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	This page transcludes all the text from all of the [[interviews]] listed on the [[interviews|main interviews page]] for easier viewing and searching.		This page transcludes all the text from all of the [[interviews]] listed on the [[interviews|main interviews page]] for easier viewing and searching.
−	__TOC__	+	{{TOC limit|3}}
−	= Music Has the Right to Children era =	+	== Music Has the Right to Children era ==
−	== Hardware Addicts ==	+	[[Image:Boc-wallpaper-03.jpg|center|220px]]
		+
		+
		+	=== Hardware Addicts ===
		+	{{:Hardware_Addicts}}
	----		----
−	{{:Hardware_Addicts}}
−	== The Age of Aquarius ==	+	=== The Age of Aquarius ===
	{{:The_Age_of_Aquarius}}		{{:The_Age_of_Aquarius}}
	----		----
−	== Board Clever ==	+
		+	=== Board Clever ===
	{{:Board_Clever}}		{{:Board_Clever}}
	----		----
−	== A Bunker Full of Memories ==	+
		+	=== A Bunker Full of Memories ===
	{{:A_Bunker_Full_of_Memories}}		{{:A_Bunker_Full_of_Memories}}
	----		----
−	== Two Aesthetes of Electronic Music ==	+
		+	=== The Ottawan Empire ===
		+	{{:The_Ottawan_Empire}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== Nice Melodies from Nice People ===
		+	{{:Nice_Melodies_from_Nice_People}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== Two Aesthetes of Electronic Music ===
	{{:Two_Aesthetes_of_Electronic_Music}}		{{:Two_Aesthetes_of_Electronic_Music}}
	----		----
−	== Space Age Bachelor 1998 interview ==	+
−	{{:Space_Age_Bachelor_1998_interview}}	+	===Entre Nostalgie de L'enfance et Paranoia du Futur  ===
		+	{{:Entre_Nostalgie_de_L'enfance_et_Paranoia_du_Futur}}
		+	----
		+
		+	===Moins industriel et plus champêtre ===
		+	{{:Moins industriel et plus champêtre}}
		+	----
		+
		+	===Les Alchimistes  ===
		+	{{:Les Alchimistes}}
		+	----
		+
		+	===Mysterious and Undefined  ===
		+	{{:Mysterious and Undefined}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== A Música de Dança é Preguiçosa  ===
		+	{{:A Música de Dança é Preguiçosa}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== Boards of Canada, eh?  ===
		+	{{:Boards of Canada, eh?}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== Youthful Transgressions  ===
		+	{{:Youthful Transgressions}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== Space Age Bachelor ===
		+	{{:Space_Age_Bachelor}}
	----		----
−	== Children Have the Right to Film ==	+
		+	=== Children Have the Right to Film ===
	{{:Children_Have_the_Right_to_Film}}		{{:Children_Have_the_Right_to_Film}}
	----		----
−	== Boards of The Underground ==	+
		+	=== Facce Nuove ===
		+	{{:Facce Nuove}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== Warp Factor Ten ===
		+	{{:Warp Factor Ten}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== Les Chant Future Des Musiques Electroniques ===
		+	{{:Les Chant Future Des Musiques Electroniques}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== Boards of The Underground ===
	{{:Boards_of_The_Underground}}		{{:Boards_of_The_Underground}}
	----		----
−	== Big Country ==	+
		+	=== Breaking Into Heaven ===
		+	{{:Breaking Into Heaven}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== Big Country ===
	{{:Big_Country}}		{{:Big_Country}}
	----		----
−	== Nice Melodies from Nice People ==
−	{{:Nice_Melodies_from_Nice_People}}
−	= Geogaddi era =	+	== Geogaddi era ==
−	== The Colour & The Fire ==	+	[[Image:Boc-wallpaper-05.jpg|center|220px]]
		+
		+
		+	=== The Colour & The Fire ===
	{{:The_Colour_&_The_Fire}}		{{:The_Colour_&_The_Fire}}
	----		----
−	== The Secret Life of Boards of Canada ==	+
		+	=== The Secret Life of Boards of Canada ===
	{{:The_Secret_Life_of_Boards_of_Canada}}		{{:The_Secret_Life_of_Boards_of_Canada}}
	----		----
−	== In An Imaginary Place Out In The Country ==	+
		+	=== Une Cabane Au Canada ===
		+	{{:Une Cabane Au Canada}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== I Colori Della Musica Elettronica ===
		+	{{:I Colori Della Musica Elettronica}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== The Last Unexplored Area of Boards of Canada ===
		+	{{:The_Last_Unexplored_Area_of_Boards_of_Canada}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== In An Imaginary Place Out In The Country ===
	{{:In_An_Imaginary_Place_Out_In_The_Country}}		{{:In_An_Imaginary_Place_Out_In_The_Country}}
	----		----
−	== Another Miracle of The Post-modern Sensibility ==	+
−	{{:Another_Miracle_of_The_Post-modern_Sensibility}}	+	=== Worte sind wie Nadeln, auf jeden Fall gefährlich für schöne, bunte Luftballons  ===
		+	{{:Worte sind wie Nadeln, auf jeden Fall gefährlich für schöne, bunte Luftballons}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== El Cielo Herido ===
		+	{{:El_Cielo_Herido}}
	----		----
−	== Play Twice Before Listening ==	+
		+	=== Play Twice Before Listening ===
	{{:Play_Twice_Before_Listening}}		{{:Play_Twice_Before_Listening}}
	----		----
−	== Stoned Immaculate ==	+
		+	=== Even voorstellen ===
		+	{{:Even voorstellen}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== Generazione Laptop ===
		+	{{:Generazione Laptop}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== Terra Incognita ===
		+	{{:Terra Incognita}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== B to the O to the C ===
		+	{{:B to the O to the C}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== Magical, Mystery, Cycling ===
		+	{{:Magical, Mystery, Cycling}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== Ritmo e Dolore ===
		+	{{:Ritmo e Dolore}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== We're making music that has its own universe and time ===
		+	{{:We're making music that has its own universe and time}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== Der Eckige Kreis ===
		+	{{:Der Eckige Kreis}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== Stoned Immaculate ===
	{{:Stoned_Immaculate}}		{{:Stoned_Immaculate}}
	----		----
−	== Country Comfort ==	+
		+	=== Innaturale Digitale ===
		+	{{:Innaturale Digitale}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== Country Comfort ===
	{{:Country_Comfort}}		{{:Country_Comfort}}
	----		----
−	== Northern Exposure ==	+
		+	=== The Power of Myth ===
		+	{{:The_Power_of_Myth}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== Northern Exposure ===
	{{:Northern_Exposure}}		{{:Northern_Exposure}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== Fractal Press 131 ===
		+	{{:Fractal Press 131}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== Let's Open The Time Capsule ===
		+	{{:Let's Open The Time Capsule}}
		+	----
−	= The Campfire Headphase era =	+	== The Campfire Headphase era ==
−	== The Downtempo Duo ==	+	[[Image:Boc-wallpaper-20.jpg|center|220px]]
		+
		+
		+	=== The Downtempo Duo ===
	{{:The_Downtempo_Duo}}		{{:The_Downtempo_Duo}}
	----		----
−	== Spirit, Logic & Mathematics ==	+
		+	=== Spirit, Logic & Mathematics ===
	{{:Spirit,_Logic_&_Mathematics}}		{{:Spirit,_Logic_&_Mathematics}}
	----		----
−	== Part of the Fire ==	+	=== De var först med ===
−	{{:Part_of_the_Fire}}	+	{{:De var först med}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== The Great Escape ===
		+	{{:The Great Escape}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== Protect and Survive ===
		+	{{:Protect_and_Survive_(interview)}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== La Part du Feu ===
		+	{{:La_Part_du_Feu}}
	----		----
−	== Splendid Isolation ==	+
		+	=== Splendid Isolation ===
	{{:Splendid_Isolation}}		{{:Splendid_Isolation}}
	----		----
−	== Cross Out the Inappropriate ==	+
		+	=== Around The Campfire  ===
		+	{{:Around_The_Campfire}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== Cross Out the Inappropriate ===
	{{:Cross_Out_the_Inappropriate}}		{{:Cross_Out_the_Inappropriate}}
	----		----
−	== Above Board! ==	+
		+	=== Above Board! ===
	{{:Above_Board!}}		{{:Above_Board!}}
	----		----
−	== Sweet and Sour Melodies Wander Around ==	+
		+	=== Vintage Psychedelia ===
		+	{{:Vintage Psychedelia}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== Sweet and Sour Melodies Wander Around between Positive and Celebrative Sounds and Swaying Sadness ===
	{{:Sweet_and_Sour_Melodies_Wander_Around_between_Positive_and_Celebrative_Sounds_and_Swaying_Sadness}}		{{:Sweet_and_Sour_Melodies_Wander_Around_between_Positive_and_Celebrative_Sounds_and_Swaying_Sadness}}
	----		----
−	== Stirred Up The Ashes ==	+
		+	=== Stirred Up The Ashes ===
	{{:Stirred_Up_The_Ashes}}		{{:Stirred_Up_The_Ashes}}
	----		----
−	== Two for the No-Show ==	+
		+	=== Two for the No-Show ===
	{{:Two_for_the_No-Show}}		{{:Two_for_the_No-Show}}
	----		----
−	== Protect and Survive (interview) ==	+
−	{{:Protect_and_Survive_(interview)}}	+	=== More Discreet than Most of Their Contemporaries ===
		+	{{:More_Discreet_than_Most_of_Their_Contemporaries}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== It's our take on a pop record ===
		+	{{:It's_our_take_on_a_pop_record}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== Boards of Canada's Seasons in the Sun ===
		+	{{:Boards of Canada's Seasons in the Sun}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== La Materia De La Que Están Hechos Los Sueños ===
		+	{{:La Materia De La Que Están Hechos Los Sueños}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== O Brothers Where Art Thou ===
		+	{{:O Brothers Where Art Thou}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== C'est La Ouate Qu'ils Préfèrent ===
		+	{{:C'est La Ouate Qu'ils Préfèrent}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== Scotland's Greatest Mystery ===
		+	{{:Scotland's Greatest Mystery}}
	----		----
−	== The Last Secret of Pop ==	+
		+	=== The Last Secret of Pop ===
	{{:The_Last_Secret_of_Pop}}		{{:The_Last_Secret_of_Pop}}
	----		----
−	== Wide Use of Guitars ==	+
−	{{:Wide_Use_of_Guitars}}	+	=== Search For Seclusion ===
		+	{{:Search For Seclusion}}
	----		----
−	== It's our take on a pop record ==	+
−	{{:It's_our_take_on_a_pop_record}}	+	=== We Are The (Folk) Robots ===
		+	{{:We_Are_The_(Folk)_Robots}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== Musica vs Algebra ===
		+	{{:Musica vs Algebra}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== Special Long Long Interview ===
		+	{{:Special Long Long Interview}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== The new work is like a bright-blue-green color ===
		+	{{:The new work is like a bright-blue-green color}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== Magie versus Logik ===
		+	{{:Magie versus Logik}}
	----		----
−	== Emotional Abuse ==	+
		+	=== Emotional Abuse ===
	{{:Emotional_Abuse}}		{{:Emotional_Abuse}}
	----		----
−	== Around The Campfire  ==	+
−	{{:Around_The_Campfire}}	+	=== Vi Sampler til Helvede og Tilbage ===
		+	{{:Vi Sampler til Helvede og Tilbage}}
	----		----
−	== Peering Out from Behind the Curtain ==	+
		+	=== Peering Out from Behind the Curtain ===
	{{:Peering_Out_from_Behind_the_Curtain}}		{{:Peering_Out_from_Behind_the_Curtain}}
	----		----
−	== The Golden Apples Of The Sun  ==	+
		+	=== The Golden Apples Of The Sun  ===
	{{:The_Golden_Apples_Of_The_Sun}}		{{:The_Golden_Apples_Of_The_Sun}}
		+	----
−	= Tomorrow's Harvest era =	+	=== Music of Struggle ===
−	== The Charms of the Sphinx ==	+	{{:Music of Struggle}}
−	{{:The_Charms_of_the_Sphinx}}	+	----
		+
		+	=== Death Under The Sun ===
		+	{{:Death Under The Sun}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== The Essence Of Their Artistry ===
		+	{{:The Essence Of Their Artistry}}
	----		----
−	== Brothers Who Make Electronica by Hand ==	+
−	{{:Brothers_Who_Make_Electronica_by_Hand}}	+	=== The Color Purple ===
		+	{{:The Color Purple}}
	----		----
−	== We've Become a Lot More Nihilstic over the Years ==	+
		+	== Tomorrow's Harvest era ==
		+	[[Image:Boc-wallpaper-16.jpg|center|270px]]
		+
		+	=== We've Become a Lot More Nihilstic over the Years ===
	{{:We've_Become_a_Lot_More_Nihilistic_over_the_Years}}		{{:We've_Become_a_Lot_More_Nihilistic_over_the_Years}}
	----		----
−	== Band of Brothers ==	+
−	{{:Band_of_Brothers}}	+	=== Brothers Who Make Electronica by Hand ===
		+	{{:Brothers_Who_Make_Electronica_by_Hand}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== The Charms of the Sphinx ===
		+	{{:The_Charms_of_the_Sphinx}}
	----		----
−	== L'Assenza Di Domani ==	+
		+	=== L'Assenza Di Domani ===
	{{:L'Assenza_Di_Domani}}		{{:L'Assenza_Di_Domani}}
	----		----
−	== Les Champs de la Machine ==	+
		+	=== Les Champs de la Machine ===
	{{:Les_Champs_de_la_Machine}}		{{:Les_Champs_de_la_Machine}}
	----		----
−	== Talk To The Hand, Chokri ==	+
		+	=== Talk To The Hand, Chokri ===
	{{:Talk_To_The_Hand,_Chokri}}		{{:Talk_To_The_Hand,_Chokri}}
		+	----
−	[[Category:Interviews]]	+	=== Band of Brothers ===
		+	{{:Band_of_Brothers}}
		+	----
		+
		+	=== Why Boards of Canada’s Music Has the Right to Children Is the Greatest Psychedelic Album of the ’90s ===
		+	{{:Why Boards of Canada’s Music Has the Right to Children Is the Greatest Psychedelic Album of the ’90s}}
		+	----

---

Latest revision as of 00:55, 28 October 2024

This page transcludes all the text from all of the interviews listed on the main interviews page for easier viewing and searching.

Music Has the Right to Children era

Hardware Addicts

title	Hardware Addicts
author	Gregor Wildermann
publication	De:Bug
date	1997/09
issue	03
pages	p.06

"Hardware Addicts" is an interview (In German) by Gregor Wildermann originally published Sept. 1997 in De:Bug Magazine Number 03, page 06 ^[1]

"It's just by default that we do electronic music." Dieser in Ironie getränkte Satz stammt von Mike Sandison, der zusammen mit Marcus Es die achte Platte auf SKAM-Records veröffentlichte und damit dieses Label aus Manchester nochmals interessanter machte. Gleich den Mitbetreibern von Autechre, ist das Duo aus Edingburgh eine der Gruppen, die moderne elektronische Musik von der Landkarte Englands nicht verschwinden lassen. Ihr erster Auslandsbesuch führte sie zum Sunflower-Festival bei Regensburg, wo sie in guten Absichten auf die Folgen von schlechtem Wetter trafen und wie viele andere DJs, Liveacts und Raver mit Schlammfüßen zu kämpfen hatten. Mittendrin auch Michael Fakesch und xxxxx, die Boards of Canada für die MASK 1 gewinnen konnten. Das, der SKAMpler-Sampler und ihr kommendes Album auf eben diesem Label waren Grund genug, wieder einmal die Fragen nach Wohin und Woher zu stellen.....

Gregor Wildermann [email protected]

This sentence soaked with irony is by Mike Sandison, who together with Marcus released the eighth record on Skam Records making this label from Manchester even more interesting. Like the co-operators of Autechre , The duo from Edingburgh is one of the groups that do not allow modern electronic music to disappear from the map of England.

The band's first visit abroad took them to the Sunflower Festival near Regensburg, where with good intentions met the consequences of bad weather and, like many other DJs, Live-acts and ravers, they had to struggle with muddy feet. In the middle of Michael Fakesch and xxxxx, the Boards of Canada for the MASK 1 were able to prevail. This, the Skampler sampler and their upcoming album on this label were reason enough to ask again the questions about where and when .....

---

The Age of Aquarius

title	The Age of Aquarius
author	The Cosmic Crofter
publication	EHX
date	1998/03/25
issue
pages

The Age of Aquarius is an interview by The Cosmic Crofter originally published online Mar. 1998 on the EHX website.

^[2]

Edinburgh-based Boards of Canada are due to release their debut album "Music Has the Right to Children" for Warp, licensed from Skam in Manchester. The Crofter interviewed them about their past, present and future, and attempted to discover what now lies within their six-sided oyster ...

The duo originally began serious recording at the end of 80's, having spent their early youth playing around on "home hi-fi" and in conventional bands. Various other members have come and gone, but Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin have remained the core of the unit over the last 3 or 4 years. In December of 1997, two other members joined the Hexagon Sun bunker, resulting in the acquisition of some "useful technology". Just who these other members remains a secret, as they "are more interested in the psychological capabilities of sounds and images than their aesthetics. I can't talk about current or previous collaborators because Hexagon Sun doesn't do that".

Having always been interested in art in all its apparitions, the two have continually attempted to combine their beliefs, hopes and fears into an all-encompassing sensual experience, primarily in the fields of music, film, writing and more recently web design, "the official Turquoise Hexagon Sun website will up and running by Easter 1998 with a section on BoC as well as 'THS Scripture' buyable in dead tree format, Music70 BoCumentaries and 'Emephant Diagram', the number cruncher", I am assured that all will become clear.

