the sound of Stevie in the '70s and it shoes just how different electronic music can be.<br />
<br />
Remixing Beck<br />
Mike: We were already huge fans of Beck's music and friends with the guys form Anticon. Dose and I are big penpals. I think Beck's producers asked the Anticon guys if they had a contact for us and the next thing we know we get a letter asking us to do [this remix of] Beck's. We said that we'd love to hear the track first and see what it's like and I said to Marcus at one stage that if this track is really slow and empty we'll do it.<br />
Marcus: I actually told Warp six months earlier to don't call us about remixes unless it's Beck or God.<br />
<br />
== Images ==<br />
Scans of the magazine article were provided by [[Twoism (forum)|Twoism]] user [[nlogax (person)|nlogax]].<br />
<gallery><br />
Image:Reup.gif|Cover<br />
Image:reup-01.jpg|Page 28<br />
Image:reup-02.jpg|Page 29<br />
Image:reup-03.jpg|Page 30<br />
Image:reup-04.jpg|Page 31<br />
Image:reup-05.jpg|Page 86<br />
</gallery><br />
<br />
== Blog entry ==<br />
The author posted an entry about the interview on his blog, Scissorkick. The post included an mp3 of the ''[[A Few Old Tunes]]'' track "[[Sequoia]]". The mp3 is the same as from previously known leaks; it is not a new or better quality copy.<br />
<br />
== External links ==<br />
* [http://reupmag.com/ RE:UP Magazine]<br />
** [http://www.merchline.com/reup/productdisplay.5077.p.htm Back issue ordering]<br />
* [http://www.scissorkick.com/2006/01/boc-in-reup.html Author's blog entry]<br />
<br />
[[Category: Interviews]]<br />
[[Category: Articles needing transcription]]<br />
[[Category: The Campfire Headphase era]]</div>Maxrhttps://bocpages.org/w/index.php?title=Peering_Out_from_Behind_the_Curtain&diff=6436Peering Out from Behind the Curtain2009-05-25T21:22:58Z<p>Maxr: </p>
<hr />
<div>'''"Peering Out from Behind the Curtain"''' was an [[interview]] by Steve Marchese that appeared in ''RE:UP'' magazine, Manual 09, around January 2006. Photos within the article are credited to [[Peter Iain Campbell]].<br />
<br />
== Bibliography ==<br />
"Peering Out from Behind the Curtain" by Steve Marchese<br />
<br />
RE:UP Manual 09 (~Jan 2006), pp. 28-31,86<br />
<br />
== Article text ==<br />
Edinburgh has a hangover. The normal din of this bustling university city remains eerily suppressed by a combination of the preceding night's partying and a cold front quickly descending from the North. The streets are empty save some churchgoers and a stray dog. An old man in a faded suit hands lunch menus to nobody. The museum set up as a meeting point with Boards of Canada--brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin-- is still closed and won't open to the public for at least another hour. I am sitting in the middle of an unfamiliar place, waiting to meet two virtually faceless musicians with whom I have yet to directly speak. Could this scene be completly engineered or am I thinking too much into it? Yet for some reason, I know there couldn't be a more perfect start to a day highlighted by a sit-down with Boards of Canada.<br />
<br />
The development of mystery and rumor is certainly nothing new to contemporary music. Stories of Paul McCartney's death surfaced after the Beatles released their thirteenth record. In 1989, nearly 15 years after the formation of Judas Priest, the metal band was put on trial (and eventually exonerated) after a double suicide allegedly caused by hidden messages like "try suicide" and "do it, do it" on the record ''Stained Cross''. And although testaments to Pink Floyd's ''Dark Side of the Moon'' functioning as a second, synchronizing soundtrack to ''The Wizard of Oz'' started surfacing online in 1994, rumors of this pairing can be traced all the way back to 1979.<br />
<br />
What Differentiates Boards of Canada from the rest of this smallish pantheon of mythologized artists, however, is the speed by which the duo have been able to invent and disseminate such intrigue. Much of it has to do with a pious and enthusiastic fan base, but in just a short time (over the release of only 3 full-length LPs) rumors--and some truths--have spread far and wide about the duo's religious proclivities, their use of embedded messages in tracks (sometimes known as backmasking) and secret tracks made anonymously for major pop stars.<br />
<br />
Most of the speculation gained momentum due to the pair's reluctance to do face-to-face interviews. But now that they've surfaced in promotion of their new LP, ''The Campfire Headphase'', it seems a lot of the conjecture has been systematically addressed in intervies online and recent features in European magazines ''The Wire'' and ''Groove''. Even a fleeting peek behind the curtain shows them not to be the circuit-obsessed techno Bedouins protrayed by the media- but rather, a pair of well-adjusted, hugely likeable brothers who do not only finish each other's sentences, but who have also applied an admirable do-it-yourself philosophy to their unique pursuit of artistic perfection.<br />
<br />
"There's never been a coordinated plan to engineer a blockade around who and what we are," says Mike Sandison, easing back into a chair at the coffee house where we finally decided to meet. "We wanted to make music that stood out on its own as an entity inside its own bubble. In the early stages we kind of felt like if we were going to out in magazines an start posing for photographs we'd spoil that."<br />
<br />
And while the pair have managed to maintain an easy pastoral obscurity that is suprisingly only 40 minutes outside of Edinburgh by car, their music has gained increasing popularity worldwide- making it more difficult to stay hidden in the periphery of the limelight. "One of the worst things we've found is that by being kind of absent, people have a tendency to fill in the gaps." says Marcus Eoin (Eoin being his middle name, the two have recently revealed that they are in fact brothers). "When there's a hole, people will just make things up, it isn't so much that we're trying to be secretive. We just don't feel an eed to sell ourselves. As far as we're concerned it's not part of what we do. People write about us like we're these mountain hermits who just won't talk to anybody and we [wonder]; Where did that come from? We never said that to anyone."<br />
<br />
People think of us as being one way," continues Mike. "We'd like to go out on tour in spandex and breathe fire but we just can't do that because we're supposed to be something else entirely," he jokes, duckin out of the sunlight that just surfaced through the quickly dissolving clouds. However, with a long day of interviews ahead it seems Sandison won't be able to get out of the light just yet. With the release of ''The Campfire Headphase'', Boards of Canada have agreed to be willing participants in their largest press push in quite some time, prompting many to wonder, why now? "Isolation can get negative at times," continues Mike, "because you start to feel like you're being arrogant or that we're doing it because we hate people os much. But it's not like that at all, It's more about the fact that we don't want to ruin the art by making our lives more important than the music. Because our lives are just like that of any other artist: we're just trying to create something special."<br />
<br />
