artists mentioned by Boards of Canada in their interviews
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[[Play Twice Before Listening]] | [[Play Twice Before Listening]] | ||
− | {{question|Hi Michael & Marcus, Where are you? How are | + | {{question|Hi Michael & Marcus, Where are you? How are you doing?}} |
{{boc|"Marcus: We're at our studio right now, the whole place is | {{boc|"Marcus: We're at our studio right now, the whole place is | ||
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{{question|You've recorded over 90 songs for Geogaddi. Only 22 - and | {{question|You've recorded over 90 songs for Geogaddi. Only 22 - and | ||
the silent Magic Window - made it onto the album. At | the silent Magic Window - made it onto the album. At | ||
− | + | Camber Sands you played an utterly brilliant new track | |
that's not on the album.}} | that's not on the album.}} | ||
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{{question|How did you make the selection between the 'full | {{question|How did you make the selection between the 'full | ||
− | on'tracks and the strange | + | on' tracks and the strange intermezzos and miniature |
melodies that slowly grow into little gems after a while? | melodies that slowly grow into little gems after a while? | ||
Is there an overall theme/direction that connects the | Is there an overall theme/direction that connects the | ||
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Geogaddi is a kind of confusion, as though you're going | Geogaddi is a kind of confusion, as though you're going | ||
through a kind of 'Alice in Wonderland' adventure, but | through a kind of 'Alice in Wonderland' adventure, but | ||
− | with | + | with a damaged mind. Those short tracks you mention, we |
write far more of those than the so-called "full on" | write far more of those than the so-called "full on" | ||
tracks, and in a way, they are our own favorites."}} | tracks, and in a way, they are our own favorites."}} | ||
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{{boc|"Mike: We are interested in pagan roots. We're very much into older cultures and lifestyles. People forget just how transitory this period of time in the modern world is. It's important to be able to consider other approaches to society and life than what's around you. Take a look at Julian Cope for example, he uses these influences to fuel his music in a wonderful unique way. It can influence your work in other ways too, not necessarily just in the sound of the music."}} | {{boc|"Mike: We are interested in pagan roots. We're very much into older cultures and lifestyles. People forget just how transitory this period of time in the modern world is. It's important to be able to consider other approaches to society and life than what's around you. Take a look at Julian Cope for example, he uses these influences to fuel his music in a wonderful unique way. It can influence your work in other ways too, not necessarily just in the sound of the music."}} | ||
− | {{question|Hexagon Sun (studio). Chris H aka Christ (former bandmember). Redmoon nights. Hell Interface (sometimes used alias for BOC). The Devil Is In The Details. 66 minutes and 6 seconds. Artwork full of hexagrams. Supposedly subliminal messages… How | + | {{question|Hexagon Sun (studio). Chris H aka Christ (former bandmember). Redmoon nights. Hell Interface (sometimes used alias for BOC). The Devil Is In The Details. 66 minutes and 6 seconds. Artwork full of hexagrams. Supposedly subliminal messages… How evil is BOC?}} |
{{boc|"Marcus: As evil as Mickey Mouse."}} | {{boc|"Marcus: As evil as Mickey Mouse."}} | ||
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{{question|Call it folk, nostalgia, pagan - it all comes down to the rustic/rural settings of your music, doesn't it? The music being dreamt up and worked out In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country, the land we inherited from our ancestors and haven't yet ruined completely. Being isolated from The City, Modern Life and the delusion of Ongoing Progress. How does that show in your music, you think?}} | {{question|Call it folk, nostalgia, pagan - it all comes down to the rustic/rural settings of your music, doesn't it? The music being dreamt up and worked out In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country, the land we inherited from our ancestors and haven't yet ruined completely. Being isolated from The City, Modern Life and the delusion of Ongoing Progress. How does that show in your music, you think?}} | ||
− | {{boc|"Marcus: We're very much anti- | + | {{boc|"Marcus: We're very much anti-globalization. One think that disturbs me is a trend today for technology to be created and used just for it's own sake. I recently heard a politician in the UK saying that population decline was a terrible thing and that if we don't build more houses then quality of life and the economy would suffer. It's such a naive and ignorant approach to the world. Where exactly do they stop? Once there is no land left, just industrial estates and housing? I think it's the saddest thing in the world that we have all the space and resources to give everyone a decent life, but it doesn't happen. George Bush is right in that there is an "axis of evil", but it lies at the door of big business and government. We try to support the idea of a less urbanized lifestyle in our music, but I don't want to preach to anyone."}} |