In terms of other artistic formats, they are keen to point out that the visual and literary side is by no means a colorful backdrop ... "It's not secondary to the music, it's all the same thing. We use video on stage, but it's not for wallpaper, it's got things in it which could damage you". The two collaborate with other artists under the banner "Music70", a name which they have previously used for production copyright, and is now used as the collective term for themselves and like-minded friends, creating art for non-commercial and usually personal consumption.

To witness a BoC live performance confirms their agenda, "We're not interested in ambient filmmaking, we are interested in triggers, embedding and subliminals ... (during a live performance) we like people to pay attention to the messages on the screens". The duo are keen to get the extra-melody points across, but are also able to resign themselves to the fact that for the best part, most BoC followers are simply interested in the skin-deep appearance of the music, and thus the BoC existence has a definite duality. "We hope that the music stands up for itself. You could choose to listen to the melodies on the record and enjoy them purely as melodies, or you could read into the references a bit more and perhaps connect with that, or you could choose to come and see us live and see our thoughts abstracted out on video, and if it works the listener might go 'Yeah this is familiar but I don't know why'. We just see these as forms of communication which can be used to affect the listener in an attractive and maybe even addictive way".

The sharp and sometimes disturbing images can be thought provoking, although in some cases baffling. I challenge them on the point that, along with their sometimes obscure and almost pretentious song titles, they are out to deliberately perplex the perceiver. "There is a story behind every title we use. If a title seems made-up, it's either an equation, an acronym, or a hybrid. Some titles are personal stories, such as 'Everything You Do Is A Balloon', which was a realization made long ago in the forest".

So what could possibly be in a name? "Boards of Canada" is particularly good one, and I was once informed that it was chosen due to its particularly inert and almost meaningless nature. Digging deeper, their childhood exposure to the work of The National Filmboard of Canada reveals a more direct cull.

The influences that spark the creation of the song titles are just as varied as the influences which create the music they produce. Not confined to audio releases, they cite the many facets of the latter half of 20th Century culture, including film, TV and science journals. They claim that taking the positive aspects of a product does not always provide food for their thought, but rather the underlying meaning or cosmetic triviality, "... we are interested in everything that we can re-interpret. I don't want to give you list of names, but you know we could be just as easily captivated by a piece of T.V. theme music, or Eighties' pop, for instance. The enlightened parts in our music are relative to the banal or naive parts". When pushed for particularly prominent players ... "Hundertwasser, Svankmeyer, New Scientist, Robert Anton Wilson, Documentary films and articles, Jamie Nelson, The Archdrude... we are interested in everything!".

As previously stated, BoC's beginnings began, like every proper electronic experimentation combo should, mucking around with tape loops while still at school. Briefly tapping their cap to the "originators", they see thier humble beginnings as the first necessary steps to what they produce today. "... we used to chop up shortwave radio recordings on an ancient portable recorder, and make tunes out of them by punching-in and layering tracks in a crude way. I'm talking about 1981-1982. We still do that now except that we use better equipment. I think it's all been said before about Glass, Reich, Varese, Cage etc. being the originators of techno and ambient music. We prefer to think of anyone who has ever picked up an object and made a new noise with it as an originator".

BoC are the first to admit that the influences that fuel the creation of their tracks are by no means trivial, but prefer to cloak their personal beliefs in more universal and ubiquitous issues. "We read a lot, we pay close attention to what's going on, so you probably have to look at our work pretty closely to pick up on things, and we do try to compose strong emotional melodies ...", the emotion of which is something which I propose to be the serious side of their nature, "... yes we have a melancholy sound, and we do have strong opinions, but we only filter some of them into the music. I don't want to project a political side into the music because the music is in it's own area", states Mike.

The "melancholy" sound which has become a trademark and which may stick like mud over time, does not hamper BoC's enthusiasm for the perfect "song-structure". The roots of their musical career lie in the participation in "normal bands" using "live instruments", which, they claim, may have only increased their combined melodic ear. Marcus confirms the point, "I think you can trigger emotion much more easily with a melody than you can with a rhythm, although it can be done with a rhythm, listen to Jerry Goldsmith or the The Incredible String Band ... I'm personally more interested in melody than sound, although the effectiveness of a Boards of Canada melody probably depends on it's context. And that'll be why we have a reputation for downgrading the sound. ". As with most serious electronic musicians of our time, and probably more believably BoC than others, they claim their current sound is underivative from current styles, "We don't usually listen to contemporary electronic music. Our collections might surprise you. Or alarm you maybe ...", such as? "You're looking for examples? Phil Harris, Devo, Claude Denjean, Walter/Wendy Carlos, Jesus Christ Superstar, DAF, Ween, TV themes, Tomita, MBV, Joni Mitchell ...".

Alarm us or not, the new BoC album to be released on Warp in April, only adds to BoC's mystique as renegades of "the intelligent twisted regions of electronic melody". Having been friends with the people at Warp for some time, they have developed a lasting raport that should hopefully see them good for years to come, "we all go round for tea scones regularly!". Now label buddies with their much loved Autechre et al, BoC see Warp as one of the few labels "bold enough to head away from the overtly 'techno' sound". They cite Skam as another more underground label which shares the same conviction, and funnily enough, these are the two labels which have hosted the BoC name so far. However, their association with Skam will not end with the signing to Warp, "Skam is a hive of new ideas, and there will be a lot of essential music coming from them this year, and we'll be in there, although you probably won't know it's us that you're listening to. The move to Warp was mainly out of respect for the label and it's artists, and friendship".

Boc's confidence can be attributed to the fact that they may now have reached Stage 1 of their long-term plan, and now use the Warp engine to thrust their more abstract and artistic ideas into the public domain. Their use of Super-8mm film and video images during their live performance will obviously be seen to increase and diversify from this point on. The artistic licence has finally been handed over. However, over their long career, the live shows have been few and far between, and one receives the vibe that the whole thing can be particularly tedious. One reason for this may be, from what I have so far gathered from BoC's character, that they are perfectionists in every sense, but still feel they have introduce another edge to the public rendition. Mike explains, "Every time we play live we do it a different way, technically. This is unintentional ... I like to play a familiar tune to the audience, but then make it do something totally new. We just haven't hit upon the best technical method for doing this yet, so for every gig we sit and go 'How are we gonna do it this time?'". Perhaps hitting on that "best technical method" is the reason we do not see BoC headlining many nights? "We do put a lot of work into every gig, and this slows things down. One gig takes a month of preparation, usually involving visuals and programming, and this can only be done when we're not writing. We'll be going out on tour at the end of the year".

Indeed, BoC have only ever played once in their home city, Edinburgh, which was last year when they and Think Tank supported Autechre. I was in attendance, and I put it to them that their sound and general presence was alien to the city as a whole. "We've only played in Edinburgh once so far, so I don't really know what the local Illuminati think of us. I think there is something simmering quietly now in the city, but we're based out in the country ... I'm not aware of an "Edinburgh sound", although there are quite a few threatening noises going on in there. Yeah we keep ourselves out of things a bit, I guess if we had more time we would be more involved. We make brief forays into Edinburgh clubland and then we retreat to cover. ".

So if they rarely venture out into the clubland of The Capital, what do BoC see as a great night out? "Somewhere in the hills, in a huge bonfire, with the beautiful Julian Cope ...".

---

Board Clever

title	Board Clever
author	Richard Hector-Jones
publication	Jockey Slut
date	1998/04
issue	Vol.02 No.13 (April/May 1998)
pages	p.20

"Board Clever" is an interview by Richard Hector-Jones originally published in Jockey Slut magazine Vol. 02 No. 13 (April/May 1998). It was published alongside the featured review of Music Has the Right to Children.

Boards of Canada are breathing new life into the experimental end of electronic music. And you can whistle their tunes...

offers Michael Sandison one half of Scottish electronic pairing Boards Of Canada.

Boards Of Canada are fixed on melody and emotion in music. It's a rare obsession in the world of British electronica but it gives their sound a uniqueness, a ghostly sense of yearning, and a depth of emotion that sets them far outside the pack. Music Has the Right to Children, their debut album, is the product of their fixation; a melancholy mix of rhythms and melodies revealing more shading and character with every listen.

explains fellow Boarder Marcus Eoin.

All of this might lead you to think that's it's an 'oh so serious' album which isn't true. It's simply refreshing to see such a human approach behind the employment of modern musical technology.

continues Michael.

The first record Boards Of Canada released was the self financed and limited hardly any Twoism EP. They sent the record to Autechre's Sean Booth who phoned back the very next day suggesting they mail a copy to Andy Maddock's Manchester based SKAM label. (Autechre release records on SKAM with various other bods under the Gescom guise). The result was Hi Scores, a 12" that brought the pair to a wider audience and paved the way for a follow up 7" Aquarius and now a full length album jointly put out by Warp and SKAM.

It would seem that, with the help of Boards of Canada, Britain's homegrown electronica music scene might finally step out from the shadow of the machine to explore the more emotional and human avenues.

Strange to think something so simple could be so exciting.

Richard Hector-Jones

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A Bunker Full of Memories

title	A Bunker Full of Memories
author	René Passet
publication	Forcefield
date	1998/04/14
issue
pages

A Bunker Full of Memories is an interview by René Passet originally published online Apr. 1998 on the Forcefield website. ^[3]

'Strong emotional melodies'. That pretty much sums up the essence of what Boards of Canada is about. After various hard-to-get releases on cassettes, Skam Records (and it's enigmatic offshoot Mask) the Scottish duo has just released their debut album Music Has The Right To Children on Warp Records. The first of five on the Sheffield label!

Five albums. That might explain why Mike Sanderson and Marcus Eoin are extremely busy in their Hexagon Studio and reject most interview requests. So many tracks to finish, so little time. But Forcefield managed to enter the bunker which hosts the Hexagon Studio. Via E-mail. Here is what they said.

interview by René Passet, April 1998.

The album Music Has The Right To Children is out now on Warp/Skam, as is their remix of Mira Calix' Sandsings. WAP100 will contain an exclusive track by Boards of Canada, called Orange Romeda. Soon the Turquise Hexagon Sun website will open it's gates.

Check out EHX for a very informing interview Cosmic Crofter had with Boards of Canada. And for the Boards of Canada page.

reviews at Forcefield:

Various - Skampler - CD - Silent/Skam

Various Artists - Mask EP - 12" - Mask

Boards of Canada - High Scores - 12" - Skam

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The Ottawan Empire

title	The Ottawan Empire
author	Toby Manning
publication	NME
date	1998/04
issue	Apr. 18th, 1998
pages	p.33

"The Ottawan Empire" is an interview by Toby Manning originally published Apr 1998 in NME magazine April 18th, 1998.

An enigmatic duo holed up in a rural bunker somewhere near Edinburgh, from where they emit languorous, airy electronica with the charm and simplicity of cartoon theme tunes.

Like their music, it comes from a shared past in front of the TV. says Mike Sandison, the elder and more vocal of these two bearded urchins whose woolly hats seem to be surgically attached to their heads. He and Marcus Eoin have been friends since they were toddlers, growing up in Scotland before sharing a brief sojourn in the Canada when their parents moved there for work.

counters Mike.

Boards Of Canada attempt to create their own versions of these tunes -soundtracks for imaginary wildlife documentaries, jingles for invented corporations. Or, as Marcus puts it:

Hardly. Their debut album for Warp, Music Has The Right To Children, is equally reminiscent of forgotten TV themes, all powered by rhythms distantly related to hiphop. It’s a strangely rural sound, infinitely less mechanised than the average Warp record.

says Mike. That said, there’s also a distinctly sinister undercurrent inherent in their stuttering, cut-up vocals. chuckles Mike. Then there’s that malicious psychedelic edge, too, hardly all hippy vibes and sunshine. says Mike, adding that such chemical shenanigans have already lost the band one member to date. explains Mike, grimly.

admits Mike, before Marcus chips in,

The nappy hardcore revival starts here!

Toby Manning

BOARDS OF CANADA’S ‘MUSIC HAS THE RIGHT TO CHILDREN’ ALBUM IS OUT ON WARP ON MONDAY.

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Nice Melodies from Nice People

title	Nice Melodies from Nice People
author	Thaddeus Hermann
publication	De:Bug
date	1998/05
issue	Number 11
pages	p.04

"Nice Melodies from Nice People" is an interview (in German) by Thaddeus Hermann originally published in De:Bug magazine Number 11, p.04.

Nette Melodien von netten Menschen

Boards Of Canada, das neueste Pferd im Warp-Stall.

Thaddeus Herrmann

[email protected]

Boards of Canada Fans hatten es bisher schwer, alle von den Schotten Michael Sandison und Marcus Eoin veröffentlichten Platten zu ergattern. Die erste EP, Twoism, erschien im Eigenverlag in einer Auflage von 100 Stück, ein großer Teil der Auflage einer als Weihnachtssingle gedachten 7″ auf SKAM vergammeln derzeit in einem Wohnzimmer in Manchester – Schwierigkeiten mit diversen Vertrieben – und das beste BoC Stück versteckt sich auf MASK 1, einer ebenfalls auf 100 Stück limitierten Compilation 12″. Dabei hat diese Musik mehr Aufmerksamkeit verdient. Denn: Es geht um Melodien zwischen Science Fiction und Kitsch, und weil das oft dasselbe ist, irgendwie um früher. Irre catchy, vereinnehmend und … haunting. Melodien, die ein wohliges Gefühl in der Magengegend machen, in Detroit wohl Memory Chords genannt werden und die einem die wirklich wichtigen Dinge in Erinnerung rufen: Sommerferien, in die Sonne blinzeln. Folgerichtig hat Warp, Heimat der blassen Engländer, Boards of Canada jetzt eingekauft und mit Music Has the Right to Children eine Mischung aus vergriffenem und neuem Material vorlegt. Michael Sandison meldet sich am Karfreitag per Funktelefon bei mir, irgendwo unterwegs auf einer Autobahn bei Köln.

Note: Translated using DeepL Translator^[4].

"Nice Melodies from Nice People"

Boards Of Canada, the newest horse in the Warp stable.

Boards of Canada fans have had a hard time getting hold of all the records released by Scotsmen Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin. The first EP, Twoism, was self-published in an edition of 100, a large portion of the edition of a 7″ on SKAM intended as a Christmas single is currently rotting in a living room in Manchester - difficulties with various distributors - and the best BoC track is hiding on MASK 1, a 12″ compilation also limited to 100 copies. This music deserves more attention. Because: it's about melodies between science fiction and "kitsch", and because that's often the same, somehow about earlier. Crazy catchy, engaging and ... haunting. Melodies that make you feel good in your stomach, are probably called memory chords in Detroit and remind you of the really important things: summer vacations, blinking into the sun. Consequently, Warp, home of the pale English, has now bought Boards of Canada and with Music Has the Right to Children presents a mixture of out-of-print and new material. Michael Sandison calls me on Good Friday, somewhere on the way on a highway near Cologne.

---

Two Aesthetes of Electronic Music

title	Two Aesthetes of Electronic Music
author	Ariel Kyrou & Jean-Yves Leloup
publication	Virgin Megaweb
date	1998/06
issue
pages

"Two Aesthetes of Electronic Music" is an interview (in French) by Ariel Kyrou & Jean-Yves Leloup originally published online Jun. 1998 on the Virgin Megaweb website.^[5]

Deux esthètes de l'électronique entre nostalgie de l'enfance et paranoïa du futur

Au cœur du Marais parisien, à deux pas du Musée Picasso, on verrait bien Markus Eion et Michael Sandison comme des étudiants british en goguette culturelle. Ils ont l'air de hippies voyageurs et non de techno freaks, les deux Boards of Canada, avec leur sac à dos, leur sourire mouillé et leur bonnet de laine... On n'imagine pas tenir là les auteurs d'un album électronique de pur cristal, paru sous une double signature on ne peut plus branchée : Skam et Warp, respectivement label pointu de Manchester et mythique maison mère de l'electronica made in Sheffield. Cet album, "Music Has the Right to Children", ressemble à sa pochette. L'image d'une famille ou d'un groupe d'amis, visiblement sur les pierres d'un château en ruine. Image naïve comme les univers du "Manège enchanté" et des "Animaux du Monde". Banale. Heureuse. Mais cette image est noyée de lumière bleu vert, comme sous l'effet d'une soucoupe volante en phase d'atterrissage. Et puis il y a ces visages lisses comme une pierre ponce. Inquiétants. Des faces d'humains zombifiés. Que cachent Michael Sandison et Markus Eion par cette image d'innocence troublée ? Les deux Ecossais - dont nous avons confondu la voix dans l'interview - semblent ne faire qu'un, le premier un peu plus bavard que le second avec son accent à se frapper le lobe de l'oreille...

(rires)

Propos recueillis par Ariel Kyrou et Jean-Yves Leloup

Photo : DR

Two aesthetes of electronic music caught between nostalgia for childhood and paranoia of the future

At the heart of the Marais district of Paris, right next to the Picasso Museum, it would be easy to take Marcus Eoin and Michael Sandison for a couple of British Students on a culture spree. The two "Boards of Canada" look more like travelling hippies than techno freaks, with their backpacks, soppy grins, and woolly hats. It's hard to imagine that standing there are the creators of an electronic album of pure crystal, released jointly by two labels that could not be further apart: Skam and Warp; respectively, the cutting-edge Manchester label, and the legendary nerve-centre of "Made in Sheffield" electronica. This album, "Music has the right to children", is much as its cover suggests. The image of a family or a group of friends, standing on the stones of a ruined castle. A naïve image like the world of "The Magic Roundabout" or "Animals of the World". Perfectly ordinary. Cheerful. Except that the image is flooded with a turquoise light, as though caught in the glare of a flying saucer that is coming in to land. And then there are those faces, smooth as pumice stone. Disturbing. The faces of zombified people. What are Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin hiding in this picture of troubled innocence? The two Scots, whose replies we have merged in this interview, seem to act as one; the first a little more talkative than the other, who has a very striking accent.

interview by Ariel Kyrou & Jean-Yves Leloup, June 1998.