In a way it seems like the self-sequestered twosome have enthusiastically embraced the chance to finally speak out, exploding from topic to topic like barges of fireworks wired together with small lengths of fuse. In mood, tone and content, a conversation with Boards of Canada barely echoes the consistency that governs their recordings. Instead it jumps from random subjects like Ted Nugent, Noriega (the dictator, not the MC), and an internet free lifestyle to Jerry Lewis films and trans-Atlantic politics with an effortless flow that defies the misinformed online reports of a disdain aimed at journalists. What captures my attention almost immediately is not how art(??? couldn't make this out) late the two are--I expected that considering the intricate language and presentation of their music--but how approachable and open they seem to almost any inquiry. A list of talking points I had prepared the night before is totally disregarded as the conversation steers itself amost invisibly toward one of the biggest questions that will be asked all day: Why haven't they played live in over 3 years?<br />
<br />
Opening up a long stretch of conversation on the subject, Mike takes the lead "We've been under a lot of pressure to play of course," he confirms. "One of the things that comes through from the big boss man [Warp Records] is offers from festivals. Usually our respons to that is that we would be more comfortable playing a small venue that would suit what we do. Our live show as it was had ah eavy reliance on visuals--we were using video projections and monitors--and secretly over the last 3 years since we last played a gig we've started to develop a different show. We expanded the band and have friends who are part of the potential group if we go out on the road again. And we do intend to go out and play again but at the moment what we want to do is at odds with the offers coming in to play alongside bands like Foo Fighters and people like that."<br />
<br />
Marcus, the quieter but by no means less passionate of the two, finishes Mike's thought and addresses more specifically what it is about Boards of Canada's sound that makes the prospect of a live show do tricky. "You've got to know the limitations of the music that you make. I always think of our music as being a lot more like headphone music, a brain music that you can drift into," he says. "So the idea of playing on a stage where you may be coming on just before a massive set by The Chemical Brothers doesn't sound like it would work. Earlier on though, when we were in transition from working with Skam to working with Warp, we did a couple of gigs that were label showcases with Warp artists. We have massive respect for guys like Squarepusher and Aphex Twin but we found ourselves doing shows with these guys and they were so full-on electronic and really full of energy. It wasn't really what we wanted to do at the time."<br />
<br />
Finishing Marcus' thought, Mike chimes in for one last comment, the thought of which will certainly become fan-boy fodder for neo-prog and electronica lovers the world over. "It might have suited us better to be put on a bill beside Tortoise or somebody like that. And you never know, we still could end up doing it one day."<br />
<br />
Talk of the new record conveniently follows, revolving around the idea for Boards of Canada that is perhaps their most important reord to date. In so many ways ''The Campfire Headphase'' marks a musical evolution for the brothers, but what makes it a truly compellin listen is its adherence to the band's emerging modus opreandi: To move forward--both technologically and philosophically--while maintaining a strong connection to the past. This time, in palce of the numerological Easter eggs and hidden Branch Daviddian references, Boards of Canada have enmeshed their music within the trappings of live instrumentation, placing them squarely in the middle of an intersection with infinite roads trailing outward. "A little part [of using the guitars] on the new album is to open up the scope for what we want to do in the future," comments Mike. "There's kind of a destiny for where the music is going to go but we haven't managed to do it yet. Maybe the new record will kind of open the door for future options."<br />
<br />
"It doesn't necessarily mean the next album will be a Deep Purple record," adds Marcus jokingly. The brothers have an unexpectedly wry sense of humor that comes as a pleasant surprise given the melancholy and often ominous tones of their music. "We could go and make a record that's really electronic but we know now that we've got a platform to go in any direction we want. We're trying to make sure that people don't define us purely as an electronic band."<br />
<br />
Being defined by labels or pidgeonholed to a particular scene or genre are two things that both Sandison brothers agree are detrimental to their music making. "We don't buy into anything," declares Marcus. "When there's something that we're really into we still try to have some objectivity about it."<br />
<br />
"We're sort of cultural nomads," supports Mike. "I don't see us in part of a group - social or musical." Their publicly released records all bear an undeniable trademark of textured ambience and reworked hip-hop breaks and-like it or not-the winning combination has led to considerable praise by electronic music fans. But privately, hidden away in their private studio (which is rumored to house hundreds of rare and irreplaceable instruments), are thousands of tracks of organic, acoustic and experimental music that they hope to one day release under various pseudonyms. It's just one of a number of examples during the conversation that show both brother's love of simple, organic instrumentation.<br />
<br />
Mike elaborates, "People may be surprised to hear that of the demos that get sent to us, we truly love the ones that are really homemade, sort of crap and unfinished. The ones that are rough around the edges. The demos that are really slick electronica-type things are the ones that get listened to once and put on the shelves."<br />
<br />
"The thing with electronic music these days," says Marcus, "is that so much of it nowadays can be really good but it's so studio-based. So the moment you try and take it out, it's either played back form the laptop or a mess for someone who isn't able to play it live. The laptop performance thing has never been something that's appealed to us."<br />
<br />
Continuing on the live element, Mike tells a story that will certainly add to an increase in message board chatter, "I think it's commetable that people are creating software to do that because at least it's better than someone turning up to a show and pressing play on a .wav file. We know a guy who is a very high profile electronic producer in Britain - very famous in some electronic circles - and he played a show in Glasgow one time and he told us that he had just played a cassette and stood on stage pretending to press buttons. And he thought it was funny. We were laughing but also horrified at the same time."<br />
<br />