{{question|For years - since Kraftwerk actually - electronic music has been associated with science fiction, futurism, cyberspace, technology, a world of robots and machinery. Your music seem to be a reaction to all that: it's not shaping the future, but recapturing the past - with a child-like innocence. Is that a correct interpretation? How important is the child-like innocence in this.}} | {{question|For years - since Kraftwerk actually - electronic music has been associated with science fiction, futurism, cyberspace, technology, a world of robots and machinery. Your music seem to be a reaction to all that: it's not shaping the future, but recapturing the past - with a child-like innocence. Is that a correct interpretation? How important is the child-like innocence in this.}} | ||
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{{boc|"Mike: In that song it refers to a specific period in the history of a religious group, and at the same time the period in general, the hopefulness of a forward-thinking generation that wasn't aware of what was coming in their collective future."}} | {{boc|"Mike: In that song it refers to a specific period in the history of a religious group, and at the same time the period in general, the hopefulness of a forward-thinking generation that wasn't aware of what was coming in their collective future."}} | ||
− | {{question|It's these references that give your music a context. Or is there more to it than just context… a | + | {{question|It's these references that give your music a context. Or is there more to it than just context… a message?}} |
{{boc|"Marcus: It's a bit of both. Some of our tracks are using messages to lend the sound of the tune a context, to make it easier for people to understand what frame of mind we intend the track to be taken in. It can mean the difference between someone understanding our sense of irony or not. We're very conscious of what we sound like, and we have a sense of humor that can be completely missed if you don't fully understand what we're about. At the same time, we're quite serious about a lot of issues, we're politically motivated, and we're genuinely interested in a lot of cultural and scientific subjects. We do a lot of research. So, some of our tracks are putting across a very specific message."}} | {{boc|"Marcus: It's a bit of both. Some of our tracks are using messages to lend the sound of the tune a context, to make it easier for people to understand what frame of mind we intend the track to be taken in. It can mean the difference between someone understanding our sense of irony or not. We're very conscious of what we sound like, and we have a sense of humor that can be completely missed if you don't fully understand what we're about. At the same time, we're quite serious about a lot of issues, we're politically motivated, and we're genuinely interested in a lot of cultural and scientific subjects. We do a lot of research. So, some of our tracks are putting across a very specific message."}} | ||
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{{boc|"Mike: Seventy."}} | {{boc|"Mike: Seventy."}} | ||
− | {{question|Many plants show the Fibonacci Numbers in the arrangement of the leaves around their stem. It's these mysterious phenomenons, where nature and science meet, that seem to fascinate you more than anything. See: | + | {{question|Many plants show the Fibonacci Numbers in the arrangement of the leaves around their stem. It's these mysterious phenomenons, where nature and science meet, that seem to fascinate you more than anything. See: Gyroscope, Sunshine Recorder, Magic Window, I Saw Drones and the volcano and energy warnings on Geogaddi.}} |
{{boc|"Mike: Yeah the main thing is these titles are evocative and the idea is it helps put a picture in your mind to associate with the track. We don't want to go too far as it's important to leave a certain space there for the listener's imagination. On this album a lot of the tracks are referring to science and nature and maths, it's just what we were into at the time of writing it. When we work on music we often imagine a visual part, as though the track is meant to accompany a short film of some kind, so yeah I suppose each track has a theme that we want to convey in some vague way."}} | {{boc|"Mike: Yeah the main thing is these titles are evocative and the idea is it helps put a picture in your mind to associate with the track. We don't want to go too far as it's important to leave a certain space there for the listener's imagination. On this album a lot of the tracks are referring to science and nature and maths, it's just what we were into at the time of writing it. When we work on music we often imagine a visual part, as though the track is meant to accompany a short film of some kind, so yeah I suppose each track has a theme that we want to convey in some vague way."}} | ||
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{{boc|"Mike: Maybe."}} | {{boc|"Mike: Maybe."}} | ||
− | {{question|What do think of Twoism being sold for up to 710 pounds on eBay? (Most offers coming from Edinburgh. It seems people want to cash in on their money before the old stuff is being | + | {{question|What do think of Twoism being sold for up to 710 pounds on eBay? (Most offers coming from Edinburgh. It seems people want to cash in on their money before the old stuff is being re-released.)}} |
{{boc|"Mike: We heard about this. It's ridiculous. If people have that much money to spend on music it's up to them. There has been no decision about doing any re-releases yet, and if there was, nobody would know about it because we never tell anybody anything."}} | {{boc|"Mike: We heard about this. It's ridiculous. If people have that much money to spend on music it's up to them. There has been no decision about doing any re-releases yet, and if there was, nobody would know about it because we never tell anybody anything."}} |
title | Play Twice Before Listening |
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author | Koen Poolman |
publication | OOR.nl |
date | 2002/03 |
issue | 06 |
pages |
"Play Twice Before Listening" is a 2002 interview by Koen Poolman. It originally appeared in OOR magazine.