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Entre Nostalgie de L'enfance et Paranoia du Futur

title	Entre Nostalgie de L'enfance et Paranoia du Futur
author	Ariel Kyrou
publication	Coda
date	1998/06
issue	45
pages	40-41

"Entre Nostalgie de L'enfance et Paranoia du Futur" is an interview (in French) by Ariel Kyrou originally published June 1998 in Coda magazine Number 45, pp.40-41.

Text: Ariel Kyrou

Photo: Pierre Emmanuel Rastoin

Nouvelle découverte du genre electronica, Boards of Canada crée une musique paradoxale, à la fois belle et troublante, sombre et enfantine, sous le parrainage de Sean Booth d'Autechre... Rencontre avec deux musiciens écossais. Loin du tumulte londonien.

Au cœur du Marais parisien, à deux pas du Musée Picasso, on verrait bien Markus Eion et Michael Sandison comme des étudiants british en goguette culturelle. Ils ont l'air de hippies voyageurs et non de techno freaks, les deux Boards of Canada, avec leur sac à dos, leur aimable barbichette, leur sourire mouillé et leur bonnet de laine... On n'imagine pas tenir là les auteurs d'un album électronique de pur cristal qui songe, paru sous une double signature on ne peut plus branchée : Skam et Warp, respectivement label pointu de Manchester et mythique maison mère de l'electronica made in Sheffield.

Cet album, Music has the Right to Children, ressemble à sa pochette. L'image d'une famille ou d'un groupe d'amis, visiblement sur les pierres d'un château en ruine. Image naïve comme les univers du Manège enchanté et des Animaux du Monde. Banale. Heureuse. Mais cette image est noyée de lumière bleue verte, comme sous l'effet d'une soucoupe volante en phase d'atterrissage. Et puis il y a ces visages lisses comme une pierre ponce. Inquiétants. Des faces d'humains zombifiés.

Que cachent Michael Sandison et Markus Eion par cette image d'innocence troublée ? Les deux Ecossais semblent parler d'une même voix, le premier un peu plus bavard que le second avec son accent à se frapper le lobe de l'oreille. Ils n'ont pas l'air vieux, et pourtant, lorsqu'ils parlent de leurs premières armes musicales, c'est au début des années 80 qu'ils remontent...

La musique de Boards of Canada marie deux mondes : la nostalgie de l'enfance et l'angoisse du présent, voire la paranoïa du futur. Au fur et à mesure de l'entretien, on découvre le mix de ces deux univers. D'un côté les émissions enfantines et les mélodies naïves, de l'autre la vision pessimiste de la science-fiction des années 70, la numérologie, les sciences du Chaos, les bad trips psychédéliques, les délires de l'intelligence artificielle... On comprend aisément la passion de Richard D. James ou de Sean Booth d'Autechre pour ce duo qui cultive son isolement, dans les Pentland Hills, où ils ont bâti leur studio à une quinzaine de kilomètres d'Edinbourgh.

Ariel Kyrou

interview complète au

http://www.virgin.fr

Note: Translation by ChatGPT-4o

Text: Ariel Kyrou

Photo: Pierre Emmanuel Rastoin

A new discovery in the electronica genre, Boards of Canada creates paradoxical music that is both beautiful and disturbing, dark and childlike, under the sponsorship of Sean Booth from Autechre... Meeting with two Scottish musicians. Far from the tumult of London.

In the heart of the Marais in Paris, a stone's throw from the Picasso Museum, Markus Eion and Michael Sandison could be mistaken for British students on a cultural spree. They look like traveling hippies rather than techno freaks, the two members of Boards of Canada, with their backpacks, friendly little beards, wet smiles, and woolen hats... It's hard to imagine that these are the creators of a purely crystalline electronic album, released under two of the trendiest labels: Skam, a niche label from Manchester, and Warp, the mythical electronica label from Sheffield.

This album, Music has the Right to Children, resembles its cover. The image of a family or a group of friends, seemingly on the stones of a ruined castle. An innocent image like the worlds of The Magic Roundabout and Animals of the World. Ordinary. Happy. But this image is drenched in blue-green light, as if under the effect of a landing flying saucer. And then there are these smooth faces like pumice stones. Unsettling. The faces of zombified humans.

What do Michael Sandison and Markus Eion hide behind this image of troubled innocence? The two Scots seem to speak with one voice, the first a bit more talkative than the second with his heavily accented speech. They don't look old, and yet, when they talk about their early musical endeavors, they go back to the early 80s...

Boards of Canada's music marries two worlds: the nostalgia of childhood and the anxiety of the present, even the paranoia of the future. As the interview progresses, one discovers the mix of these two universes. On one side, children's programs and naïve melodies, on the other, the pessimistic vision of 70s science fiction, numerology, chaos theory, bad psychedelic trips, the delirium of artificial intelligence... It's easy to understand the passion of Richard D. James or Sean Booth from Autechre for this duo that cultivates their isolation, in the Pentland Hills, where they built their studio about fifteen kilometers from Edinburgh.

Ariel Kyrou

Complete interview at

http://www.virgin.fr

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Moins industriel et plus champêtre

title	Moins industriel et plus champêtre
author	Quentin Groslier
publication	Prémonition
date	1998/06
issue	29
pages	p.35

"Moins industriel et plus champêtre"' is an interview (in French) by Quentin Groslier originally published June 1998 in Prémonition magazine Number 29 p.35

Entretien: Quentin Groslier

Photos: Stéphane Burlot

Moins industriel et plus champêtre que le gros des productions Warp, Boards of Canada perfectionne depuis déjà longtemps des musiques aux contours flous, jouant sur le temps, la répétition et d'étranges vocaux. Si à première vue, Michael Sanderson et Marcus Eoin ressemblent à des hippies, leur premier album, sous forme de compilation introductive, ne laisse pas pour autant beaucoup de place aux fleurs.

Interview: Quentin Groslier

Photos: Stéphane Burlot

Less industrial and more rural than the big productions of Warp, Boards of Canada have long been perfected with blurred music, playing with time, repetition and strange voices. If at first, Michael Sanderson[sic] and Marcus Eoin may look like hippies, their first album, in the form of an introductory compilation, won't leave much room for flowers.

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Les Alchimistes

title	Les Alchimistes
author	Sylvain Collin
publication	Magic
date	1998/07
issue	21 (Jul/Aug 1998)
pages	p.60

Les Alchimistes is an interview (in French) by Sylvain Collin originally published July 1998 in Magic magazine Number 21, p.60.

Les Alchimistes

Article: Sylvian Collin

Photo: Mélanie Elbaz

Music Has The Right To Children est sans doute la curiosité du moment. Boards Of Canada - duo énigmatique et aguerri - parvient à merveille, par des structures complexes, à engendrer des émotions douces et à poser les jalons d'une forme d'expérimentation musicale tenue jusqu'alors à l'écart de la pop électronique. Renversant.

La rencontre entre ces deux Ecossais, Marcus Eoin, 24 ans, et Michael Sandison, de deux ans son ainé, est encore plus ancienne puisqu'elle date de l'école. explique Michael, plus loquace que son ami. La musique de Boards Of Canada a ainsi pris le temps de se forger, de trouver sa propre forme même s'il semble difficile de la décrire précisément. Pourtant, on serait tenté de la rapprocher de celle de Black Dog, Autechre ou même dj Shadow ...

Palindromes

Que ce soit les influences ou les sonorités, ces deux garçons tiennent à leur identité. explique Marcus. De plus, leur univers est contrôlé de bout en bout el isolé du reste du troupeau. Les deux hommes ont d'ailleurs installé leur studio dans un bunker près d'Edimbourg, qui est devenu le QG de Music 70, un collectif qui regroupe des amis musiciens, d'autres qui font des films ou encore un projet parallèle au groupe, d'une dimension moins sérieuse et mélodiquement différent. Cependant, pour Michael, ce n'est pas tant cet isolement que la manière particulière de composer qui les singularise. La musique expérimentale n'est donc plus une recherche hasardeuse mais trouve ici un côté méthodique et rigoureux, quasi-scientifique, comme puissant vecteur émotionnel. Si tout cela paraît peut-être un peu complexe pour qui voudrait décortiquer leurs morceaux, l'ensemble est à la fois simple et lumineux, avec des touches de mélancolie.

Super 8

Inévitablement et parce que certains titres ont un côté narratif, on décrit Music Has The Right To Children comme la musique d'un film imaginaire. déclare Marcus en s'amusant du paradoxe. Michael sort alors de son sac quelques vinyles qu'il vient d'acheter à Paris, dont la BO de L'Apocalypse Des Animaux et un pressage français de Zabriskie Point. Voilà une autre facette du travail de Boards Of Canada : c'est au collège que Michael et quelques-uns de ses amis ont commencé à réaliser des petits films, expérimentaux eux aussi, et ils n'hésitent pas à adapter leurs méthodes de composition à l'écran. L'itinéraire créatif du groupe est certes sinueux mais, au final, Music Has The Right To Children se révèle d'un accès particulièrement évident. A la portée même d'un enfant de quatre ans.

>Michelangelo Antonioni

Imagination

En marge du néoréalisme italien, Antonioni est venu au cinéma par la critique. Cinéaste du réel, il invente le cinéma introspectif. Sa réflexion sur la perception de la réalité et de l'imaginaire trouve son paroxysme dans Blow Up(67) où un photographe passe d'un imaginaire de la réalité vers une réalité imaginaire via son troisième œil. Ainsi, Antonioni prend le contre-pied de la plupart de ses contemporains qui préfèrent utiliser l'introduction de l'imaginaire dans la réalité, par le biais d'images mentales ou d'hallucinations. Signalons La Natte et L'Eclipse(62) comme deux belles réussites anti-dramatiques et le fantastique Zabriskie Point(70), dont la BO est signée entre autre par le Grateful Dead et Pink Floyd, où, comme dans Profession Reporter(75), la critique lui reproche une priorité à la recherche formelle. Aujourd'hui très malade, Par De Là Les Nuages, son dernier film. a été achevé par Wim Wenders. >

The Alchemists

Article: Sylvian Collin Photo: Mélanie Elbaz

Music Has The Right To Children is undoubtedly the curiosity of the moment. Boards Of Canada - an enigmatic and seasoned duo - succeed wonderfully, through complex structures, in generating gentle emotions and laying the groundwork for a form of musical experimentation held until now remote from electronic pop. Stunning.

The meeting between these two Scotsmen, Marcus Eoin, 24, and Michael Sandison, two years his elder, dates as far back as their school-years. says Michael, more loquacious than his friend. The music of Boards Of Canada has thus taken the time to forge, to find its own form even if it seems difficult to describe it precisely. Nevertheless, one would be tempted to bring it closer to that of Black Dog, Autechre or even DJ Shadow ...

Palindromes

Whether influences or sounds, these two boys depend on their identity. explains Marcus. Moreover, their universe is controlled from beginning to end and isolated from the rest of the herd. The two men have also installed their studio in a bunker near Edinburgh, which has become the headquarters of Music70, a group of friends, musicians, and others who make films or a parallel project to the group, of a less serious and melodically different dimension. However, for Michael, it is not so much the isolation, than the particular way of composing that singles them out. Experimental music is thus no longer a hazardous search but here finds a methodical and rigorous, quasi-scientific side, as a powerful emotional vector. If all this seems a bit complex for those who would like to dissect their tracks, as a whole it is both simple and luminous, with touches of melancholy.

Super8

Inevitably and because some titles have a narrative side, Music Has The Right To Children is described as the music of an imaginary film. says Marcus, amusing himself with the paradox. Michael then pulls out of his bag some vinyl that he had just bought in Paris, including the soundtrack of L'Apocalypse des Animaux and a French pressing of Zabriskie Point. This is another facet of the work of Boards of Canada: it was at college that Michael and some of his friends had started making small, experimental films as well, and they do not hesitate to adapt their composition methods to the screen. The creative itinerary of the band is certainly meandering, but in the end, Music Has The Right To Children reveals a particularly obvious approach. Within the reach of a four-year-old child.

> Michelangelo Antonioni

Imagination

On the sidelines of the Italian neorealism, Antonioni came to the cinema by criticism. A filmmaker of reality, he invented introspective cinema. His reflection on the perception of reality and imagination finds its paroxysm in Blow Up (67) where a photographer passes from an imaginary of reality to an imaginary reality via his third eye. Thus, Antonioni takes the opposite view of most of his contemporaries who prefer to use the introduction of the imaginary into reality, through mental images or hallucinations. La Natte and L'Eclipse (62) as two beautiful anti-dramatic successes and the fantastic Zabriskie Point (70), whose soundtrack is signed by the Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd, , Criticizes it as a priority for formal research. Today very ill, By De Là Les Nuages, his last film. Was completed by Wim Wenders. >

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Mysterious and Undefined

title	Mysterious and Undefined
author	Kelley Schwartz
publication	Massive
date	1998/08
issue	20
pages	p.80

Mysterious and Undefined is an interview by Kelley Schwartz originally published Aug 1998 in Massive magazine Number 20, page 80.

Interview by Kelley Schwartz

In the course of less than a year Scotland’s Boards of Canada has three remixes, a debut album, a track on Warp’s celebrated 100th release and a new album in the works. Mysterious and undefined- could BoC be the KLF of a new generation? Marcus Eoin and Michael Sandison set us straight and prove there’s more to Scotland than just Mogwai, Glasgow Underground and bagpipes.

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A Música de Dança é Preguiçosa

title	A Música de Dança é Preguiçosa
author	Nuno Corvacho
publication	Público Sons
date	1998/09
issue	64 (04 Sept.1998)
pages	p.04

"A Música de Dança é Preguiçosa" is an interview (in Portuguese) by Nuno Corvacho originally published Sept. 4th, 1998 in the Público Sons magazine, a supplement of the Portuguese daily national newspaper Público, Number 64, p.04.

Entrevista com os Boards of Canada

Nuno Corvacho

"Music Has the Right to Children", o álbum de estreia do duo escocês Boards Of Canada, é uma deliciosa fantasia electrónica. Nesta entrevista, realizado por fax, dão conselhos às crianças, discutem as virtudes da idade analógica e desancam na cultura de dança.

Oriundos de Edimburgo, os Boards of Canada são compostos pela dupla Mike Sandison e Marcus Eoin. Passaram a juventude à volta de aparelhagens domésticas e discos de bandas convencionais. Mas desde muito cedo descobriram o potencial que a música electrónica proporciona, formaram algumas bandas, extinguiram outras tantas, numa série de projectos que se foram renovando como as marés. Acabam de lançar o seu primeiro longa-duração, "Music Has The Right To Children", um disco de ambientes sonoros ambíguos e sensuais. Refugiados numa sensibilidade quase infantil, não se aventuram demasiado na cultura nocturna e uma noite bem passada, para eles, é longe das discotecas, algures no alto de uma colina à luz de uma enorme fogueira.

Note: Translation by twoism.org user "kakanara"^[6]

Dance Music is Lazy

Interview with Boards of Canada

Nuno Corvacho

“Music Has The Right To Children”, the debut album of Scottish duo Boards of Canada, is a delicious mix of electronic fantasy. In this interview, done by fax, the duo give advice to children, discuss the virtues of the analogue age and take a jab on dance culture. Hailing from Edinburgh, Boards of Canada are composed by Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin. They have spent their childhood surrounded by household appliances and records by conventional bands. But early on, they discovered the potential that electronic music provides, formed some bands, and broke up many others, in a series of projects that renewed themselves like seawaves. They have just released their first LP, “Music Has The Right To Children”, a record full of ambiguous, sensual ambient sounds. Sheltered in an almost childlike sensibility, the duo doesn’t take particular interest in the night culture. For them, a good night is spent far away from the nightclubs, somewhere along the peak of a hill around an enormous campfire.

---

Boards of Canada, eh?

title	Boards of Canada, eh?
author	Walt Miller
publication	Faqt
date	1998
issue	Vol.02 No.04
pages	32-33

"Boards of Canada, eh?" is an interview by Walt Miller originally published 1998 in Faqt magazine Vol. 02 No. 04, pp.32-33.

Marcus Eoin and Mike Sandison are a couple of Scottish lads who grew up in Canada, and were mesmerized as children by the documentary soundtracks produced by the Canadian Film Board, (hence the name). As youths. Marcus and Mike were prolific in their endeavors: early adventures included unusual, visionary film & sound experiments. As musicians, the two went virtually unnoticed until Sean Booth called the band up after receiving a demo tape, which led to the much-heralded release, Hi Scores, on Autechre's Skam label. As the hype slowly mounted on the strength of the record, BOC continued their steady work ethic, contributing tracks to various compilations, doing remixes and releasing two more records for Skam (a 7" and a 10"). In 1998, Music Has A Right To Children was put out by Warp, and subsequently licensed to Matador in America. As their first full length release, the album represents a a culmination in the duo's perfected sound: beautiful melancholic melodies over deliciously crunchy rhythms that give nods to Autechre. The duo plans to follow up Music Has A Right with another album for Warp next year. Meanwhile, their film production collective, Music70, continues to work on a large film project to be completed in 2-3 years time. The following is an email interview conducted with the band in late summer conducted by Walt Miller.

---

Youthful Transgressions

title	Youthful Transgressions
author	Justin B Hampton
publication	Alternative Press
date	1998/11
issue	124
pages	p.84

"Youthful Transgressions" is an interview by Justin B Hampton originally published Nov. 1998 in Alternative Press magazine Number 124, p.84.

Some people just never grow up. Take Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin of Boards Of Canada. Their music recalls Iong-forgotten video-game themes and documentary film scores colored with a bittersweet sense of longing. The "Canada" in their name refers to a portion of Sandison's and Eoin's youth spent in that country, even though they now work and reside in their secluded Hexagon Sun bunker in Scotland's Pentland Hills. And their new album, Music Has The Right To Children (Matador/ Warp/Skam), presents a cryptic musical manifesto for the world's reluctant adults. Perhaps they've discovered the key to eternal youth; but like all children, they know how to keep a secret.