The mixture of humor, honesty, passion and creativity is something revealed only by meeting these two self-confessed reclusive artists in person. Instead, all most of us have to objectively evaluate about Boards of Canada is their music. It's a scenario the brothers have worked very hard to cultivate. Most importantly, however, and perhaps the chief reason they've surfaced for this brief set of interviews--besides dispelling myths of course--is to reveal that they are musicians with purpose and that music is but one way for them to achieve that purpose. "If you had to vaguely approximate a purpose behind our music," summarizes Marcus, "for me it would be like we are soundtracking the alternative place you might be right now. You wouldn't be dead but you'd just be in a different world; everything would be quite alien, so you'd wonder what would the music be like. What would you be hearing?" He continues, "I think perhaps the theme of what we're doing is instead of looking forward we are looking backward to the positivity that you might have had as a child. And we want to take it as a fuel and be inspired by it. I think of myself as the kind of person that even when I'm 80 I'll still be listening to weird music and playing computer games. I don't want to be the kind of person that gives up on youth." It's a sentiment shared by both brothers and, I'm sure, by most of the enthusiastic fans who hope to be listening to the "weird" music of Boards of Canada far into their eighties as well.<br />
<br />
<br />
Boards of Canada on...<br />
Spirituality<br />
Marcus: You have to allow some spiritual element when making music. But we don't mean that in any kind of mumbo jumbo faux religious way, because some people have misquoted us and made us sound like a couple of magicians or something. A lot of musicians don't seem to have that spiritual element because they are just working when they make music. Like they have another agenda and are doing it for other reasons. But the most interesting musicians seem to be the ones that are tying to go somewhere else with their music. A bit like he whole escapist or science fiction fantasy thing, it's the ones that look at music and think: how could things be different?<br />
<br />
Fan expectations<br />
Mike: When you are signed to a label like Warp, you know that there's an audience of people out there buying [your music]. You can try to ignore it and try to imagine there's no one listening but there is always a feeling in the back of your mind that you have certain things to live up to regarding production standards. You wouldn't be able to get away with putting out an album with an 18-minute long ambient track in the middle of all pop and soul tracks. That's the kind of thing we do on our old tapes. We wouldn't have gotten shit aobut it and we would have just done it. It wouldn't have mattered. But now we have these considerations because we're putting out records that force use to think aobut the average person who buys them.<br />
<br />
Living in Canada<br />
Marcus: At the particular age we were at when we lived in Canada you are more likely to notice the differences between where you come from and where you're visiting. The things that out like TV and music, the way people dress are the things that you carry with you when you leave that place. I thik it's been imprinted on us. For us, it was a very specific time--1979 to 1980 North American media culture--that left like a ghostly shadow that sort of stuck to us. We came away form there with a memory of the palce that was nostalgic to the extent that we've been trying to get back there ever since. Not geographically, but more like a feeling. By making music that makes you travel to that place.<br />
<br />
Fatherhood<br />
Mike: Now I find that a lot of the depression about losing my childhood has gone by the wayside because I'm able to go back there with my little daughter. Kids do a lot of interesting things that you kind of vaguely remember doing yourself but have shutoff as an adult. You start to realize that life doesn't have to be about being completly conscious of the universe's problems. It can be really fulfilling if you just concentrate on a little microscopic version of life that a child sees. As a parent you have no choice but to occasionally lose yourself in a child's world like The Jungle Book of something. It's a bit like what we do with our music. It's like saying to yourself that just for this hour I'm gonna switch off all the crap in the world and lose myself in an alternative world. Like a good book or something. It's kind of how we see what we do with our records. Although it's becoming increasingly difficult the older we get. It's much harder to not put our political beliefs into the music.<br />
<br />
Stevie Wonder<br />
Marcus: I know it sounds strange to say it but I've always thought of Stevie Wonder as an electronic artist. A lot of his bass line were done on synths. He's done project albums like ''The Secret Life of Plants'' that are all synthesizers, all done with keyboards. You wouldn't describe him as rock and it's too lazy to describe him as R&B or soul. To me, it's electronic but it's absolutely organic. Here you have incredible singing, incredible tunes, and amazing use of keyboards. Sometimes I step back and think aobut the sound of Stevie in the '70s and it shoes just how different electronic music can be.<br />
<br />
Remixing Beck<br />
Mike: We were already huge fans of Beck's music and friends with the guys form Anticon. Dose and I are big penpals. I think Beck's producers asked the Anticon guys if they had a contact for us and the next thing we know we get a letter asking us to do [this remix of] Beck's. We said that we'd love to hear the track first and see what it's like and I said to Marcus at one stage that if this track is really slow and empty we'll do it.<br />
Marcus: I actually told Warp six months earlier to don't call us about remixes unless it's Beck or God.<br />
<br />
== Images ==<br />
Scans of the magazine article were provided by [[Twoism (forum)|Twoism]] user [[nlogax (person)|nlogax]].<br />
<gallery><br />
Image:Reup.gif|Cover<br />
Image:reup-01.jpg|Page 28<br />
Image:reup-02.jpg|Page 29<br />
Image:reup-03.jpg|Page 30<br />
Image:reup-04.jpg|Page 31<br />
Image:reup-05.jpg|Page 86<br />
</gallery><br />
<br />
== Blog entry ==<br />
The author posted an entry about the interview on his blog, Scissorkick. The post included an mp3 of the ''[[A Few Old Tunes]]'' track "[[Sequoia]]". The mp3 is the same as from previously known leaks; it is not a new or better quality copy.<br />
<br />
== External links ==<br />
* [http://reupmag.com/ RE:UP Magazine]<br />
** [http://www.merchline.com/reup/productdisplay.5077.p.htm Back issue ordering]<br />
* [http://www.scissorkick.com/2006/01/boc-in-reup.html Author's blog entry]<br />
<br />
[[Category: Interviews]]<br />
[[Category: Articles needing transcription]]<br />
[[Category: The Campfire Headphase era]]</div>Maxrhttps://bocpages.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Peering_Out_from_Behind_the_Curtain&diff=6435Talk:Peering Out from Behind the Curtain2009-05-25T20:27:48Z<p>Maxr: </p>
<hr />
<div>Here is the transcribed interview. Words labeled with (???) I was unsure of. I have not finished formatting the italics and such yet.<br />
<br />