This is an original text copied verbatim from the original source. Do not edit this text to correct errors or misspellings. Aside from added wikilinks, this text is exactly as it originally appeared.
Play Twice Before Listening
under snow at the moment. Everything's cool. Geogaddi must be one of the most anticipated records of 2002. I guess this weekend saw the first string of reviews in the
magazines."affect your work if you read the comments people make. Even positive comments can be damaging, I mean it's a lot easier for us to have fun writing music if we imagine
nobody is listening to it."album? a) we don't care about music business politics and promotion schedules b) we tried to keep the music from the net (and miraculously succeeded) c) we like a little
mystery d) all above is trueChildren was one of those seminal records that got better and more personal every time you listened to it. Its reputation seemed to grow every year. It's a modern classic. Geogaddi won't get the time and space to grow in people's subconsciousness, as MHTRTC did. People are taking in the album from day one, swallowing every track,
hungry as they are."you appear out of nowhere with your first album. After that, if people let their expectations grow too much, then it's inevitable that any subsequent records won't have the same effect, no matter what the music sounds like. Our music is never intended to do its work on just the first listen. Like Jack Dangers said, "play twice
before listening".comfortable with the idea that a lot more people are gonna hear your music, giving it momentum, building up a hype rather than letting it "capture a nostalgic feeling buried somewhere in our mind", as one journalist so
accurately wrote.themselves, you know, so that it's something that feels like it belongs to them. If it was up to us there would be no promotion for our music at all. MHTRTC was a one-off moment of magic you can't possibly repeat - because of the aforementioned situation. Wasn't it? Is it fair to expect another album of such class? Best thing to do in a situation like this is to disappear for good...
and let legend begin."and recording our own music for about fifteen years before 'Music Has The Right...', and we're never going to stop creating music. We wouldn't have left it at just that album, just because that's the first record that became quite widely-known. The truth is that when we released that record we had no idea it would develop the
kind of cult thing that it has."fastidious when it comes to playing live. How important
is Boards Of Canada, The Myth, to you?interested in trying to become famous. There are too many artists out there who barely put any records out, yet they're on television and in magazines all the time. If that's what they want, that's fine, but I think that's the mentality of someone who came to the music world quite late in their life, but for us we've been doing what we do for years already, and we'd be doing it anyway even if nobody knew us. The music industry is full of people who are famous for being famous. We just want to create good music, and it doesn't matter to us to do all
the other nonsense.The ultimate conclusion would be: perceiving your music as if it were nostalgia itself, originating from another time and space. Something out there. Not of today's
world.isn't attached to the current time. I hope our music could be enjoyed thirty years in the future without sounding like it came from an identifiable trend or a scene. We've always loved the sound of things that are a little sad and broken-sounding. I think that because we try to capture a damaged, eerie effect in our music, it ends up sounding nostalgic to some listeners. But you could be right because the intention is to make it sound like it's something strangely familiar but perpendicular
to the real world, and in a way timeless."the silent Magic Window - made it onto the album. At Camber Sands you played an utterly brilliant new track
that's not on the album.When we play live we often play tracks that haven't been released. Sometimes those tracks will be used later, sometimes we will move on from that sound and leave the
track behind."chance of a quick follow-up to Geogaddi or, at least, an
EP then?after this one. As Marcus said, you make an album by compiling what fits together, and we're already putting
together a different record."on' tracks and the strange intermezzos and miniature melodies that slowly grow into little gems after a while? Is there an overall theme/direction that connects the
tracks on the album?strange musical, or an imagined movie. The theme with Geogaddi is a kind of confusion, as though you're going through a kind of 'Alice in Wonderland' adventure, but with a damaged mind. Those short tracks you mention, we write far more of those than the so-called "full on"