Sandison says of the duo's creative approach. Now in their late 20s, Sandison and Eoin have been making music both separately and together since the early '80s. Initially drawn to the goth pop of Cocteau Twins and the proto-electronic groups DAF and Devo, Boards Of Canada wrote music for a small group of family and friends. (This is still evident in their continuing stream of limited-edition releases under pseudonyms as well as the BOC moniker.) Eventually, the group's ranks diminished to the core of Sandison and Eoin, and they were discovered by Autechre's Sean Booth. A series of 12-inches on the intelligent dance music label Skam indicated the duo's instinctual knack for naive rhythms and bittersweet melodies. As Sandison describes the BOC partnership, Already hard at work on a follow-up to Music, Boards Of Canada are also keeping busy with a low-budget feature film project and planning to visit North America for a spring 1999 tour. It seems as if BOC are poised for success, which may force maturity on them after all. But Sandison sees this as unlikely.

---

Space Age Bachelor

title	Space Age Bachelor
author	Donald Anderson
publication	Space Age Bachelor
date	1998
issue	12 (Winter 1998)
pages	03

"Space Age Bachelor" is an interview by Donald Anderson originally published Winter 1998 in Space Age Bachelor Magazine Number 12, p.03

---

Children Have the Right to Film

title	Children Have the Right to Film
author	Daniel Chamberlin
publication	URB
date	1999/01
issue	Vol.09 No.63 (Jan/Feb 1999)
pages	p.26

"Children Have the Right to Film" is an interview by Daniel Chamberin originally published Jan. 1999 in Urb magazine Volume 09, Number 63 (Jan/Feb 1999), p.26

Scotland's Boards of Canada (Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin) make downtempo techno out of samples of smiling children and their tripping teachers, melodic lullabies, tones and rhythms as chilly and deep as a summer loch. Much of the atmosphere created in their music springs from an elaborate, far-from-kitschy use of sampled motifs from both television programs and the '70s-era documentaries produced by the National Film Board of Canada (hence the name). Not surprisingly, original video footage has accompanied some of their live sets alongside soundtracks from obscure children's programming.

• Michael Sandison's Top Ten Films

1. Be Glad for the Song Has No End
2. Picnic at Hanging Rock
3. The New Numbers (unknown)
4. Heavenly Creatures
5. Dark Star
6. The Elephant Man
7. Dandelion Seed (unknown)
8. Followers
9. A Man Escaped
10. Revolution (unknown)

• Marcus Eoin's Top Ten Films

1. Papillon
2. Ice Core Drilling (unknown - thought to perhaps be an NFBC film)
3. The Invention of Destruction
4. Zabriskie Point
5. Alice
6. The Andromeda Strain
7. Jesus Christ Superstar
8. Diagram (unknown - may refer to Paul Glabicki's 1978 Diagram Film)
9. Capricorn One
10. The Wizard of Oz

interview by Daniel Chamberlin, February 1999.

---

Facce Nuove

title	Facce Nuove
author	Gian Paolo Giabini
publication	Rumore
date	1999/05
issue	88
pages	p.11

"Facce Nuove" is an interview (in Italian) by Gian Paolo Giabini originally published May 1999 in Rumore magazine Number 88, p.11.

Facce Nuove

Così Michael Sandison sintetizza quella che è la filosofia di Boards Of Canada, duo inglese che lo scorso anno, con Music Has The Right To Children e più di recente con Peel Sessions, è stato una delle sorprese più interessanti all'interno di quella scena ambient sempre meno visibile, sempre più "intelligente". Il segreto del loro "successo"? Una musica che, come spesso accade nei territori bazzicati da Warp (per cui incidono) e Rephlex (l'etichetta di Aphex Twin), è giocoso, ludica e allo stesso tempo geneticamente malinconica, fatta di semplici melodie per piano mandate in loop e poi incastonate fra loro secondo un criterio consequenziale matematico. Una musica che è flusso di ritmiche elaborate e spesso "distorte" alla maniera di Aphex Twin, ma in cui soprattutto, all'interno dell'evoluzione del suono, tutto confluisce teneramente, secondo un'inedita attitudine "intimista" che tinteggia con colori tenui la musica di Music Has The Right Io Children, lasciando che ogni cosa venga filtrata da un desiderio di emozionare ed emozionarsi e andando magicamente oltre le logiche del dance floor. Non avrebbe potuto essere altrimenti. Basta sapere da dove arrivano Michael e Marcus (Eoin) per capire questo posizionamento inusuale. Nel '92 infatti, dopo aver fatto parte di diversi progetti, iniziano a suonare regolarmente da soli, durante una serata (Redmoon) che si svolge tutti i mesi, fra le rovine di un monastero, in Scozia, lontano mille miglia dal fragore del dance floor. Tre anni dopo, nel '95, costituiscono uno studio in un bunker fra le colline di Petland, in Scozia, dove nascono i primi pezzi di Music Has The Right To Children. A parte questo isolazionismo fisico BOC confermano la loro lontananza dalla "dance" con un "modus operandi" che la dice lungo sulla propensione ad atmosfere crepuscolari ed armoniche che nulla hanno a che fare con la fisicità dei big-beat e della chemical generation. dice Michael.

Note: Translation by ChatGPT-o4

New faces

This is how Michael Sandison synthesizes the philosophy of Boards Of Canada, an English duo that last year, with Music Has The Right To Children and more recently with Peel Session, has been one of the most interesting surprises within that increasingly invisible, increasingly “intelligent” ambient scene. The secret of their “success”? Music that, as often happens in the territories frequented by Warp (for which they record) and Rephlex (Aphex Twin’s label), is playful and at the same time genetically melancholic, made of simple piano melodies looped and then interwoven according to a mathematical consequential criterion. Music that is a flow of elaborate and often “distorted” rhythms in the manner of Aphex Twin, but in which everything, especially within the evolution of sound, tenderly converges according to an unprecedented “intimate” attitude that paints the music of Music Has The Right To Children with soft colors, allowing everything to be filtered by a desire to evoke emotions and magically going beyond the logic of the dance floor. It couldn’t have been otherwise. Just knowing where Michael and Marcus (Eoin) come from is enough to understand this unusual positioning. In ’92, after being part of several projects, they started playing regularly on their own during an event (Redmoon) held every month among the ruins of a monastery in Scotland, a thousand miles away from the noise of the dance floor. Three years later, in ’95, they set up a studio in a bunker among the hills of Pentland, Scotland, where the first pieces of Music Has The Right To Children were born. Apart from this physical isolation, BOC confirms their distance from “dance” with a “modus operandi” that speaks volumes about their inclination toward twilight and harmonic atmospheres that have nothing to do with the physicality of big-beat and the chemical generation.

says Michael.

---

Warp Factor Ten

title	Warp Factor Ten
author	Toby Manning
publication	Jockey Slut
date	1999/10
issue	Vol.02 No. 22 (Oct/Nov 1999)
pages	p.47

Warp Factor Ten is an interview by Toby Manning originally published Oct. 1999 in Jockey Slut magazine Vol.02, No. 22 (Oct/Nov 1999), p.47.

Nostalgic pastoral electronic duo, holed-up in the Scottish Highlands...

---

Les Chant Future Des Musiques Electroniques

title	Les Chant Future Des Musiques Electroniques
author	Max Renn
publication	Coda
date	2000/01
issue	Series 02 No.09
pages	p.21

"Les Chant Future Des Musiques Electroniques" is an interview (in French) by Max Renn originally published Jan 2000 in Coda magazine Series 02, Number 09, p.21

Les Chant Future Des Musiques Electroniques

Concept & interview : Max Renn / Traduction : Roxanne / Photos : DR

Nous ne pouvons plus ignorer que la bande-son de notre quotidien est presque entièrement dominée par la technologie. Du vrombissement souterrain du métro aux vibrations de la circulation, en passant par le souffle du ventilateur estival, nos sons familiers sont générés par des machines. La musique n'échappe pas à cette règle. De techno qu'elle était il y a 10 ans, elle est devenue tout simplement "électronique". Ou plutôt "musiques électroniques" au pluriel, car elles sont aujourd'hui multiples et parfois même indiscernables de l'analogique. Alors, à l'aube du troisième millénaire, nous pensions qu'il était intéressant de laisser s'exprimer les artistes, toutes générations confondues, qui ont participé à l'évolution d'un genre aujourd'hui incontournable. Aussi, nous avons décidé de poser une question, et une seule, à tous ceux qui gravitent, de près ou de loin, dans l'univers des musiques électroniques : "Quelles évolutions envisagez-vous pour les musiques électroniques du futur ?". A cela, ils ont bien voulu répondre.

...

3/ MIKE SANDISON MARCUS EOIN BOARD OF CANADA Duo électronique (Warp)

Retrouvez Board Of Canada en ligne à :

http://www.ednet.co.uk/-ehx/boc/index.html

The Future Sounds Of Electronic Music

Concept & interview : Max Renn / Translation : Roxanne / Photos : DR

We can't ignore anymore that the sounds we hear nowadays are greatly dominated by technology. From the roars of subways to the vibrations of road traffic, without forgetting the wind coming from fans, the sounds we are now familiar with are generated by machines. So does music. From techno it was during the last decade, it is now simply "electronic". Or rather "electronic music" in the plural, because it has become wide and sometimes not so different from the analogic. At the dawn of third millennium, we thought it would be interesting to let artists talk, artists from all generations who got involved in the electronic music evolution, making it a major kind of music. So, we decided to ask just one simple question: "what development do you foresee to electronic music?". To that, they kindly answered.

---

Boards of The Underground

title	Boards of The Underground
author	Richard Southern
publication	Jockey Slut
date	2000/12
issue	Vol.03 No.11
pages	30-34

"Boards of The Underground" is an interview by Richard Southern originally published Dec. 2000 in Jockey Slut magazine Volume 03, Number 11, pp.30-34

They're the fire-starters, the rustic fire-starters, who've influenced everyone from Air to Radiohead. Boards of Canada invite Richard Southern to their secret den and share with him their bluffer's guide to making the perfect bonfire and why they have little time for Leo Di Caprio.

remembers Boards of Canada's Marcus Eoin. Marcus protests, adding,

This isn't the only fire that Boards of Canada have unwittingly started. Just over two years ago, their debut album Music Has the Right to Children, a muted, un-ostentatious collection of haunting, home-made melodies initially just seemed like one of electric haven Warp's more consistent releases. Then, slowly, word of mouth began to crackle like sparking kindling. Here was a record not only spotters and electronic obsessives could love - a hazily nostalgic record which snuck its way into your head and set up a commune. The album's muttering voices seemed to speak in tongues; rumours of occult dabblings only added to the Boards of Canada enigma. Sales, while impressive for a leftfield release, were a meagre glow compared to the blaze Music Has the Right. caused amongst Boards of Canada's musical peers.

Suddenly, those slo-mo, slightly melancholy synth-loops were everywhere. On Super Furry Animals' Guerilla (see:: "Some Things Come from Nothing"), on Danmass' "Happy Here" on the Sunday Best compilation, on Air's Virgin Suicides; even on the ever trend-tailing Texas' new material. As if that wasn't enough, Boards' influence can also clearly be heard on new albums by both the barometer of all things buzzworthy, Madonna, and Radiohead, whose much puzzled-over Kid A sounds rather closer to Music Has the Right. than it does to the stadium-conquering OK Computer.

confesses Michael Sandison in the rather sterile confines of Warp's new London offices. continues Michael in his precise, (Miss Jean) Brodie-esque brogue. Michael demurs. adds Marcus in his thicker Scots slur. answers Marcus, mystifyingly.

Secretiveness is congenital to Boards of Canada. These, after all, are people who refuse to reveal the location of the commune they inhabit in the Pentland hills near Edinburgh, who won't give out their phone number or even, for the most part, give interviews. They've chosen Jockey Slut in favour of the covers of a number of major national publications, and, in person, these childhood friends radiate a warmth and amiability that's anything but enigmatic. They finish each other's sentences, listen intently to questions and in contrast to most ego-blinkered musicians even ask questions themselves.

says Marcus, still running with his theme. He pauses. Mike explains, laughing. Marcus adds. says Mike. Slightly embarrassed grins. says Marcus, thoughtfully,
Equally, you don't need a City & Guilds engineering diploma to deduce that the densely atmospheric, otherworldly aspects of the Boards' music is painstakingly achieved. says Mike. says Marcus.
Mike laughs.
Marcus chuckles.
says Michael.
shrugs Marcus. Sequestered away in the Scottish hills, "getting it together in the country", is a way of life for Boards of Canada. Even taking into account childhood sojourns in Canada, they've never known anything different. Hardly listening to contemporary music, keeping away from the back-slapping musical backstage, rarely reading magazines, living in what was once a commune (Mike: "People had kids, or went off travelling. It's down to a hardcore of four or five now") but is now effectively a hill-bound artists' colony - theirs is a deliberately rarefied world. says Mike. continues Marcus. He laughs.
says Mike.

At times, the pair's penchant for privacy can border on the paranoid. They're so concerned about hackers that they've both got completely separate computers for using the net.

says Mike. adds Marcus.

Aware that their bunker mentality may be getting out of hand, the pair have made a conscious effort to get out more recently.

says Michael. Before 'Music...' took off, theirs was a more leisurely isolation, their music simply soundtracks for the Red Moon events they and their friends would organise in the hills near the commune:

These days, they still drive out into the country with their friends, set up camp and make bonfires. Bonfires, you will notice, figure large in the Boards of Canada world. You can almost hear the crackling twigs on many of their cuts.

says Marcus, says Mike,
continues Marcus. grins Mike.

The explanation is that both adverts were done with filmmaker du jour Chris Cunningham, "because he asked us and we respect him". They're not saying, but rather than heralding that Shell advert, could it be that the Boards have their eye on Cunningham's future feature work? It isn't, after all, a big step from imaginary soundtracks to actual films, and it'd be hard to contemplate a more perfect union.

Marcus grins: And no, they didn't get to meet Leo.

The future of music may be uncertain, but Boards of Canada seem very definite about their own future musical direction.

says Mike.
Marcus continues:

THINGS BOARDS OF CANADA LIKE

• The wobble you get on an off-centre record ("We even decide if it's wobbling at 33 or 45 rpm!).
• The little bursts of music you get behind a logo.
• Things that are a little bit out of tune:: "Space Oddity" by David Bowie, "God Only Knows" by the Beach Boys, "Wonderful World" by Louis Armstrong, and "Tomorrow Never Knows" by the Beatles (Marcus:: "In modern music everything is perfect, rationalised, bland.").
• "The sounds between notes."
• Progressive rock (Mike:: "For at least trying to get somewhere no one's been").
• Kung-fu.
• "Listening in increments."
• Devo, Twins Cocteau and Aphex, Nitzer Ebb, acid folkies, the Incredible String Band, the Wu-Tang Clan. "RZA," it seems, "listens like we do."
• A record Marcus found in America which features a Christian robot that sang songs if you pressed a button in his stomach ("The scary part is that it was very Old Testament, slitting the throats of first born and stuff").
• "Geno" by Dexy's Midnight Runners.
• "The sound when you're at a fairground and you're caught between two different sound systems and they combine to create something new and outlandish."

THINGS BOARDS OF CANADA DON'T LIKE

• Electronic gadgets that don't work (Marcus:: "It makes me sad to see things that have just been thrown away. I'll pick it up and take it back home and try and make it work. I've still got a brown valve television set from the '70s and it works better than my friends' wide screen TVs").
• Meat (in Marcus' case).
• Napster (Marcus:: "It's not the big rich artists who'll suffer, it's the smaller artists. Why should people buy their records when they can download them for free? The issue of choice is illusory. If lots of musicians go out of business, then there's only going to be a smaller number of extremely commercial crap artists to choose from."

BOARDS OF CANADA'S TIPS ON BONFIRES

• Marcus:: "For kindling the best way to ensure it catches is to get loads of pieces more or less the same length and lay them in a grid, then overlay them in a lattice."
• Mike:: "You don't need matches or a lighter. If it's wet or windy they often won't work. But two twigs will. The trick is to tie string to either end of one twig, then you can rub them together faster than your hands ever could."

DISCOGRAPHY

• Acid Memories (Music 70, 1989)
  

Absurdly rare, cassette-only release from the barely teen Boards, then six-strong. Guitars meet electronics in embryonic but recognisably Boards-ian melodicism.

• Play by Numbers (Music 70, 1994)
  

Five-track CD from what was now a trio, boasting a My Bloody Valentine influence in places, shifting further into electronics in others.

• Hooper Bay (Music 70, 1994)
  

Closer still:: the use of kids' voices was a hint of what was to come. People pay small fortunes for copies.

• Twoism (Music 70, 1995)
  

The last record as a trio when everything slipped into focus and pricked up record company ears.

• BOC Maxima (Music 70, 1996)
  

Twenty tracks:: half of which would appear on later EPs and albums; the others remain an impossibly elusive prospect (50 copies only).

• Hi Scores EP (Skam, 1996)
  

Essential for the Eno-esque "Everything You Do is a Balloon" and the spooky electro of "Nlogax".

• Korona (from Mask 100 compilation) (Skam, 1996)
  

Darkness visible:: slurring synths and an uneasy, off-kilter rhythm.

• Untitled (from Mask 200 as Hell Interface) (Skam, 1997)
  

Even darker, harder, faster side of the Boards. "Who are Hell Interface?" they ask.

• Michael Fakesch "Surfaise" (Boards of Canada remix) (Warp, 1997)
  

Spacious, dissonant, slightly disembodied ambience.

• Mira Calix "Sandsings" (Boards of Canada remix) (Warp, 1997)
  

Boards render Warp's press officer's warblings intelligble.