Edinburgh has a hangover. The normal din of this bustling university city remains eerily suppressed by a combination of the preceding night's partying and a cold front quickly descending from the North. The streets are empty save some churchgoers and a stray dog. An old man in a faded suit hands lunch menus to nobody. The museum set up as a meeting point with Boards of Canada--brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin-- is still closed and won't open to the public for at least another hour. I am sitting in the middle of an unfamiliar place, waiting to meet two virtually faceless musicians with whom I have yet to directly speak. Could this scene be completly engineered or am I thinking too much into it? Yet for some reason, I know there couldn't be a more perfect start to a day highlighted by a sit-down with Boards of Canada.<br />
<br />
The development of mystery and rumor is certainly nothing new to contemporary music. Stories of Paul McCartney's death surfaced after the Beatles released their thirteenth record. In 1989, nearly 15 years after the formation of Judas Priest, the metal band was put on trial (and eventually exonerated(???)) after a double suicide allegedly caused by hidden messages like "try suicide" and "do it, do it" on the record ''Stained Cross''. And although testaments to Pink Floyd's ''Dark Side of the Moon'' functioning as a second, synchronizing soundtrack to ''The Wizard of Oz'' started surfacing online in 1994, rumors of this pairing can be traced all the way back to 1979.<br />
<br />
What Differentiates Boards of Canada from the rest of this smallish pantheon of mythologized artists, however, is the speed by which the duo have been able to invent and disseminate such intrigue. Much of it has to do with a pious(???) and enthusiastic fan base, but in just a short time (over the release of only 3 full-length LPs) rumors--and some truths--have spread far and wide about the duo's religious proclivities(???), their use of embedded messages in tracks (sometimes known as backmasking) and secret tracks made anonymously for major pop stars.<br />
<br />
Most of the speculation gained momentum due to the pair's reluctance to do face-to-face interviews. But now that they've surfaced in promotion of their new LP, ''The Campfire Headphase'', it seems a lot of the conjecture has been systematically addressed in intervies online and recent features in European magazines ''The Wire'' and ''Groove''. Even a fleeting peek behind the curtain shows them not to be the circuit-obsessed techno Bedouins protrayed by the media- but rather, a pair of well-adjusted, hugely likeable brothers who do not only finish each other's sentences, but who have also applied an admirable do-it-yourself philosophy to their unique pursuit of artistic perfection.<br />
<br />
"There's never been a coordinated plan to engineer a blockade around who and what we are," says Mike Sandison, easing back into a chair at the coffee house where we finally decided to meet. "We wanted to make music that stood out on its own as an entity inside its own bubble. In the early stages we kind of felt like if we were going to out in magazines an start posing for photographs we'd spoil that."<br />
<br />
And while the pair have managed to maintain an easy pastoral obscurity that is suprisingly only 40 minutes outside of Edinburgh by car, their music has gained increasing popularity worldwide- making it more difficult to stay hidden in the periphery of the limelight(???). "One of the worst things we've found is that by being kind of absent, people have a tendency to fill in the gaps." says Marcus Eoin (Eoin being his middle name, the two have recently revealed that they are in fact brothers). "When there's a hole, people will just make things up, it isn't so much that we're trying to be secretive. We just don't feel an eed to sell ourselves. As far as we're concerned it's not part of what we do. People write about us like we're these mountain hermits who just won't talk to anybody and we [wonder]; Where did that come from? We never said that to anyone."<br />
<br />
People think of us as being one way," continues Mike. "We'd like to go out on tour in spandex and breathe fire but we just can't do that because we're supposed to be something else entirely," he jokes, duckin out of the sunlight that just surfaced through the quickly dissolving clouds. However, with a long day of interviews ahead it seems Sandison won't be able to get out of the light just yet. With the release of ''The Campfire Headphase'', Boards of Canada have agreed to be willing participants in their largest press push in quite some time, prompting many to wonder, why now? "Isolation can get negative at times," continues Mike, "because you start to feel like you're being arrogant or that we're doing it because we hate people os much. But it's not like that at all, It's more about the fact that we don't want to ruin the art by making our lives more important than the music. Because our lives are just like that of any other artist: we're just trying to create something special."<br />
<br />
In a way it seems like the self-sequestered twosome have enthusiastically embraced the chance to finally speak out, exploding from topic to topic like barges of fireworks wired together with small lengths of fuse. In mood, tone and content, a conversation with Boards of Canada barely echoes the consistency that governs their recordings. Instead it jumps from random subjects like Ted Nugent, Noriega (the dictator, not the MC), and an internet free lifestyle to Jerry Lewis films and trans-Atlantic politics with an effortless flow that beats (???) the misinformed online reports of a disdain aimed at journalists. What captures my attention almost immediately is not how art(???) late the two are--I expected that considering the intricate language and presentation of their music--but how approachable and open they seem to almost any inquiry. A list of talking points I had prepared the night before is totally disregarded as the conversation steers itself amost invisibly toward one of the biggest questions that will be asked all day: Why haven't they played live in over 3 years?<br />
<br />
Opening up a long stretch of conversation on the subject, Mike takes the lead "We've been under a lot of pressure to play of course," he confirms. "One of the things that comes through from the big boss mah(???) [Warp Records] is offers from festivals. Usually our respons to that is that we would be more comfortable playing a small venue that would suit what we do. Our live show as it was had ah eavy reliance on visuals--we were using video projections and monitors--and secretly over the last 3 years since we last played a gig we've started to develop a different show. We expanded the band and have friends who are part of the potential group if we go out on the road again. And we do intend to go out and play again but at the moment what we want to do is at odds with the offers coming in to play alongside bands like Foo Fighters and people like that."<br />
<br />
Marcus, the quieter but by no means less passionate of the two, finishes Mike's thought and addresses more specifically what it is about Boards of Canada's sound that makes the prospect of a live show do tricky. "You've got to know the limitations of the music that you make. I always think of our music as being a lot more like headphone music, a brain music that you can drift into," he says. "So the idea of playing on a stage where you may be coming on just before a massive set by The Chemical Brothers doesn't sound like it would work. Earlier on though, when we were in transition from working with Skam to working with Warp, we did a couple of gigs that were label showcases with Warp artists. We have massive respect for guys like Squarepusher and Aphex Twin but we found ourselves doing shows with these guys and they were so full-on electronic and really full of energy. It wasn't really what we wanted to do at the time."<br />