tracks, and in a way, they are our own favorites."even bigger in numbers than on Music Has The Right To Children. Is seems like you're teasing us. It's hidden,
so find it! True?made up only with those short tracks. The ones on Geogaddi are the ones that make most sense in the overall
flow."The Country, November 2000, you were said to have recorded 64 tracks from which 23 would be pared down to an album. Fifteen months later there's an album of 23 tracks - selected out of 90-plus. How does Geogaddi differ from the album you could have put together on and
a half year ago?been compiled into an album in 2000, I think it would have been pretty different. We go through phases, Geogaddi has a lot to do with what we were listening to in the last year. If we'd made it in 2000 it might have been more electronic, but over time we've tried to create something more fuzzy and organic. Every time we make a record we see it as an individual project, separate from what went before and what will happen afterwards.
Likewise the next record will sound different."How perfect is Geogaddi? Is the devil really in the details? Is that why it took you another year to finish
the album?thing that we're always aiming at. For us it can mean something that's full of imperfection, because part of our aim has always been to destroy the sound in a beautiful way. It doesn't mean that we expect everyone would like it. I'm not sure that we will ever get there, to make the perfect record. But the whole point of making
music is at least to aim at your own idea of perfection."from the same sessions as the tracks on Geogaddi? Those were four 'full on'tracks. Put too many of these on an album and it will become a collection of songs, not an
organic work of art as a whole, is that what you believe?make something where all the tracks had a similar undercurrent while being diverse. The songs on IABPOITC could have ended up on Geogaddi, but at the time, we realized they worked well together so they became their
own EP."Glass, La Monte Young), very ambient. Zoetrope had a similar vibe. It's a vibe that shines through on Geogaddi (esp. in You Could Feel The Sky), but not as much as I expected. It's not a big step from MHTRTC to Geogaddi
really. Or is it?musically. It has more to do with our own moods at the time of writing, and for example, what we have read or watched as an influence. That EP had it's own little theme. Because Geogaddi has a lot more tracks than an EP, it's easier to draw a connection between it and our last album, because we are the same band! Usually we're a lot more minimal than the songs on Geogaddi, but this time we wanted to do something with more facets, more detail and a kind of concentrated recipe of chaotic little melodies. It reflected a chaotic time in our personal lives. I guess we'll probably go back in a more minimal direction next. If you were to point out one difference, one
progression from MHTRTC, what would it be?"for outdoors on a cold, blue-skied day, while 'Geogaddi' is a record for some sort of trial-by-fire, a claustrophobic, twisting journey that takes you into some pretty dark experiences before you reach the open air again. It has a kind of narrative. That's why we ended it with 'Corsair', it's like the light at the end of the
tunnel.head of Warp Records, said about In A Beautiful Place,
back then. Does that count for Geogaddi as well?creating Geogaddi involved much darker material, so I
think this comes through in the album."Could Feel The Sky, are they pointing out a new direction
for BOC, you think?up what you're doing is to strip it down and go minimal, so we'll see. Though our next EP could just as easily be a collection of ROYGBIV-like songs. Every so often we like to stop ourselves and change direction, it's important to do that or you can become tired of your own music. Every record is like a reaction to the last one, so I guess at the moment we're feeling more like heading
in a minimal direction, simplifying the sound again."copying Autechre/Aphex and the other half is copying you,
stealing your voice and style?influencing others to create music. But I think everyone should find their own path. In a way, if people copy us
closely, it just keeps me on my toes."every review, like "the production aesthetics of late 60s
and early 70s folk artists"?used in Geogaddi, though not in obvious ways. We love artists like Joni Mitchell and The Incredible Stringband. There's a sort of purity of sound that they have, and I
guess we are striving for that ourselves"interview by by Koen Poolman, March 2002.
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