• Jack Dangers "Prime Audio Soup" (Boards of Canada remix) (Play it Again Sam, 1998)

Respectful to the Meat Beat man, this is a curious, slightly gothy hybrid.

• "Aquarius" (seven-inch single) (Skam, 1998)
  

A different version to the one on Music. Sesame Street meets Kraftwerk meets the between-scenes bits from Seinfeld.

• Music Has the Right to Children (Skam/Warp, 1998)
  

Music has The Right to Children claimed not just children but grown adults of shock both sexes.

• Bubbah's Tum "Dirty Great Mable" (III, 1998)
  

Unusually beat-heavy, balanced by their trademark use of kids' voices and big, spooky chords. Their final mix.

• "Orange Romeda" (from We Are Reasonable People compilation) (Warp, 1999)
  

Very much in the Music. vein. Children's voices, bird's wing percussion and yearning, half-heard synth melodies.

• Peel Sessions (Strange Fruit, 1999)
  

Reworks of "Aquarius" and "Olson", plus newie "Happy Cycling".

• In a Beatiful Place Out in the Country EP (Warp, 2000)
  

OK, so it's an EP not an album, and it's not exactly a revolutionary departure, but when familiar ground is this gorgeous, who's complaining?

interview by Richard Southern, December 2000.

---

Breaking Into Heaven

title	Breaking Into Heaven
author	Emma Warren
publication	The Face
date	2001/01
issue	Vol.03 No.48
pages	94-98

Breaking Into Heaven is an interview by Emma Warren originally published Jan. 2001 in The Face magazine Volume 03, Number 48, pp.94-98.

Breaking Into Heaven

Text Emma Warren

Photography Boards Of Canada

Boards Of Canada make music from the top of the world, in a twisty parallel universe where it’s 3am all day. They’d like to take you there.

Kings Of Quiet

Arthur’s seat is an 850ft outcrop of volcanic rock that melts into the outskirts of Edinburgh’s; Scottish electronica duo Boards Of Canada are perched halfway up. It’s not quite, as the new EP would have it A Beautiful place out in the county, but it’s near enough to the grainy, rural influences that seep through everything they create. This is as close as we’re allowed to get to their secret countryside studio. ‘It’s only to keep unwanted visitors away,’ explains Mike Sandison. ‘We receive a lot of strange mail. On guy sent us mail addressed to ‘Jesus’ and ‘Alien’. I’m not sure which one I was…’

Myth: boards Of Canada are easy to define. They don’t let other people photograph them. They conduct media relations by email. They live out in the wilds of Scotland, making distressed, nostalgic electronica and esoteric short films. Truth: Boards Of Canada are all this and more. But also: Boards Of Canada want to make parallel-universe pop records that sound like an electronic version of the beach boys ubermotional zenith, Pet sounds. Sandison and his musical partner Marcus Eoin supply artwork instead of posing fro photographs – because, they say, ‘we look like potatoes.’ Actually that’s not strictly true. But this is: Boards Of Canada are the kings of quiet, grand rulers of tune-laden analogue electronica, and despite their insistence that it is not the sound of coming down, it is the sound of 3am…only more so.

Their 1998 debut album Music Has the Right To Children became a word-of-mouth sensation, selling 100,000 copies worldwide. Electronic, quiet, sonorous and off kilter, every track showed that electronic experimentation could live in peace with beautiful melodies. Boards Of Canada tunes became a fixture on Chris Morris’ Radio 1 show Blue Jam (‘he’s a ten-times-more –intelligent Jeremy Paxman who woke up one day and decided not to lie anymore,’ says Sandison). Doves were desperate to tour with them. Then a type of quiet (or quietist) revolution happened in music. Folksy Norwegian duo Kings Of Convenience called their album Quiet is the new loud. The most successful indie bands (Travis, Coldplay) were no longer loud and macho, but more mellow and folky. The current stream of bedroom electronica, from Melodic labels Minotaur Shock to Warp’s ambient trash-can hip-hop outfit Prefuse 73, makes calmness the new virtue in experimental music. Shh!

Boards Of Canada may be influential, but they wear it lightly. ‘We just want to make something that sounds like a pop record from another dimension,’ shouts Eoin over the noise of a growing downpour.‘ Something that everyone is listening to, but that sounds really, really strange.’ Standing between the clouds and earth, looking over a busy city from an ancient explosion of rock, Boards Of Canada, with their ageless, melancholic, otherworldly music, seem uniquely placed to do just that.

Though they’d rather die than be bombastic about it, like all great pop bands, Boards Of Canada define themselves by what they dislike as much as what they love. They stand for childlike innocence, not adult cynicism; natural awe, not chemical thrills; and above all, a rural ideal completely opposite to the fast-paced urban excitement that has powered pop music for nearly 50 years. ‘Our music is a negative reaction to the city,’ declares Sandison in a voice that mixes well-bred Edinburgh vowels with a softer, countryside burr. ‘In cites, the clubs and DJs all influence each other. It’s like a soup,’ agrees Eoin, enjoying the very non-urban view of the North Sea with a rainbow high above. ‘Like clothes-shop music. If I ever heard any of our music in a clothes shop, I’d quit!’ Not that they’ve anything against commerciality per se. After meeting Chris Cunningham through their label, Warp, Boards Of Canada composed music for a handful of his promos including a 1999 Nissan ad and a 30-second Telecom Italia short that featured Leonardo Di Caprio. ‘Chris gets very excited about the music,’ they smile. ‘He was nearly exploding on the phone last time we sent him some tracks. He reckoned the new EP Sounded like vocoder music at a Sunday school.’

Surely drugs must have inspired such weirdness? Boards of Canada – typically – disagree. ‘We want to reiterate this,’ says Sandion. ‘This isn’t drug music. I’ve always imagined it as daytime music: it’s a beautiful day, in the middle of the afternoon, and you’re with your friends listening to twisty music’. Boards have, of course, done time under the influence (‘mushrooms!’), but now their musical vision is unadulterated. ‘Imagine going back in time to a point where music branched off, but it went down a slightly different alley.’ Sandison sighs. ‘So it’s still music, and it’s still 2000 but it sounds brilliant, fresh and strange.’ In a parallel universe of their making, there would be ‘more colour’ (Sandison), ‘more extremity and less grey’ (Eoin), and ‘no Starbucks!’ (both).

Eoin and Sandison grew up in Cullen, a small fishing village on the west coast of Scotland. Their fathers were both construction managers. Each family emigrated within a few months of each other, and between 1976 and 1980, Eoin and Sandison found themselves living only a few streets apart in Calgary, Canada. ‘We knew each other before, but it was just coincidence that both our families went,’ says Sandison. ‘It was a thing to do in the late Seventies – everyone seemed to be going to try something fresh, to get some mores space.’ Canada, they say, wasn’t that different from home (‘its just a big, inflated Scotland’). But the place had a lasting influence, if only in Boards Of Canada name – inspired by the hours they spend watching nature documentaries made by the Film Board of Canada. After their families moved back to Cullen, Eoin and Sandison spent their adolescent years getting into trouble (for breaking windows and stealing things), experimenting with electronic music and making basic stop-start animation with an old Super-8 camera and zombie movies with masks and fake blood. Their work still mines this freewheeling, innocent, DIY aesthetic. Live, Boards Of Canada perform banked by TV sets playing clips from safety information films, grainy images of children in faded rainbow colours, and their own family cine films showing them cycling round in circles in bright suburban gardens. Their record sleeves are decorated with pictures of trees, birds, buses and children’s paintings. It’s a hidden, half-forgotten world, a million miles away from sophisticated, grown-up, personality-led pop music. ‘Cullen’s one of those places where there’s nothing for kids to do, but that’s a good thing because you’re creating everything yourself,’ reckons Eoin.

‘I’m still conscious of being in our own little world,’ says Sandison. The pair finally ventured out of village life to study at Edinburgh University. Sandison studied music; Eoin dropped out of an artificial intelligence degree. The students, he says wanted to ‘do mad things with like grow DNA and leave it to learn’, but the lecturers were more interested in equations. In 1996 the pair released Twoism, an EP of grainy melancholia on their own label Music 70,. Autechre’s Sean Booth heard it and hooked them up with Manchester electronic label Skam, who released their single Aquarius’. Autechre’s links with Skam made a move to Warp almost inevitable: MHTRTC was joint release between the two labels. Driving around the outskirts of Edinburgh, drying off in (the) warmth of his plush, silver BMW, Eoin ejects a Stevie Wonder CD out from the car stereo and rummages through his rucksack. ‘You have to hear this. It’s the Mysterious Voices Of Bulgaria – 30 women in traditional dress singing these unbelievable harmonies! It’s the kind of music that is totally divorced from normal music, bit I love it. It resets my clock.’

The new album, as yet untitled, also promises to rest your clock. ‘Some artists air their dirty laundry. We know which songs fit the Boards umbrella,’ they say. Neither Sandison or Eoin will be drawn into specifics, although they say things like ‘my dream album would be an organic, really melodic electronic album’; ‘it’s a lot darker, and some tracks sound like they’re 25 years old’; and ‘ we use a lot of subliminal messages. You have to reconstruct them in your mind.’ They have based a number of new songs on mathematical equations (working out frequencies for melodies that directly correlate to the changing amount of light in one day, for example). They’ve also painstakingly downgraded the production, so that it sounds like it has been made on ancient equipment: ‘We like the nostalgia of it.’

Two books of their photography and artwork are also planned: one to accompany the album, the other a ‘proper, glossy’ coffee table affair. All of which goes some way to explaining the long gaps between releases. ‘Someone wrote that we smoke too much and that’s why we the music takes so long’ splutter’s Sandison. ‘They have no idea!’ The fact is that , like the countryside itself, Boards Of Canada can’t be rushed. The gentle, ageless beauty of their art is the result of months and years of evolution; and of constant, backbreaking work which brooks no metropolitan distraction. Their sound may happen to be fashionable, but they themselves are beyond fashion.

Mike Sandison once had a dream that he was in Edinburgh, near the castle. All the stonework of the buildings and the roads were covered in flowerbeds sown with a tapestry of bright flowers in concentric patterns. ‘It was the most amazing thing, and it stuck with me for ages. It made me think: there’s nowhere in the world like this! Nowhere at all! So I thought we should try and make tunes that people in that town would be listening to’.

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Big Country

title	Big Country
author	Steve Nicholls
publication	XLR8R
date	2001/03
issue	47
pages	30-33

"Big Country" is an interview by Steve Nicholls originally published Mar. 2001 in XLR8R magazine Issue 47, pp.30-33.

Music fans around the globe wait patiently for the second full-length release from mysterious Scottish duo Boards of Canada, who turned music on its head with their debut recording's gentle, psychedelic ambience. Fan to the core, England's Steve Nicholls fulfills a dream, travelling north to the group's Scottish hideaway to investigate the source of their sorcery.

I'll never forget the first time, over two years ago, I heard Boards Of Canada's debut album Music Has The Right To Children. Prior to its arrival I was expecting something kind of special, because of the quality of their previous single "Aquarius" and the "Hi Scores" EP, released on the UK guerrilla-tactics electronic label Skam. I clearly remember receiving the album, by then released jointly with Warp Records, and time stopped. I sat and listened to the whole album, overpowered by the myriad kaleidoscopic layers, messages, hallucinations and images it relayed. It was like the tantalisingly elusive parts of a beautiful dream that you struggle to grasp after waking.

Two years later and I finally get to interview Marcus Eoin and Michael Sandison, Boards Of Canada. I say finally because I firmly believe that, in Music Has The Right To Children, they made one of the great records of the last decade, and with the advent of a new album in the next few months, there is a distinct possibility that they might repeat the feat. And it's not just me-Eoin and Sandison also freely admit that they are trying to make the perfect record.

says Sandison. adds Eoin.

In some ways, for Boards Of Canada to have disappeared after releasing one album would have suited the image of mysteriousness that has sprung up around them. Partly due to the cut up and addled vocal samples that littered Music Has The Right To Children and instantly initiated talk of subliminal messages, and partly due to the unavoidable feeling that there was something very strange going in their music just beneath the surface, people were fascinated by what they were all about. But the fact that they live in Scotland has far more to do with their lack of involvement in the still remarkably London-centric UK music scene than any kind of Howard Hughes-type elusiveness.

On their new EP, "In A Beautiful Place In The Country," it is gratifying to hear that they have continued to strive for the perfect beat, because Boards Of Canada were an anomaly in the '90s electronica scene into which people tried to fit them, and it's still impossible to fit them into any kind of timeline of electronic music. They admit to liking late '80s and early '90s industrial electronic bands like Front 242, Consolidated and Meat Beat Manifesto, and then the Cocteau Twins and Siouxsie and the Banshees, but that's about as far as they go. As Eoin rightly says,

Eoin's analogy with nature is one that constantly reappears when discussing Boards Of Canada's music. Much has been made of the strangely rural and organic sounds and images they create. In the countryside area surrounding Edinburgh, it is not uncommon to see a double rainbow appearing over the barrenly beautiful countryside, the image a visual analog to much of their music.

Eoin and Sandison fully admit that if they lived in a city it would be detrimental to their work, and you can see how a more structured environment would hem the natural ebb and flow of ideas and sounds that emerged from Music Has The Right To Children. On that album, sounds or loops or melodies would only be heard once in a track, and other tracks frequently only lasted for thirty tantalizing seconds, a simple melodic refrain, a ghostly beat, or a plaintive note, disappearing as quickly as it appeared, taking on the presence of a fleeting memory-a cloud that momentarily takes a recognizable shape, or a captured snowflake that melts on your hand.

says Sandison. recalls Eoin, Sandison says,

It all adds fuel to the fire that there is something mysterious about their music. As sweet, and frankly, listenable as their melodic head music may be on the surface, you can't escape the feeling that still waters run deep, and that there are strong currents running beneath the surface. Indeed, although it's always asking for trouble by drawing the parallel, Boards Of Canada's work has far more in common with something like The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper than anything from the more recent past, as its unerring tunefulness and song craft masquerades and alludes to something far deeper.

Those allusions are there all the way through Music Has The Right To Children, particularly come the last track, "One Important Thought," which warns of the dangers of censorship, and leaves you wondering what you might have just listened to that could ever be censored, so sublime, relaxing and apparently innocent was the music. So you have to listen to it again with new ears. Although Eoin and Sandison are still struggling with the idea that a lot of people are going to hear this new record, unlike many an experimental producer, they want their music to be listenable, to be a pleasurable experience, but one in which, if you choose to delve deeper, the rewards are there to be had.

says Eoin. Sandison joins in.

As well as crediting the listener with intelligence, which, as Eoin later points out, so few electronic "dance" producers do, Boards Of Canada also credit us with an imagination. They leave space in their music for us to project our own ideas, images, and thoughts. Their messages are in there, but they are encrypted allusions hinting at what might lie within. It might explain why they are becoming so popular, because in a way each Boards' track becomes very personal to the individual listener, alluding to different things in different people's lives. I ask them about the often-mentioned nostalgia element in their music-people have constantly remarked how their music vaguely reminds them of something else, and how that differs from being retro.

says Eoin. says Sandison,

And happily, after finally meeting them, Boards Of Canada's music remains as much of an enigma as it always has, because some myths and mysteries you don't really want to be explained away. Later on, Sandison goes on to talk about their music as a spiral or a fractal that gets more detailed the further you go in, and how they have experimented musically by using Fibonacci's Golden Ratio, a fraction close to two thirds that strangely occurs again and again in nature, and has allegedly been used in works of art by Da Vinci, Mozart and many others over the centuries, to space moments in tracks, write melodies and tune frequencies. And all of a sudden a friend's blithe request prior to the interview, to "find out what their magic ingredient is" begins to ring almost eerily true.

Whatever that ingredient may be, at the start of the 21st century, where, culturally and in terms of music, we are being increasingly discouraged from thinking for ourselves, where our attention is directed more than ever, where the gaps for our own imagination grow ever smaller, Boards Of Canada are an anomaly of timeless artistry that should be cherished. As Sandison says:

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Geogaddi era

The Colour & The Fire

title	The Colour & The Fire
author	Mark Pytlik
publication	HMV.com
date	2002/02
issue
pages

"The Colour & The Fire" is an interview by Mark Pytlik originally published online Feb. 2002 on the HMV.com webiste.

The Colour & The Fire

As a corollary to Brian Eno's famous rumination on Velvet Underground's first record ("I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band"), it might be time to draw a link between Boards of Canada's seminal 1998 debut Music Has The Right To Children and the reams of nurturing, organic electronic music that have since followed. After a brief survey of the current experimental electronic music scene, it's difficult to make the case that many more are as influential as Boards of Canada. Perhaps more striking than the advent all this subterranean success is the way in which Marcus Eoin and Michael Sandison have arrived there. Even within comparatively anonymous electronic music circles, Boards of Canada are commonly regarded as nothing short of an enigma, an inscrutable pair who rarely disperse release information, grant interviews or perform live. It is generally accepted that the duo record from a secluded studio nestled somewhere in Scotland's Pentland Hills; we also know that they tend to litter their fiery, kaliedoscopic records with oblique references to various mathematical phenomena, the Branch Dividians and (as their name implies) snippets from the curiously gauzy soundtracks that accompany National Film Board Of Canada documentaries circa 1970.

What follows is the unabridged transcript of a one-pass e-mail interview we recently conducted with Eoin and Sandison, where the refreshingly articulate pair gave us their thoughts on the state of electronic music, eBay bidders, their long-awaited Geogaddi and "cosseted suburban American internet music-pirating kids." Naturally, the honour was all ours:

Interview by Mark Pytlik, February 2002.

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The Secret Life of Boards of Canada

title	The Secret Life of Boards of Canada
author	John Mulvey
publication	NME
date	2002/02/23
issue	23 February 2002
pages	24,53

"The Secret Life of Boards of Canada" is an interview by John Mulvey originally published Feb. 23 2002 in NME magazine.