<br />
Finishing Marcus' thought, Mike chimes in for one last comment, the thought of which will certainly become fan-boy fodder for neo-prog and electronica lovers the world over. "It might have suited us better to be put on a bill beside Tortoise or somebody like that. And you never know, we still could end up doing it one day."<br />
<br />
Talk of the new record conveniently follows, revolving around the idea for Boards of Canada that is perhaps their most important reord to date. In so many ways ''The Campfire Headphase'' marks a musical evolution for the brothers, but what makes it a truly compellin listen is its adherence to the band's emerging modus opreandi: To move forward--both technologically and philosophically--while maintaining a strong connection to the past. This time, in palce of the numerological Easter eggs and hidden Branch Daviddian references, Boards of Canada have enmeshed their music within the trappings of live instrumentation, placing them squarely in the middle of an intersection with infinite roads trailing(???) outward. "A little part [of using the guitars] on the new album is to open up the scope for what we want to do in the future," comments Mike. "There's kind of a destiny for where the music is going to go but we haven't managed to do it yet. Maybe the new record will kind of open the door for future options."<br />
<br />
"It doesn't necessarily mean the next album will be a Deep Purple record," adds Marcus jokingly. The brothers have an unexpectedly wry sense of humor that comes as a pleasant surprise given the melancholy and often ominous tones of their music. "We could go and make a record that's really electronic but we know now that we've got a platform to go in any direction we want. We're trying to make sure that people don't define us purely as an electronic band."<br />
<br />
Being defined by labels or pidgeonholed to a particular scene or genre are two things that both Sandison brothers agree are detrimental to their music making. "We don't buy into anything," declares Marcus. "When there's something that we're really into we still try to have some objectivity about it."<br />
<br />
"We're sort of cultural nomads," supports Mike. "I don't see us in part of a group - social or musical." Their publicly released records all bear an undeniable trademark of textured ambience and reworked hip-hop breaks and-like it or not-the winning combination has led to considerable praise by electronic music fans. But privately, hidden away in their private studio (which is rumored to house hundreds of rare and irreplaceable instruments), are thousands of tracks of organic, acoustic and experimental music that they hope to one day release under various pseudonyms. It's just one of a number of examples during the conversation that show both brother's love of simple, organic instrumentation.<br />
<br />
Mike elaborates, "People may be surprised to hear that of the demos that get sent to us, we truly love the ones that are really homemade, sort of crap and unfinished. The ones that are rough around the edges. The demos that are really slick electronica-type things are the ones that get listened to once and put on the shelves."<br />
<br />
"The thing with electronic music these days," says Marcus, "is that so much of it nowadays can be really good but it's so studio-based. So the moment you try and take it out, it's either played back form the laptop or a mess for someone who isn't able to play it live. The laptop performance thing has never been something that's appealed to us."<br />
<br />
Continuing on the live element, Mike tells a story that will certainly add to an increase in message board chatter, "I think it's commetable that people are creating software to do that because at least it's better than someone turning up to a show and pressing play on a .wav file. We know a guy who is a very high profile electronic producer in Britain - very famous in some electronic circles - and he played a show in Glasgow one time and he told us that he had just played a cassette and stood on stage pretending to press buttons. And he thought it was funny. We were laughing but also horrified at the same time."<br />
<br />
The mixture of humor, honesty, passion and creativity is something revealed only by meeting these two self-confessed reclusive artists in person. Instead, all most of us have to objectively evaluate about Boards of Canada is their music. It's a scenario the brothers have worked very hard to cultivate. Most importantly, however, and perhaps the chief reason they've surfaced for this brief set of interviews--besides dispelling myths of course--is to reveal that they are musicians with purpose and that music is but one way for them to achieve that purpose. "If you had to vaguely approximate a purpose behind our music," summarizes Marcus, "for me it would be like we are soundtracking the alternative place you might be right now. You wouldn't be dead but you'd just be in a different world; everything would be quite alien, so you'd wonder what would the music be like. What would you be hearing?" He continues, "I think perhaps the theme of what we're doing is instead of looking forward we are looking backward to the positivity that you might have had as a child. And we want to take it as a fuel and be inspired by it. I think of myself as the kind of person that even when I'm 80 I'll still be listening to weird music and playing computer games. I don't want to be the kind of person that gives up on youth." It's a sentiment shared by both brothers and, I'm sure, by most of the enthusiastic fans who hope to be listening to the "weird" music of Boards of Canada far into their eighties as well.<br />
<br />
<br />
Boards of Canada on...<br />
Spirituality<br />
Marcus: You have to allow some spiritual element when making music. But we don't mean that in any kind of mumbo jumbo faux religious way, because some people have misquoted us and made us sound like a couple of magicians or something. A lot of musicians don't seem to have that spiritual element because they are just working when they make music. Like they have another agenda and are doing it for other reasons. But the most interesting musicians seem to be the ones that are tying to go somewhere else with their music. A bit like he whole escapist or science fiction fantasy thing, it's the ones that look at music and think: how could things be different?<br />
<br />
Fan expectations<br />
Mike: When you are signed to a label like Warp, you know that there's an audience of people out there buying [your music]. You can try to ignore it and try to imagine there's no one listening but there is always a feeling in the back of your mind that you have certain things to live up to regarding production standards. You wouldn't be able to get away with putting out an album with an 18-minute long ambient track in the middle of all pop and soul tracks. That's the kind of thing we do on our old tapes. We wouldn't have gotten shit aobut it and we would have just done it. It wouldn't have mattered. But now we have these considerations because we're putting out records that force use to think aobut the average person who buys them.<br />
<br />
Living in Canada<br />
Marcus: At the particular age we were at when we lived in Canada you are more likely to notice the differences between where you come from and where you're visiting. The things that out like TV and music, the way people dress are the things that you carry with you when you leave that place. I thik it's been imprinted on us. For us, it was a very specific time--1979 to 1980 North American media culture--that left like a ghostly shadow that sort of stuck to us. We came away form there with a memory of the palce that was nostalgic to the extent that we've been trying to get back there ever since. Not geographically, but more like a feeling. By making music that makes you travel to that place.<br />
<br />
Fatherhood<br />
Mike: Now I find that a lot of the depression about losing my childhood has gone by the wayside because I'm able to go back there with my little daughter. Kids do a lot of interesting things that you kind of vaguely remember doing yourself but have shutoff as an adult. You start to realize that life doesn't have to be about being completly conscious of the universe's problems. It can be really fulfilling if you just concentrate on a little microscopic version of life that a child sees. As a parent you have no choice but to occasionally lose yourself in a child's world like The Jungle Book of something. It's a bit like what we do with our music. It's like saying to yourself that just for this hour I'm gonna switch off all the crap in the world and lose myself in an alternative world. Like a good book or something. It's kind of how we see what we do with our records. Although it's becoming increasingly difficult the older we get. It's much harder to not put our political beliefs into the music.<br />
<br />
Stevie Wonder<br />
Marcus: I know it sounds strange to say it but I've always thought of Stevie Wonder as an electronic artist. A lot of his bass line were done on synths. He's done project albums like ''The Secret Life of Plants'' that are all synthesizers, all done with keyboards. You wouldn't describe him as rock and it's too lazy to describe him as R&B or soul. To me, it's electronic but it's absolutely organic. Here you have incredible singing, incredible tunes, and amazing use of keyboards. Sometimes I step back and think aobut the sound of Stevie in the '70s and it shoes just how different electronic music can be.<br />
<br />
Remixing Beck<br />
Mike: We were already huge fans of Beck's music and friends with the guys form Anticon. Dose and I are big penpals. I think Beck's producers asked the Anticon guys if they had a contact for us and the next thing we know we get a letter asking us to do [this remix of] Beck's. We said that we'd love to hear the track first and see what it's like and I said to Marcus at one stage that if this track is really slow and empty we'll do it.<br />
Marcus: I actually told Warp six months earlier to don't call us about remixes unless it's Beck or God.</div>Maxrhttps://bocpages.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Peering_Out_from_Behind_the_Curtain&diff=6434Talk:Peering Out from Behind the Curtain2009-05-25T19:23:55Z<p>Maxr: </p>
<hr />
<div>Here is the transcribed interview. Words labeled with (???) I was unsure of. I have not finished formatting the italics and such yet.<br />
<br />
Edinburgh has a hangover. The normal din of this bustling university city remains eerily suppressed by a combination of the preceding night's partying and a cold front quickly descending from the North. The streets are empty save some churchgoers and a stray dog. An old man in a faded suit hands lunch menus to nobody. The museum set up as a meeting point with Boards of Canada--brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin-- is still closed and won't open to the public for at least another hour. I am sitting in the middle of an unfamiliar place, waiting to meet two virtually faceless musicians with whom I have yet to directly speak. Could this scene be completly engineered or am I thinking too much into it? Yet for some reason, I know there couldn't be a more perfect start to a day highlighted by a sit-down with Boards of Canada.<br />
<br />
The development of mystery and rumor is certainly nothing new to contemporary music. Stories of Paul McCartney's death surfaced after the Beatles released their thirteenth record. In 1989, nearly 15 years after the formation of Judas Priest, the metal band was put on trial (and eventually exonerated(???)) after a double suicide allegedly caused by hidden messages like "try suicide" and "do it, do it" on the record ''Stained Cross''. And although testaments to Pink Floyd's ''Dark Side of the Moon'' functioning as a second, synchronizing soundtrack to ''The Wizard of Oz'' started surfacing online in 1994, rumors of this pairing can be traced all the way back to 1979.<br />
<br />
What Differentiates Boards of Canada from the rest of this smallish pantheon of mythologized artists, however, is the speed by which the duo have been able to invent and disseminate such intrigue. Much of it has to do with a pious(???) and enthusiastic fan base, but in just a short time (over the release of only 3 full-length LPs) rumors--and some truths--have spread far and wide about the duo's religious proclivities(???), their use of embedded messages in tracks (sometimes known as backmasking) and secret tracks made anonymously for major pop stars.<br />
<br />
Most of the speculation gained momentum due to the pair's reluctance to do face-to-face interviews. But now that they've surfaced in promotion of their new LP, ''The Campfire Headphase'', it seems a lot of the conjecture has been systematically addressed in intervies online and recent features in European magazines ''The Wire'' and ''Groove''. Even a fleeting peek behind the curtain shows them not to be the circuit-obsessed techno Bedouins protrayed by the media- but rather, a pair of well-adjusted, hugely likeable brothers who do not only finish each other's sentences, but who have also applied an admirable do-it-yourself philosophy to their unique pursuit of artistic perfection.<br />
<br />
"There's never been a coordinated plan to engineer a blockade around who and what we are," says Mike Sandison, easing back into a chair at the coffee house where we finally decided to meet. "We wanted to make music that stood out on its own as an entity inside its own bubble. In the early stages we kind of felt like if we were going to out in magazines an start posing for photographs we'd spoil that."<br />
<br />
And while the pair have managed to maintain an easy pastoral obscurity that is suprisingly only 40 minutes outside of Edinburgh by car, their music has gained increasing popularity worldwide- making it more difficult to stay hidden in the periphery of the limelight(???). "One of the worst things we've found is that by being kind of absent, people have a tendency to fill in the gaps." says Marcus Eoin (Eoin being his middle name, the two have recently revealed that they are in fact brothers). "When there's a hole, people will just make things up, it isn't so much that we're trying to be secretive. We just don't feel an eed to sell ourselves. As far as we're concerned it's not part of what we do. People write about us like we're these mountain hermits who just won't talk to anybody and we [wonder]; Where did that come from? We never said that to anyone."<br />