The Secret Life of Boards of Canada

From the Pentland Hills, just south of Edinburgh, it's possible to examine the world at a different angle. Nature becomes reduced to a pattern of hexagons. Melodies sound better in reverse. Bonfires make for better nights out than clubs. And the colour of the universe is, unequivocally, turquoise. This is where Boards Of Canada, Britain's most exceptional and reclusive electronica group, see things from. Or, at least, how they may see things. In comparison, the Aphex Twin is an open book, as straightforward in art and life as Fran Healy. A trawl of the internet for facts about the Boards duo of Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin turns up a proliferation of witchy rumours but precious few hard facts. They record in a disused nuclear bunker, it's suggested. They belong to some defiantly obscure art-collective-cum-cult named Turquoise Hexagon Sun. They fill their music with backwards messages, alternately sinister and playful, that range from invocations to a "horned god" (one old side project was named Hell Interface) to samples of ELO's Jeff Lynne. In the Boards of Canada section of the Warp Records website, alongside cover images and a few scant details about release dates, is a link to a Guardian news story which offers conclusive proof the average colour of the universe is "A greenish hue halfway between aquamarine and turquoise" when all visible light is mixed together.

All very intriguing, of course. But when BOC have made one of the most anxiously anticipated albums in years, hardly satisfying. To date, Sandison and Eoin have made a tremendous amount of music, most of which has neither ever been released or else is long unavailable; their 1996 debut EP for the Skam label, "Twoism", is currently available for a tidy £710 on eBay. For most people, their reputation rests on 'Music Has The Right To Children', the 1998 album that mixed spectral, quasi-ambient melodies and dulled hip-hop beats with the constant chatter of infants, hovering tantalisingly beyond comprehension. Deceptively simplistic, there was something about the way the melodies twisted backwards and forwards around each other, about the tangibly creepy atmosphere that pervaded it, that made for an extraordinary debut. By the time 'In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country' an uncommonly beautiful EP, was released at the end of 2000, the band enjoyed a near-holy status among electronica fans - not to mention artists, plenty of whom had diligently adapted BOC's spooked, rustic kindergarten vibes for themselves. And when the long-promised second album, 'Geogaddi', unexpectedly appeared on release schedules a month ago, the grassroots hype became phenomenal.

Knowing that part of the band's allure is their inaccessibility, Warp embarked on a campaign to make hearing 'Geogaddi' as difficult as possible. Virtually no new music made it onto the internet: download apparently new tracks from Audiogalaxy and you're as likely to discover an ambient fake, four minutes of looped speech samples or an old Brian Eno tune. The track titles, meanwhile, could only be located on HMV's Japanese site. Eventually, 'Geogaddi' was premiered in six churches around the world - in London, New York, Edinburgh, Tokyo, Berlin and Paris. Slides of children playing, of sunsets where the sky is bent into a hexagon, were projected above the altars. Small turquoise hexagons took the place of hymn books.

And then there was the album: 66 minutes and six seconds of music that is both soothing and disorienting, lushly beautiful yet creaky and unnerving. One track, 'Opening The Mouth', sounds like a heavy-breathing call from a banshee. Another, the truly horrible 'The Devil Is In The Details', alternates between the instructions on a relaxation tape and a desperately crying child. There are ghostly organs and distant tablas, warnings of volcanic explosions, an ecstatic vocal about "1969 in the sunshine" and an overall feeling that this heady, saturated music is how My Bloody Valentine might've sounded had they released anything after 1991's 'Loveless'. Honestly, it's that good.

accepts Sandison.

Early February 2002, and Boards Of Canada have consented to a rare interview with NME, on the understanding it runs after the album's release. To preserve their privacy, it's to be conducted by email, but the resulting answers still shed a little light on the world of Sandison and Eoin, without ever completely dismantling their mystique.

To begin, their name derives from the National Film Board Of Canada, whose nature documentaries enraptured the Scottish-born pair when they spent some time living in Calgary as children. writes Sandison. They started making tapes around 1982 or '83, when they were still children. At their Hexagon Sun studio, there's an archive of 20 years of music. admits Eoin, Though the paucity of their released might suggest otherwise, Sandison and Eoin are anything but lazy. writes Eoin, Expectations and pressures from the outside world hardly make an impact, either. reckons Sandison.

One thing Boards Of Canada are emphatic about, for all the talk of bonfires and rural retreats, is that they're not hippies. We ask if they're a psychedelic band, and Marcus replies: "If you mean psychedelic in a scientific way, then, yeah, that's probably fair. But if you mean it in a lifestyle way, you know, hippy-large floppy hat, patchouli oil and colourful trousers way, then nothing could be further from who we are." Further from what, though? Tempt BOC into the open for a few moments and still, you can only make out the faintest of outlines. And ask them, finally, how important mystery and a lack of information is to their music, and they'll prove it by sidestepping the question. "We just try to keep ourselves to ourselves," concludes Marcus Eoin. "The music is what is important." Of course.

interview by by John Mulvery, February 2002.

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Une Cabane Au Canada

title	Une Cabane Au Canada
author	Joseph Ghosn
publication	Les Inrockuptibles
date	2002/02 (Feb/Mar)
issue	327
pages	20-23

"Une Cabane Au Canada" is an interview (in French) by Joseph Ghosn originally published Feb./Mar. 2002 in Les Inrockuptibles magazine, Issue 327, pg.20-23

Une Cabane Au Canada

Par Joseph Ghosn

Photo Peter Iain Campbell

Avec un premier album bucolique et enfantin, les Ecossais de Boards Of Canada inventaient un folk électronique, dont l'influence rayonne aujourd'hui de Radiohead au hip-hop. Avec Geogaddi, le mystérieux duo livre un deuxième chef-d'œuvre pastoral et inquiet.

Des ermites autistes, des paranoïaques aigus enchaînés à leurs ordinateurs, des fous cloîtrés devant leurs machines... Les rumeurs les plus folles circulent sur Boards Of Canada depuis la sortie de leur premier album Music Has the Right ta Children, il y a cinq ans. Duo insondable, le groupe avait alors réussi un coup de force rarement imité, véritable OPA implicite sur la musique, de tout bord et de tout crin. Leur son, égrené en une poignée de morceaux électroniques, est parvenu, presque sournoisement, à réconcilier en un même mouvement les activistes de toutes les tendances, les ayatollahs du rap, du rock et de l'electronica.

Au départ, pourtant, rien ne distinguait vraiment les Ecossais Marcus Eoin et Mike Sandison de leurs contemporains. Pour beaucoup, le duo n'était qu'un clone supplémentaire d'un autre groupe à l'aura presque mystique : Autechre. Les similitudes étaient flagrantes : même maison de disques (Warp), même traitement sombre des ambiances musicales délétères, même formation à deux, faux couple uni devant les machines et passionné par la création d'univers parallèles, autant graphiques que musicaux. La similitude, pourtant, s'arrête là. Autant la musique d'Autechre est pétrie dans des paysages postindustriels violents, souvent arides et crevassés, autant celle de Boards Of Canada est empreinte de visions pastorales, quasi impressionnistes et oniriques.

Ecouter Boards Of Canada, c'est souvent se retrouver confronté à un étrange sentiment de familiarité lointaine, comme si le disque qui tourne était composé de bribes de souvenirs évanescents, d'étincelles de réminiscences. Boards Of Canada met en scène une musique étrangement pénétrante, très diffuse et presque vénéneuse. Un sentiment que renforce pleinement Geogaddi, attendu par beaucoup comme une sorte de messie électronique, alors même que l'époque semble mettre en berne la plupart des tentatives d'électronique abstraite, trop isolationniste. Un travers qui aurait pu précipiter Boards Of Canada au terminus des prétentieux : le duo trimballe une réputation peu enviée de hippies enfermés dans une communauté perdue en Ecosse, vivant en vase clos, dans une ferme surprotégée de toute attaque physique ou virtuelle. Un havre devenu légendaire chez tous les fans du groupe, qui ont bâti via le Net une incroyable mythologie autour du duo, devenu un emblème malgré lui de la génération des hackers technoïdes, obsédés par leurs ordinateurs.

La réalité, pourtant, est différente. Les deux membres de Boards Of Canada ne ressemblent en rien à des héros. Jeunes trentenaires que leurs photos montrent toujours habillés avec les mêmes vieilles fringues — survêtements élimés, bonnet enfoncé jusqu'aux oreilles —, ils semblent surtout soucieux d'éviter les modes, de tuer dans l'œuf toute catégorisation. Plus que tout, le groupe revendique pleinement son attachement à sa musique et sa haine des compromis.

Pas étonnant que le plus vieux souvenir musical de Boards Of Canada soit Seasons in the Sun, cette reprise folk-rock d'un morceau de Jacques Brel, aux airs délétères rappelant étrangement les atmosphères nocturnes et la nostalgie rémanente qui sourd de la musique du duo. Une nostalgie toute pastorale, ainsi que l'explicitait déjà le titre d'un single sorti entre leurs deux albums, In a Beautiful Place out in the Country ("Dans un bel endroit à la campagne").

Réfugié en pleine campagne, le groupe ne rencontre que rarement les journalistes. Pour la sortie du nouvel album, il ne répond d'ailleurs aux interviews que par e-mails. Cette mise à distance, qui est commune à plusieurs musiciens électroniques, traduit-elle une timidité maladive, masquée par la pratique des machines ?

Les premiers jours... Boards Of Canada est né des cendres de l'indie-rock des années 8o et de son chant du cygne : Loveless, le dernier album en date de My Bloody Valentine, qui mêlait guitares éthérées et beats salis, dans un déluge onirique et infernal de distorsion, d'échos psychédéliques et de ritournelles organiques violées.

La sortie de ces années de vaches maigres se fait par le biais d'Autechre :

Aujourd'hui: une copie originale de Twoism, rarissime, peut coûter plus de mille euros : quelques veinards fortunés se les arrachent sur les sites de vente aux enchères... Des prix prohibitifs qui traduisent l'aura du groupe, grandissante : de Radiohead à Röyksopp, les beats maladifs, les effets psychédéliques et les mélodies enfantines de Boards Of Canada semblent avoir contaminé toutes les musiques.

<Le son de Boards Of Canada a contaminé quelques-uns des plus beaux disques de ces dernières années : revue des victimes.

univers parallèles

L'influence de Boards Of Canada ne se mesure pas simplement aux chiffres de vente de leurs disques ou aux rares concerts du duo. Sans bruit, sans phénomène de masse, le son de Boards Of Canada s'est pourtant infiltré dans un certain nombre de disques majeurs de ces dernières années. En premier lieu, on retrouve le Radiohead de Kid A et Amnesiac : les rythmes glacés de ces deux disques et leur atmosphère polaire semblent prendre racine dans les compositions de Music Has the Right to Children. De même, la BO composée par Air pour Vire Suicides correspond avec les hymnes de poche du duo anglais. Le hip-hop, aussi, semble avoir puisé dans les interstices du duo : des groupes aussi novateurs que cLOUDDEAD ou Anti-Pop Consortium ont repris à leur compte quelques leçons soniques de Boards Of Canada. Ils ont notamment exploité toute l'esthétique crade et dégradée de leur son : une patine qui tranche avec le reste de la production du genre, souvent très propre sur elle. Enfin, Melody A.M. des Norvégiens de Röyksopp navigue dans les mêmes eaux que Boards Of Canada, tandis qu'un groupe comme Bola (signé sur Skam, premier label de Boards Of Canada) pousse les leçons du duo dans leurs retranchements les plus noirs, les plus mélancoliques et remplis de bile, notamment dans le récent et très attachant Fyuti. Signalons également parmi les disciples les plus flagrants (et doués) Telefon Tel Aviv, EU, Manitoba, Gorodisch, Pilote ou Savath & Savalas... Boards Of Canada cultive à cet égard une modestie distanciée :

J. G.>

L'influence de Boards of Canada passe sans doute par une approche de la composition qui tranche avec les idiomes de la musique électronique, plutôt portée vers des morceaux assemblés par superposition de couches sonores. Boards of Canada, au contraire, semble chérir une approche classique : leurs morceaux sont d'abord des chansons, dans lesquelles on reconnaît des refrains, des ponts, des couplets. Mais le duo remplace les instruments traditionnels par des synthétiseurs et des boîtes à rythmes et le chant par des échos de voix d'enfant, déformées et triturées par tous les côtés.

C'est cette approche de la composition, héritée du rock ou de la pop, qui anime la musique du duo. Une musique qui se révèle, sur Geogaddi, encore plus amochée et cabossée qu'à l'accoutumée. Les morceaux, jamais aseptisés, sont remplis de sautes, d'arrêts, de voiles et de bosses. L'album, au final, est d'une beauté sourde, peuplé par des fantômes et des spectres mal en point.

En écoutant Geogaddi, en regardant les visuels déformés de la pochette, on a l'impression de tenir un groupe imaginaire, sans substance humaine. Comme si ces morceaux-là étaient fabriqués à partir d'une matière intangible, comme un collage de matériaux hétéroclites, venus de civilisations perdues, cristallisés dans des coulées de lave. Les voix de gosses, les extraits de messages informatifs, qui naviguent entre les beats lents, concourent à créer une musique funky et très cérébrale, qui fait songer à du Sly Stone déformé par les synthétiseurs de Brian Eno. Une confrérie de rêve qui rassemble, sur un même disque, les meilleurs artisans musicaux.

Le duo cherche d'ailleurs, avant tout, à décloisonner sa musique, à induire son auditeur en erreur, à lui indiquer de fausses pistes.

Boards Of Canada diffuse en direct de Mars. •

A Cabin in Canada

By Joseph Ghosn

Photo: Peter Iain Campbell

With a pastoral and childlike first album, the Scots of Boards Of Canada invented an electronic folk, whose influence shines today from Radiohead to hip-hop. With Geogaddi, the mysterious duo delivers a second pastoral and uneasy masterpiece. Autistic [Altruistic?] hermits, acute paranoids chained to their computers, fools cloistered in front of their machines ... The wildest rumors circulating on Boards Of Canada since the release of their first album Music Has the Right, five years ago . An impenetrable duo, the group had then managed a power grab rarely imitated, real OPA implied in the music, on all sides, unbridled. Their sound, ginned into a handful of electronic pieces, has managed, almost slyly, to reconcile in the same movement the activists of all tendencies, the ayatollahs of rap, rock and electronica.

Initially, however, nothing really distinguished the Scots Marcus Eoin and Mike Sandison from their contemporaries. For many, the duo was just another clone of another group with an almost mystical aura: Autechre. The similarities were obvious: same record company (Warp), same dark treatment of deleterious musical moods, same duo formation, false pair united in front of machines and passionate by the creation of parallel universes, as graphic as it is musical. The similarity, however, stops there. As much as Autechre's music is steeped in post-industrial and violent landscapes, often arid and crevassed, Boards Of Canada is marked by pastoral, quasi-impressionistic and dreamlike visions.

To listen to Boards Of Canada is often to be confronted with a strange feeling of distant familiarity, as if the record that was playing was composed of fragments of evanescent memories, sparks of reminiscences. Boards Of Canada features a strangely penetrating music, very diffuse and almost poisonous. A feeling that fully reinforces Geogaddi, expected by many as a kind of electronic messiah, even though that the time seems to put down most attempts at abstract electronics, too isolationist. A trick that could have precipitated Boards Of Canada at the terminus of the pretentious: the duo lugs an unmissable reputation of hippies locked in a community lost in Scotland, living in isolation, in a farm overprotected from any physical or virtual attack. A haven that has become legendary among all fans of the group, who have built via the Net an incredible mythology around the duo, which has become a symbol of the technoid hackers generation, obsessed by their computers.

The reality, however, is different. The two members of Boards Of Canada are nothing like heroes. Young in their thirties, their pictures always show them dressed with the same old clothes - tracksuits, cap pressed to the ears -, they seem especially anxious to avoid the fads, to nip in the bud any categorization. More than anything, the group fully claims their attachment to the music and their hatred of compromises.

No wonder the oldest musical memory of Boards Of Canada is Seasons in the Sun, this folk-rock reprise of Jacques Brel's piece, with deleterious melodies strangely reminiscent of nocturnal atmospheres and the lingering nostalgia of the duo's music.. A pastoral nostalgia, as already clarified by the title "In a Beautiful Place out in the Country", an EP released between their two albums.

Sheltered in the countryside, the group rarely meets journalists. For the release of the new album, they only respond to interviews by e-mail. Does keeping this kind of distance, common to several electronic musicians, translate to an unhealthy shyness, masked by the practice of machines?

The first days ... Boards Of Canada was born from the ashes of 80s indie-rock and its swan song: Loveless, the last album of My Bloody Valentine, which mixed ethereal guitars and dirty beats, in a dreamlike and infernal flood of distortion, psychedelic echoes and breached organic refrains.

The exit of those lean years was through Autechre:

Today: an original copy of Twoism, extremely rare, can cost more than a thousand euros: a lucky and wealthy few get them from auction sites ... inflated prices that reflect the aura of the group, growing: from Radiohead to Röyksopp, Boards Of Canada's sickly beats, psychedelic effects and child-like melodies seem to have contaminated all music.

<The sound of Boards Of Canada has contaminated some of the most beautiful records of recent years: review of victims.

Parallel Universes

The influence of Boards Of Canada can not be measured simply by their record sale figures or the rare concerts of the duo. No noise, no mass phenomenon, the sound of Boards Of Canada has yet infiltrated a number of major records of recent years. First, we find Radiohead by Kid A and Amnesiac: the frozen rhythms of these two discs and their polar atmosphere seem to take root in the compositions of Music Has the Right to Children. Similarly, the soundtrack composed by Air for The Virgin Suicides matches with the English duo's pocket anthems. . Hip-hop, too, seems to have tapped into the interstices of the duo: groups as innovative as cLOUDDEAD or Anti-Pop Consortium have taken over a few sonic lessons from Boards Of Canada. They particularly exploited all the aesthetics dirty and degraded their sound: a patina that contrasts with the rest of the production of the genre, often very clean. Finally, Norwegian Röyksopp Melody AM sails in the same waters as Boards Of Canada, while a band like Bola (signed on Skam, Boards Of Canada's first label) pushes the duo's lessons into their darkest more melancholic and full of bile, especially in the recent and very endearing Fyuti. Also among the most egregious (and gifted) Telefon Tel Aviv, EU, Manitoba, Gorodisch, Pilote or Savath & Savalas ... Boards Of Canada cultivates a modesty in this respect:

J. G.>

The influence of Boards of Canada undoubtedly depends on an approach to composition that contrasts with the idioms of electronic music, rather focused on pieces assembled by superposition of sound layers. Boards of Canada, on the other hand, seems to cherish a classical approach: their songs are at first songs, in which we recognize choruses, bridges, couplets. But the duo replaces the traditional instruments with synthesizers and drum machines and singing with echoes of children's voices, distorted and triturated by all sides.

It is this approach to composition, inherited from rock or pop, that drives the music of the duo. A music that is revealed on Geogaddi, even more damaged and battered than usual. The tracks, never sanitized, are filled with swings, stops, sails and bumps. The album, in the end, is of a dull beauty, populated by ghosts and troubled spectra.

Listening to Geogaddi, looking at the distorted visuals on the cover, one has the impression of holding an imaginary group, without human substance. As if these pieces were made from an intangible material, like a collage of heterogeneous materials, from lost civilizations, crystallized in lava flows. Kids' voices, informative message excerpts, which navigate between slow beats, combine to create funky, cerebral music, reminiscent of Sly Stone distorted by Brian Eno's synthesizers. A dream brotherhood that brings together, on the same record, the best musical craftsmen. The duo seeks, above all, to de-compartmentalize their music, to mislead the listener, to point out red herrings.

Boards Of Canada broadcasts live from Mars.

Source: J Ghosn's retrieved Feb 2008 ^{[8] [9]}

_{Subscript text: quoted in "Un Cabane Au Canada" 2002 Feb/Mar}

Une interview de Boards of Canada, réalisée par email au moment de l'album Geogaddi. J'ai gardé la version originale, comme au cinéma, mais j'ai oublié de sous-titrer. bonne lecture et décryptage.

---

I Colori Della Musica Elettronica

title	I Colori Della Musica Elettronica
author	Beppe Recchia
publication	Blow Up
date	2002/03
issue	No.46
pages	pp.24-27

"I Colori Della Musica Elettronica" is an interview (in Italian) by Beppe Recchia originally published Mar. 2002 in Blow Up magazine Number 46, pp.24-27.

I Colori Della Musica Elettronica

"Nello spazio nessuno può sentirvi urlare, il che non è più tanto necessario ora che gli scienziati hanno scoperto che l'universo è una varietà di turchese. Ricercatori americani hanno rivelato che il colore medio, ovvero quello che si otterrebbe se tutta la luce visibile si mescolasse, è una tonalità verdognola compresa tra l'acquamarina ed il turchese. L'universo ha già attraversato il suo periodo blu, dominato da stelle giovani e attraversa attualmente la sua fase verde, che corrisponde sostanzialmente alla sua mezza età. Nella sua fase finale sarà il rosso a dominare."

(Jeevan Vasagar, And the colour of the universe is ... , venerdì 11 gennaio 2002, The Guardian)

E' con questa notizia che qualche giorno dopo la Warp decide di annunciare l'imminente pubblicazione di Geogaddi, nuovo album dei Boards of Canada. L'operazione, nel più classico stile dell'etichetta di Sheffield, fa scattare nei più attenti all'iconografia del duo scozzese almeno un paio di considerazioni: la prima è che tenendo conto dell'abbondante uso del turchese nelle copertine e nei titoli dei BoC, la notizia sembra quasi perfettamente artefatta; la seconda, più inquietante, è che, se si guarda la copertina di Geogaddi - dei bambini che fanno il girotondo intorno ad un albero in una scala cromatica che varia dal giallo al rosso - viene da chiedersi se questo non sia il loro album definitivo. Ed allora, prima che sia troppo tardi, raccontiamo la loro storia.

'Our friends and families hear all the music we write, and that's all that matters really.'

Il periodo blu

Mike Sandison (nato il 14 luglio1971) e Marcus Eoin (nato il 27 maggio 1973) si conoscono sin da bambini, quando, attraverso numerosi cambi di residenza delle rispettive famiglie, dal nord dell'Inghilterra sino allo stato dell'Alberta in Canada e ritorno, cominciano a suonare diversi strumenti e a mostrare una spiccata passione per i sintetizzatori ed i campionatori. I loro primi esperimenti fanno da commento a progetti visivi, documentari girati in modo casalingo con un super-8. E' proprio in omaggio al National Film Board of Canada, i cui filmati vengono avidamente consumati dai due e dal loro ristretto gruppo di amici, che l'originaria formazione prende il nome: è il 1986 e Marcus suona il basso, ma ciò che verrà negli anni successivi viene in un certo modo già anticipato dall'intreccio degli strumenti con i suoni emessi dai personal computers e con quelli catturati dalla radio e dalla televisione.

L'alone di mistero che avvolge l'attività dei primissimi BoC è spesso e denso: si dice che abbiano cambiato formazione quattordici volte, che abbiano costituito una vera e propria eccezione - difficile stupirsi, dato che un'affascinante anomalia lo sono ancora oggi - nel circuito live scozzese, dovendo conciliare le loro influenze che spaziavano da Cocteau twins a Front 242. con la necessità di dover far da supporto ad una serie quasi infinita di cover bands dedite al glam-rock, e che per evitare l'onta abbiano cominciato a mettere su autonomamente degli happenings all'aperto, dove accolti da enormi falò si presenziava a installazioni cinematografico-musicali in cui vecchi temi televisivi o filastrocche di infantile memoria venivano torturati da ritmi elettronici incalzanti o rivoltati con sovraincisioni di messaggi in backwards.

Quel che è certo è che nel 1989 i Boards of Canada sono ormai ridotti ad un nucleo essenziale di tre elementi - Mike, Marcus ed un certo Chris -, che decide di creare il proprio studio di registrazione, dal nome di Hexagon sun, nelle Pentland Hills nel nord-est della Scozia (l'aperta campagna che circonda Edinburgo). Per un lungo periodo registrano una messe di e.p. e di album per l'autofinanziata Music70, ma nessuno dei quali supera i ristretti confini del circolo familiare e delle amicizie; ricorda Mike, "Abbiamo fatto musica sin dai tempi della scuola negli anni '80 e nessuno l'ascolterà mai. I nostri amici e le nostre famiglie sono gli unici ad ascoltare tutto ciò che scriviamo e questo è ciò che davvero importa. C'è da rimanere senza parole per quanto materiale abbiamo su nastro."

'"Music Has The Right To Children" is a statement of our intention to affect the audience using sound.'

La fase turchese

Non proprio tutto rimane ignoto: nel 1996, Twoism, l'ennesimo lavoro a tiratura limitata finisce negli uffici dell'etichetta di Manchester Skam e le sue melodie malinconiche rette da partiture elettroniche asciutte e lente convincono Sean Booth degli Autechre a chiamare nella stessa giornata Marcus e Mike - che nel frattempo sono rimasti un duo.

Ciò che vien fuori da questo incontro è Hi-scores, un e.p. che in realtà è più un mini (sei tracce per circa trenta minuti) che mostra compiutamente l'estetica BoC: una scrittura semplice e allo stesso efficace che mescola hìp-hop sottile a rimandi della prima ondata elettro (Nlogax), ma su cui sovrasta una immensa capacità melodica che li pone una spanna sopra il mucchio. Che il gruppo sia già maturo è testimoniato dalla presenza del futuro classico Turquoise hexagon sun (poi ripreso nell'album di debutto) e della lunga e finale Everything you do is a balloon, che dà la sensazione di trasvolare l'oceano a cavallo di un pallone aerostatico.

Difficile trovare una categoria o un'etichetta; troppo agitate le acque più profonde dei brani per essere ambient, ma anche troppo morbidi e onirici per essere techno. Anche per questo i BoC diventano 'proprietà bollente' ed il loro 1997 è caratterizzato da un'attività frenetica: partecipazioni ad una serie di e.p. a tiratura limitata - non si superano le 200 copie - edita congiuntamente con il nome MASK dalla Skam e dalla tedesca Musik Aus Strom (per la quale incidono tanto sotto il nome BoC quanto sotto l'alter ego Hell lnterface), l'immancabile manipolo di remix, e molti concerti con Autechre, Plaid e Seefel, e finanche l'apparizione al festival di Phoenix in estate.

Nel febbraio 1998, dopo alcuni mesi di voci insistenti, la Warp conferma di aver messo i Boards of Canada sotto contratto. Così, dopo la pubblicazione di una tiratura rigorosamente limitata su 7" del brano Aquarius, nell'aprile arriva finalmente Music has the right to children. Qualunque iperbole abbiate letto al riguardo, è pienamente giustificata: Music è tanto in termini di qualità assoluta, quanto per capacità di influenzare i movimenti della scena elettronica - mi correggo, della scena e basta; pensate ai Radiohead - uno dei dischi fondamentali del decennio trascorso.

Marcus e Mike rifiniscono gli spunti originali presenti in Hi-scores e mettono a punto una lunga opera di sessantatrè minuti che attraversa le balbuzie sincopate e un po' sinistre di Telephasic workshop, le trasmissioni lunari di Sixtyten, i gorghi ripetitivi di Rue the whirl, alternandosi ad abbozzi sonori che difficilmente superano il minuto e che spesso devono essere annoverati tra le cose migliori del disco. Su questi ultimi, in particolare, Mike sottolinea come "stiamo cercando di comporre in maniera orizzontale, quando è così scontato scrivere aggiungendo e togliendo cose che poi ritornano. Comprendiamo perfettamente il principio per cui se inserisci qualcosa di affascinante in un brano una volta sola costringerai chi ascolta a far partire di nuovo il disco per poterlo riascoltare. E' come quel passaggio di Strawberry fields dove c'è una vocina che dice 'I buried Paul' ed è così nascosta, eppure percepibile, che ti chiedi se l'hai immaginata o se è solo sulla tua copia del disco".

Qualcuno la chiamerà stregoneria, ma rifinendo la propria arte, il duo sembra essere diventato quasi superfluo alla sua epifania: è come se le macchine si animassero e comunicassero senza tramite umano. E' questa forse la ragione per cui Music has the right è così impersonale - niente foto, e neppure le immagini dei bambini in copertina hanno definite sembianze - e personale insieme, perché è l'ascoltatore a decifrarlo e caricarlo di contenuti, grazie alla complicità di frammenti vocali o brevi messaggi. La rivendicazione del diritto all'immaginazione (il reato di cui la censura potrebbe accusare i BoC, come suggerito nella chiusura di One important thought) viene immediatamente recepito dalla stampa specializzata, che dopo avergli giustamente tributato quasi ovunque il titolo di disco del mese e poi dell'anno, nel caso dell'inglese NME, lo inserisce anche nell'elenco dei 25 dischi psichedelici di tutti i tempi (per la cronaca, il primo è Tomorrow never knows dei Beatles).

Epilogo: verso la fase rossa

E poi? Come si fa a dare il seguito a uno dei dischi più acclamati di sempre? Il rischio è quello di avvolgersi su se stessi e finire come i My bloody valentine, ancora alla ricerca del suono perfetto senza che una sola nota abbia visto la luce negli ultimi dieci anni. E' quello che evidentemente devono aver passato anche i nostri se cor rispondono al vero le voci che li hanno dati in studio di registrazione sin dall'estate del 1998 per un fatidico secondo album prima annunciato per l'inizio del 1999 e poi a cadenza costante rinviato a data indefinita.

Le uscite si sono fatte sempre più rarefatte: prima la pubblicazione della Peel session registrata per il programma di Radio One nel giugno 1998 e giudicata dallo stesso Peel come 'eccellente', ma che in realtà poco aggiunge alla conoscenza del duo scozzese, se non la possibilità di recuperare una Happy cycling altrimenti destinata al mercato dei collezionisti (e a brano di chiusura della versione americana di Music has the right to children), poi il contributo agli album per i 10 anni della Warp. Infine, più di un anno fa un nuovo e.p., In a beautiful piace out in the country, che piuttosto che soddisfare gli appetiti ha finito per alimentarli a dismisura, rappresentando il momento più caldo dell'intera discografia. I frammenti vocali si fanno quasi canto nella title-track ed aggiungono una nuova dimensione al contrasto ritmica/melodia del passato; i brani si allungano e sembrano poter durare all'infinito, come un sogno celestiale e visionario (Zoetrope, Kid for today).

Non conosco nessuno che non abbia ascoltato l'e.p. almeno quattro volte di fila appena acquistato, ipnotizzato da quella che Mike chiama 'il potere emotivo della melodia'. E di ipnosi e magia ha parlato anche chi è riuscito a vederli trionfare all'edizione 2001 dell' All Tomorrow's parties, dove ad aggiungere mistero c'erano lunghi drappi neri calati sulla strumentazione del palco. Pochi fortunati, quelli. Ma ora, se state leggendo questo articolo, ascoltando Geogaddi, come io sto facendo, fortunati anche noi. The wait is over.

Discografia

Hi-scores (SKA008, SKAM 1996)

Music has the right to children (WARP55, WARP 1998)

Peel session (WAP114, Warp 1999)

lnabeautifulplaceoutinthecountry (WAP144, WARP 2000)

Geogaddi (WARP101, WARP 2002)

Le dichiarazioni di Mike Sandison sono tratte da un'intervista rilasciata al sito www.xlr8r.com

L'intervista

Era il caso che anche i diretti interessati dicessero al loro; e così, con un breve e veloce scambio di posta elettronica, queste le opinioni e le rivelazioni dei due Boards of Canada.

A lato (p.26)

I Boards Of Canada sono un altro esempio di quella confluenza stilistica che ha portato l'elettronica degli anni '90 ben oltre i confini del dancefloor ... ... ma non si tratta di musica dance che ha cercato un mezzo espressivo per allargare il bacino d'utenza oltre gli amanti della pista. Le radici dei Boards Of Canada appaiono subito più intellettuali e sofisticate rispetto a quelle dei gruppi house e techno che dominano i club di inizio decennio. L'etichetta che pubblica il loro esordio su album è la Warp: inevitabilmente il primo riferimento obbligato è proprio lo stile tipico della label, quella famosa intelligent techno (un neologismo piuttosto infelice, in definitiva) che agli inizi del decennio ha marcato in modo decisivo l'elettronica inglese e lascerà ai posteri opere memorabili di Black Dog, LFO e Nightmares On Wax, per citare solo i nomi più famosi. La Warp nella seconda metà degli anni '90 non è però più all'avanguardia come nel precedente lustre. I suoi nomi di punta non hanno avuto un ricambio sufficiente e perfino fuoriclasse come gli Autechre (per molti versi il riferimento più evidente per i BOC) cominciano ad avere qualche difficoltà a rinnovarsi. La label di Sheffield comincia allora proprio con i Boards Of Canada quel percorso di revisione stilistica 'che la porterà, nel 2001, a farle addirittura incide're gli esordi di Vincent Gallo o di Prefuse 73. E qui arriva il punto sulla musica dei Boards Of Canada. Non si tratta più di sola techno, cosa che non sembra così evidente di primo acchito, ma che costituirà l'importanza futura di "Music Has The Right To Children". Le radici e le sonorità sono elettroniche, questo sì, ma emerge in qualche modo un contesto più aperto, dove il suono sembra espandersi nello spazio - e non nel tempo circolare scandito dall'iteratività ritmica. Più che un groove, c'è una dimensione dilatata e a più ampio respiro che non è talvolta dissimile da quella messa in atto da molti gruppi di area post rock; tant'è vero che anche il pubblico normalmente più interessato all'indie rock che non a proposte dance finisce col ravvedere in quella musica elementi di interesse. Succede che l'elettronica viene messa al servizio di un concetto che si evolve diversamente rispetto alle musiche di matrice essenzialmente ritmica. Finora nella musica elettronica il beat è stato fondamentale, anche quando l'approccio è di ristrutturarlo in funzione di obiettivi che vanno al di là del dancefloor: vedi il caso del trip hop, che rallenta e rende esplicitamente musicale l'asciuttezza e il minimalismo dell'hip hop. I Boards Of Canada, al contrario, iniziano ad utilizzare tecniche e modalità sonore che sono normalmente appannaggio della musica di campionatori e sequencer per creare atmosfere astratte, spaziali, quasi surreali - e non per forza strutturate attorno al ritmo, che per quanto sia complesso e articolato non è mai il conduttore principale della musica, al contrario ricca di tastiere sognanti, suggestioni melodiche, atmosfere sospese. Quindi elettronica sì, ma senz'altro più quella che lega il kraut rock alla ambient di fine anni '80, che nori quella della generazione house. "Music Has The Right To Children" è un disco imperfetto, ancora in sospeso tra una continuità con la techno dei primi '90 e la sua successiva evoluzione; ma rimane di grandissima importanza nell'elettronica di fine millennio, quasi confrontabile con quella avuta da "Moon Safari" degli Air, anch'esso del '98. In dischi come quello ci sono le radici del suono che definimmo qualche mese or sono easytronica: l'evoluzione del nuovo downtempo, sempre più slegata dalle imposizioni ritmiche dell'hip hop, forte melodicamente, ricca di atmosfere psichedeliche e di grande suggestione. Per i Boards Of Canada, è tempo di confermarsi un gruppo adulto dell'elettronica del nuovo secolo. Bizarre

Note: translation provided by Orbited insanitarium^[10]

The Colors Of Electronic Music

"In space no one can hear you scream, which the universe is a variety of turquoise. American researchers have revealed that the average color, that is, the one that would be obtained if all visible light were mixed, is a greenish hue between aquamarine and turquoise. The universe has already gone through it's blue period, dominated by young stars, and is currently in it's green phase, which basically corresponds to it's middle age. In it's final phase, red will dominate"

It is with this news that a few days Warp decides to announce the imminent release of Geogaddi, the new boards of canada album. The operation, in the most classic style of the Sheffield label, triggers at least a couple of considerations in the most attentive to the iconography of the Scottish duo: the first is that taking into account the abundant use of turquoise in the covers and titles of the BoC, the news seemed almost perfectly artificial; the second, more disturbing, is that, if you look at the cover of Geogaddi - of children who go around a tree in a chromatic scale that varies from yellow to red - one wonders if this is not their definitive album. And then, before it's too late, lets tell their story.