<br />
People think of us as being one way," continues Mike. "We'd like to go out on tour in spandex and breathe fire but we just can't do that because we're supposed to be something else entirely," he jokes, duckin out of the sunlight that just surfaced through the quickly dissolving clouds. However, with a long day of interviews ahead it seems Sandison won't be able to get out of the light just yet. With the release of (i)The Campfire Headphase(/i), Boards of Canada have agreed to be willing participants in their largest press push in quite some time, prompting many to wonder, why now? "Isolation can get negative at times," continues Mike, "because you start to feel like you're being arrogant or that we're doing it because we hate people os much. But it's not like that at all, It's more about the fact that we don't want to ruin the art by making our lives more important than the music. Because our lives are just like that of any other artist: we're just trying to create something special."<br />
<br />
In a way it seems like the self-sequestered twosome have enthusiastically embraced the chance to finally speak out, exploding from topic to topic like barges of fireworks wired together with small lengths of fuse. In mood, tone and content, a conversation with Boards of Canada barely echoes the consistency that governs their recordings. Instead it jumps from random subjects like Ted Nugent, Noriega (the dictator, not the MC), and an internet free lifestyle to Jerry Lewis films and trans-Atlantic politics with an effortless flow that beats (???) the misinformed online reports of a disdain aimed at journalists. What captures my attention almost immediately is not how art(???) late the two are--I expected that considering the intricate language and presentation of their music--but how approachable and open they seem to almost any inquiry. A list of talking points I had prepared the night before is totally disregarded as the conversation steers itself amost invisibly toward one of the biggest questions that will be asked all day: Why haven't they played live in over 3 years?<br />
<br />
Opening up a long stretch of conversation on the subject, Mike takes the lead "We've been under a lot of pressure to play of course," he confirms. "One of the things that comes through from the big boss mah(???) [Warp Records] is offers from festivals. Usually our respons to that is that we would be more comfortable playing a small venue that would suit what we do. Our live show as it was had ah eavy reliance on visuals--we were using video projections and monitors--and secretly over the last 3 years since we last played a gig we've started to develop a different show. We expanded the band and have friends who are part of the potential group if we go out on the road again. And we do intend to go out and play again but at the moment what we want to do is at odds with the offers coming in to play alongside bands like Foo Fighters and people like that."<br />
<br />
Marcus, the quieter but by no means less passionate of the two, finishes Mike's thought and addresses more specifically what it is about Boards of Canada's sound that makes the prospect of a live show do tricky. "You've got to know the limitations of the music that you make. I always think of our music as being a lot more like headphone music, a brain music that you can drift into," he says. "So the idea of playing on a stage where you may be coming on just before a massive set by The Chemical Brothers doesn't sound like it would work. Earlier on though, when we were in transition from working with Skam to working with Warp, we did a couple of gigs that were label showcases with Warp artists. We have massive respect for guys like Squarepusher and Aphex Twin but we found ourselves doing shows with these guys and they were so full-on electronic and really full of energy. It wasn't really what we wanted to do at the time."<br />
<br />
Finishing Marcus' thought, Mike chimes in for one last comment, the thought of which will certainly become fan-boy fodder for neo-prog and electronica lovers the world over. "It might have suited us better to be put on a bill beside Tortoise or somebody like that. And you never know, we still could end up doing it one day."<br />
<br />
Talk of the new record conveniently follows, revolving around the idea for Boards of Canada that is perhaps their most important reord to date. In so many ways (i)The Campfire Headphase(/i) marks a musical evolution for the brothers, but what makes it a truly compellin listen is its adherence to the band's emerging modus opreandi: To move forward--both technologically and philosophically--while maintaining a strong connection to the past. This time, in palce of the numerological Easter eggs and hidden Branch Daviddian references, Boards of Canada have enmeshed their music within the trappings of live instrumentation, placing them squarely in the middle of an intersection with infinite roads trailing(???) outward. "A little part [of using the guitars] on the new album is to open up the scope for what we want to do in the future," comments Mike. "There's kind of a destiny for where the music is going to go but we haven't managed to do it yet. Maybe the new record will kind of open the door for future options."<br />
<br />
"It doesn't necessarily mean the next album will be a Deep Purple record," adds Marcus jokingly. The brothers have an unexpectedly wry sense of humor that comes as a pleasant surprise given the melancholy and often ominous tones of their music. "We could go and make a record that's really electronic but we know now that we've got a platform to go in any direction we want. We're trying to make sure that people don't define us purely as an electronic band."<br />
<br />
Being defined by labels or pidgeonholed to a particular scene or genre are two things that both Sandison brothers agree are detrimental to their music making. "We don't buy into anything," declares Marcus. "When there's something that we're really into we still try to have some objectivity about it."<br />
<br />
"We're sort of cultural nomads," supports Mike. "I don't see us in part of a group - social or musical." Their publicly released records all bear an undeniable trademark of textured ambience and reworked hip-hop breaks and-like it or not-the winning combination has led to considerable praise by electronic music fans. But privately, hidden away in their private studio (which is rumored to house hundreds of rare and irreplaceable instruments), are thousands of tracks of organic, acoustic and experimental music that they hope to one day release under various pseudonyms. It's just one of a number of examples during the conversation that show both brother's love of simple, organic instrumentation.<br />
<br />
Mike elaborates, "People may be surprised to hear that of the demos that get sent to us, we truly love the ones that are really homemade, sort of crap and unfinished. The ones that are rough around the edges. The demos that are really slick electronica-type things are the ones that get listened to once and put on the shelves."<br />
<br />
"The thing with electronic music these days," says Marcus, "is that so much of it nowadays can be really good but it's so studio-based. So the moment you try and take it out, it's either played back form the laptop or a mess for someone who isn't able to play it live. The laptop performance thing has never been something that's appealed to us."<br />
<br />
Continuing on the live element, Mike tells a story that will certainly add to an increase in message board chatter, "I think it's commetable that people are creating software to do that because at least it's better than someone turning up to a show and pressing play on a .wav file. We know a guy who is a very high profile electronic producer in Britain - very famous in some electronic circles - and he played a show in Glasgow one time and he told us that he had just played a cassette and stood on stage pretending to press buttons. And he thought it was funny. We were laughing but also horrified at the same time."<br />
<br />
The mixture of humor, honesty, passion and creativity is something revealed only by meeting these two self-confessed reclusive artists in person. Instead, all most of us have to objectively evaluate about Boards of Canada is their music. It's a scenario the brothers have worked very hard to cultivate. Most importantly, however, and perhaps the chief reason they've surfaced for this brief set of interviews--besides dispelling myths of course--is to reveal that they are musicians with purpose and that music is but one way for them to achieve that purpose. "If you had to vaguely approximate a purpose behind our music," summarizes Marcus, "for me it would be like we are soundtracking the alternative place you might be right now. You wouldn't be dead but you'd just be in a different world; everything would be quite alien, so you'd wonder what would the music be like. What would you be hearing?" He continues, "I think perhaps the theme of what we're doing is instead of looking forward we are looking backward to the positivity that you might have had as a child. And we want to take it as a fuel and be inspired by it. I think of myself as the kind of person that even when I'm 80 I'll still be listening to weird music and playing computer games. I don't want to be the kind of person that gives up on youth." It's a sentiment shared by both brothers and, I'm sure, by most of the enthusiastic fans who hope to be listening to the "weird" music of Boards of Canada far into their eighties as well.<br />
<br />
<br />
Boards of Canada on...<br />
Spirituality<br />
Marcus: You have to allow some spiritual element when making music. But we don't mean that in any kind of mumbo jumbo faux religious way, because some people have misquoted us and made us sound like a couple of magicians or something. A lot of musicians don't seem to have that spiritual element because they are just working when they make music. Like they have another agenda and are doing it for other reasons. But the most interesting musicians seem to be the ones that are tying to go somewhere else with their music. A bit like he whole escapist or science fiction fantasy thing, it's the ones that look at music and think: how could things be different?<br />
<br />
Fan expectations<br />
Mike: When you are signed to a label like Warp, you know that there's an audience of people out there buying [your music]. You can try to ignore it and try to imagine there's no one listening but there is always a feeling in the back of your mind that you have certain things to live up to regarding production standards. You wouldn't be able to get away with putting out an album with an 18-minute long ambient track in the middle of all pop and soul tracks. That's the kind of thing we do on our old tapes. We wouldn't have gotten shit aobut it and we would have just done it. It wouldn't have mattered. But now we have these considerations because we're putting out records that force use to think aobut the average person who buys them.<br />
<br />
Living in Canada<br />
Marcus: At the particular age we were at when we lived in Canada you are more likely to notice the differences between where you come from and where you're visiting. The things that out like TV and music, the way people dress are the things that you carry with you when you leave that place. I thik it's been imprinted on us. For us, it was a very specific time--1979 to 1980 North American media culture--that left like a ghostly shadow that sort of stuck to us. We came away form there with a memory of the palce that was nostalgic to the extent that we've been trying to get back there ever since. Not geographically, but more like a feeling. By making music that makes you travel to that place.<br />
<br />
Fatherhood<br />
Mike: Now I find that a lot of the depression about losing my childhood has gone by the wayside because I'm able to go back there with my little daughter. Kids do a lot of interesting things that you kind of vaguely remember doing yourself but have shutoff as an adult. You start to realize that life doesn't have to be about being completly conscious of the universe's problems. It can be really fulfilling if you just concentrate on a little microscopic version of life that a child sees. As a parent you have no choice but to occasionally lose yourself in a child's world like The Jungle Book of something. It's a bit like what we do with our music. It's like saying to yourself that just for this hour I'm gonna switch off all the crap in the world and lose myself in an alternative world. Like a good book or something. It's kind of how we see what we do with our records. Although it's becoming increasingly difficult the older we get. It's much harder to not put our political beliefs into the music.<br />
<br />
Stevie Wonder<br />
Marcus: I know it sounds strange to say it but I've always thought of Stevie Wonder as an electronic artist. A lot of his bass line were done on synths. He's done project albums like (i)The Secret Life of Plants(/i) that are all synthesizers, all done with keyboards. You wouldn't describe him as rock and it's too lazy to describe him as R&B or soul. To me, it's electronic but it's absolutely organic. Here you have incredible singing, incredible tunes, and amazing use of keyboards. Sometimes I step back and think aobut the sound of Stevie in the '70s and it shoes just how different electronic music can be.<br />
<br />
Remixing Beck<br />
Mike: We were already huge fans of Beck's music and friends with the guys form Anticon. Dose and I are big penpals. I think Beck's producers asked the Anticon guys if they had a contact for us and the next thing we know we get a letter asking us to do [this remix of] Beck's. We said that we'd love to hear the track first and see what it's like and I said to Marcus at one stage that if this track is really slow and empty we'll do it.<br />
Marcus: I actually told Warp six months earlier to don't call us about remixes unless it's Beck or God.</div>Maxrhttps://bocpages.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Peering_Out_from_Behind_the_Curtain&diff=6433Talk:Peering Out from Behind the Curtain2009-05-25T14:04:26Z<p>Maxr: Created page with 'I'm not exactly sure how this works, but I'm transcribing the interview.'</p>
<hr />
<div>I'm not exactly sure how this works, but I'm transcribing the interview.</div>Maxr