Mike Sandison (born July 14, 1971) and Marcus Eoin (born May 27, 1973) have known each other since childhood. when, through numerous changes of residence of their respected families, from the north of England to the state of Alberta in Canada and back, they begin to play different instruments and show a strong passion for synthesizers and samplers. Their first experiments comment on visual projects, documentaries shot in a home way with a super-8. It is in homage to the National Film Board of Canada, whose films are eagerly consumed by the two and their small group of friends, that the original formation takes it's name: it is 1986 and Marcus plays the bass, but what will come in the following years it is in a certain way already anticipated by the intertwining of instruments with the sounds emitted by personal computers and with those captured by radio and television. The halo of mystery that surrounds the activity of the very first BoCs is thick and dense: it is said that they have changed formation fourteen times, that they have been a real exception - hard to be surprised, given that a fascinating anomaly they still are today - in the Scottish live circuit, having to reconcile their influences ranging from the Cocteau twins to Front 242. With the need to support an almost infinite series of cover bands dedicated to glam-rock, and that to avoid the shame they started to autonomously set up outdoor happenings, where greeted by huge bonfires, he attended film-musical installations in which old television themes or nursery rhymes of childhood memory were tortured by pressing electronic rhythms or turned over with over-insisting of messages in the backwards. What is certain is that in 1989 the Boards of Canada are now reduced to an essential core of three elements - Mike, Marcus and a certain Chris -, who decides to create his own recording studio. called Hexagon sun, in the Pentland Hills in north-east Scotland (the open countryside surrounding Edinburgh). For a long time they recorded a harvest of e.p and albums for the self-financed Music70, but none of which went beyond the narrow confines of the family circle and friendships; recalls Mike, "We've been making music since school in the 1980s and no one will ever listen to it. Our friends and families are the only ones who hear everything we write and that's what we really matters. We must remain speechless for how much material we have on tape"

The turquoise phase

Not everything remains unknown: in 1996, Twoism, yet another limited edition work ends up in the Manchester Skam label and it's melancholy melodies supported by dry and slow electronic scores convince Sean Booth of Autechre to call Marcus on the same day and Mike - who have remained a duo in the meantime. What comes out of this meeting is Hi-scores, an ep that is actually more of a mini (six tracks for about thirty minutes) that fully shows the BoC aesthetic: a simple yet effective writing that mixes subtle hi-hop. To references to the first electro wave (Nlogax), but on which an immense melodic capacity dominates that puts it a notch above the pile. That the group is already mature is evidenced by the presence of the future classic Turquoise hexagon sun (later reprised in the debut album) and the long and final Everything you do is a balloon, which gives the sensation of flying across the ocean on a air balloon. Difficult to find a category or a label; the deepest waters of the songs are too agitated to be ambient, but also too soft and dreamlike to be techno. Also for this reason BoC became 'hot property' and their 1997 was characterised by a frenetic activity: participation in a series of limited edition EPs - no more than 200 copies - published jointly with the name MASK by Skam and the German company. Musik aus Strom (for which they record both under the name BoC and under the alter ego Hell Interface), the inevitable handful of remixes, and many concerts with Autechre, Plaid and Seefel, and even the appearance at the phoenix festival in summer. In Febuary 1998 after a few months of persistent rumours, Warp confirms that is has signed the Boards of Canada. So, after the publication of a 7 "edition of the song Aquarius, Music has the right to children finally arrives in April. Any hyperbole you have read about it is justified: Music is as much in terms of absolute quality as it is for the ability to influence the movements of the electronic scene - I correct myself, of the scene and that's it; think of Radiohead - one of the fundamental records from the past decade. Marcus and Mike refine the original ideas present in Hi-scores and develop a long work of sixty-three minutes that crosses the syncopated and somewhat sinister stammering of Telephasic workshop, the lunar transmissions of Sixtyten, the repetitive eddies of Rue the whirl, alternating to sound sketches that hardly exceed one minute and that often must be counted among the best things on the record. On the latter, in particular, Mike underlines how "we are trying to compose horizontally, when it is so obvious to write by adding and removing things that then come back. We perfectly understand the principle that if you insert something fascinating into a song only once you will force who listens to play the record again to be able to listen to it again. It's like that passage in Strawberry fields where there's a little voice that says 'I Buried Paul' and it's so hidden, yet audible, that you wonder if you imagined it or if it's only on your copy of the disk ". Some call it witchcraft, but by refining their art, the duo seems to have become almost superflou at their epiphany: it is as if the machines come to life and communicate without a human link. This is perhaps the reason the images of children on the cover have defined appearance - and personal at the same time, because it is the listener who decrypts it and loads it with content, thanks to the complicity of vocal fragments or short messages. The claim of the right to the imagination (the offence of which the censors could accuse the BoC, as suggested in the closing of One important thought) is immediately acknowledged by the specialised press, which dope having rightly paid him the title of album of the month and then of the year almost everywhere, in the case of English NME, he also inserts it in the list of 25 psychedelic discs of all time (for the record, the first is Tommorow never knows of the Beatles).

Epilogue: towards the red phase

Then? How do you follow up one of the most acclaimed records ever? The risk is to wrap around themselves and end up like My Bloody Valentine, still looking for the perfect sound without a single note having seen the light in the last ten years. It is what evidently our people too must have gone through if the rumours that given in the recording studio since the summer of 1998 for a fateful second album first announced for the beginning of 1999and then on a constant basis must have passed. Postponed to an indefinite date. The releases have become increasingly rarefied: first the publication of the peel session recorded for the Radio One program in June 1998 and judged by Peel himself as 'excellent', but which actually ads little to the knowledge of of the Scottish duo, if not the possibility of recovering a Happy cycling otherwise destined for the collectors market (and closing track of the American version of Music has the right to children), then the contribution to the albums for the ten years of Warp. Finally, more than a year ago a new e.p., in a beautiful place out in the country, which rather than satisfying appetites ended up feeding them out of all proportion. Representing the hottest moment of the entire discography. The vocal fragments are almost singing in the title track and add a new dimension to the contrast rhythmic / melodic of the past: the songs get longer and seem to be able to last indefinitely, like a celestial and visionary dream (Zoetrope, Kid for today). I don't know anyone who hasn't listened to the e.p. at least four times in a row just purchased., mesmerised by what Mike calls 'the emotional power of melody'. And those who managed to see them triumph at the 2001 edition of the All tommorows parties also talked about hypnosis and magic, where to add mystery there were long black drapes lowered over the stage equipment. A few lucky ones. But now, if you are reading this article, listening to Geogaddi, as I am doing, lucky us too. The wait is over.

The interview

It was the case that even those directly concerned told theirs; and so, with a short and quick exchange of e-mails, these are the opinions and revelations of the two Boards of Canada.

Side (p.26)

The Boards of Canada are another example of that stylistic confluence that took 1990s electronics far beyond the confines of the dance floor... ...but it is not about dance music that has sought an expressive means to broaden the catchment area beyond the lovers of the track. The roots of the Boards of Canada immediately appear more intellectual and sophisticated than those of the house and techno groups that dominated the early twentieth century clubs. The label that publishes their debut album is Warp: inevitably the first obligatory reference is precisely the typical style of the label, the famous one intelligent techno (a rather unfortunate neologism, ultimately) which at the beginning of the decade decisively marked English electronics and will leave to posterity memorable works of Black dog, LFO and Nightmares On Wax, to name only the most famous names. The Warp in the second half of the 90s, however, is no longer avant-garde as in the previous decade. It's top names have not had a replacement sufficient and even champions like Autechre (in many ways the most evident reference for BOCs) they begin to have some difficulty in renewing themselves. The Sheffield label are starting to have some difficulties in renewing. The Sheffield label then begins precisely with the Boards of Canada that stylistic revision process 'that will lead it, in 2001, to make them even record the debuts of Vincent Gallo or Prefuse 73. And here comes the point about the Boards' music of Canada. It is no longer just techno, which doesn't seem so obvious at first glance, but which will constitute the future importance of "Music Has The Right To Children". The roots and sounds are electronic, yes, but somehow a more open context emerges, where the sound seems to expand in space - and not in a circular time marked by rhythmic iteratively. More than a groove, there is a dilated and broader dimension that is sometimes not dissimilar from that put in place by many post rock groups; so much so that even the public normally more interested in indie rock than in dance proposals end up seeing elements of interest in that music. It happens that the electronic beat was fundamental, even when the approach is to restructure it according to objectives that go beyond the dancefloor: see the case of trip hop, which slows down and makes dryness and minimalism explicitly musical. Hip hop. The Boards of Canada, on the contrary, began to use techniques and sound modes that are normally the prerogative of the samplers and sequencers to create abstract, spatial, almost surreal atmospheres - and not for structured around the rhythm, which, however complex and articulated, is never the main conductor of the music, on the contrary full of dreamy keyboards, melodic suggestions, suspended atmospheres. So electronic, yes, but certainly more the one that binds krout rock to the ambient of the late 80s, rather than that of the house generation. "Music Has The Right To Children" is an imperfect record, still in suspense between a continuity with the techno of the early 90s and it's subsequent evolution; but it remains of great importance in end-of-the-millennium electronics, almost comparable to that of Air's "Moon Safari", also from 1998. In records like that there are the roots of the sound we defined easytronica a few months ago: the evolution of the new downtempo, increasingly disconnected from the rhythmic imposition of hip hop, melodically strong, rich in psychedelic atmospheres and of great suggestion. For the Boards of Canada, it is time to confirm themselves as an adult group of twentieth century electronics. Bizarre.

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The Last Unexplored Area of Boards of Canada

title	The Last Unexplored Area of Boards of Canada
author	Joe Sato, Nakamoto Hiroyuni
publication	Buzz
date	2002/03
issue	31
pages	12-16

"The Last Unexplored Area of Boards of Canada" is an interview (In Japanese) by Joe Sato, Nakamoto Hiroyuni originally published Mar. 2002 in Buzz magazine Number 31, pp.12-16.

This article needs to be transcribed. If you can provide a transcription, please update this article!

エクスペリメンタル・ミュージック最後の秘境ボーズ・オブ・カナダ

Note: The original magazine was scanned to PDF. That PDF was sent to an online OCR tool to be converted to Japanese character text. The resulting text was translated on a basic level by Google Translate. That translation has been rewritten and interpreted into proper English by Toni L'Avon.

The Last Unexplored Area of Boards of Canada

It is already a miracle in not only electronic music, but in the entirety of music. The only thing that truly exists is the moment. Everything inside of me is entranced and captivated by a very particular sound. This sound reverberated and flowed from Boards of Canada's release - Geogaddi. Once, a band called My Bloody Valentine changed the world with its sweet and layered, sugar coated and heavily sculpted sound. Today we meet two musicians from Scotland, Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin who have once again reshaped our entire perception of music. This will be their sixth public release, but the people behind the music are still very much a mystery. Music Has the Right to Children, which had been entirely distinct from the Hip-Hop, electronic and experimental music of the time that it was often associated with, created the backdrop for the long awaited second album, Geogaddi, the contents of which was far exceeding the boundaries of imagination created by the listener's anticipation and craving for more of the Sandison's sounds. They tend to be illusive and very shy of public exposure and interviews but, to my surprise and seemingly by miracle, this will be their first ever interview in Japan. We conducted the interview by email and I was anxiously awaiting a reply which, in turn, arrived safely. Now we can begin to peer beneath the illusive cloak of secrecy and begin to build a picture of the source of the sonic mastery below. It would all become clear.

Boards of Canada are not ones to involve themselves with the media too readily and their true identities are not known at all in Japan. Through this interview conducted via Email, I found that Mike and Marcus are each different characters with interesting personalities...

[Unintelligible section omitted]

[Unintelligible section omitted]

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In An Imaginary Place Out In The Country

title	In An Imaginary Place Out In The Country
author	Ryotaro Wada, Ito Eisuke, Aoki Tatsuya, Iizuka Satoshi, Hashimoto Satoshi, Honma Satoshi
publication	Cookie Scene
date	2002/03
issue	24
pages	09-15

"In An Imaginary Place Out In The Country" is an interview (in Japanese) by Ryotaro Wada, Ito Eisuke, et al. originally published Mar. 2002 in Cookie Scene magazine Number 24, pp. 09-15.

This article needs to be transcribed. If you can provide a transcription, please update this article!

質問作成、文/和田晃太郎 質問作成、取材、翻訳/伊藤英嗣 質問作成/青木達也、飯塚耐志、橋本聡、本間聡

This article needs to be translated. If you can provide a translation, please update this article!

Note: The original magazine was scanned to PDF. That PDF was sent to an online OCR tool to be converted to Japanese character text. The resulting text was translated on a basic level by Google Translate. That translation has been rewritten and interpreted into proper English by Toni Lanov.

Initially it was a drop of water. Small ripples flowed and gathered upon the surface and began to spread. Eventually Music Has the Right to Children was given to the world in 1998, released under both Warp and SKAM record labels. The Boards of Canada and the impact of Music Has the Right to Children was strongly felt. The brothers engineering direct pluronic music, ambient atmospheres and utilizing aspects of Hip-Hop, but all genres of music were used to propagate their unique sound. Words begin to fade into the music and become one with the sound, but they maintain their sense of direction and flow, a sound full of immersive vitality. The beauty of their sound proceeded to propagate and quickly spread throughout the world. Music Has the Right to Children had become an exceptionally prominent seller on the Indie charts in the UK. Their signature identity, their je ne sais quoi and otherworldly sounds were immediately recognizable but they didn't show you the whole picture with ease. Giving few interviews and rarely seen in photographs, their style and their activities were constantly wrapped in a veil. Sometimes referred to as 'Scotland's greatest mystery'.

Their sound continues to impact the music scene in a variety of ways. The methodology, sound texture being a duality of sonic mastery. IDM and post-rock were being sold readily with coined nicknames such as 'Nupsychedelic', but still, Boards of Canada's sound is something that doesn't fade, it continues to grow into something beautiful over time. Their sound is unique. Meeting and exceeding the high expectations of future releases that fans were left with after their 1998 release, Geogaddi (2002) saw the light of day. Sounds and phrases, everything is composed of great beauty. Great moments of euphoria are reached in the new release. Within lies a psychedelic world that only the brothers Sandison can create. In addition to this, the few that have seen them at a live setting have also told of the charming characteristics of their, often intimate, live performances. The perfect blend of both psychedelic video and sound entrances the listener with all senses.

I am overjoyed to be interviewing both Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin, the masters behind the music, listening intently as I am aware of some of our readers anticipation and interest in hearing their story. Although I am not aware of how familiar they will be to Cookie Scene readers, I find that their sound alone leads me to want to know the story beneath. I tell myself: 'Before beginning this interview, I will want to recap their history'. Geogaddi was distributed to the press upon its release. I find myself wondering 'Are their four, or perhaps even five members of the group to create such a diverse sound?' The answer to this is now apparent. In 1995 the band and a group of their lucky friends gathered in Hexagon Sun studios in the Pentland Hills, Scotland and held an ordinance for their new release. Hexagon Sun is often the venue of small scale, closed audiovisual events for members of the collective. Their early releases were on a self-produced label 'Music70'. The very first release had been layered with melancholic melodies and rough rhythm sections.

[Unintelligible section omitted]

Boards of Canada utilized Hexagon Sun visuals in live settings, often accompanied by depressive and subliminal texts, gradually increasing the degree of audiovisual perfectionism.

Mike and Marcus immigrated between Scotland and southern Canada as children. The original form of Boards of Canada was based around a 1950's microphone, making experimental sounds using borrowed drums, synths and tape machines. Also utilizing 8mm cine-film video. A great deal of their influence comes from the soundtracks of educational documentaries, movies and music. The name 'Boards of Canada' coming from a Canadian documentary service: 'The Film Boards of Canada'. In 1996, Christ who was originally the group's 3rd member and helped to compose certain tracks on the Twoism EP, left the group leaving Mike and Marcus to continue. This year in London, the brothers performed a live show at an intimate Lighthouse venue on the River Thames, complete with super 8mm video for the duration. I attended this event, the 'Warp Lighthouse Party' seeing other artists from WarpRecords perform along with the Boards of Canada. Tortoise and Autechure are other notable appearances.

Hell Interface is the Board's side project and focuses mainly on intricate remix work, often sublime.

On February 2nd 2002, their long silence was ended and their second warp LP, Geogaddi emerged from the caverns and Warp Records gave away several releases for the press. Boards of Canada's name began to be well known in Japan. Four years ago, in the United Kingdom, the brothers appeared on the long established 'John peel radio show'. Peel referred to the broadcasting of it as 'one of his best sessions'.

Hexagon Sun began a regular event and referred to said event only as 'Redmoon'. People sat around a large bonfire akin to an old nursery rhyme. In February, I continued to scan over the UK indie chart Top 200.

This interview will comprise of three parts.Part one will be applying their roots, they tell me that they were releasing records from childhood.

For us Japanese, the series of words that 'Boards of Canada' is, isn't. We have but a small idea of the image, the phrase is only applicable or understandable to those who's native language is English.

Recently, one feels that the commercial music scene is coming back in a way, but there were always artists with a particular palette in terms of audiovisual creations. In many ways, the video is now viewed as one of the elements to music creation. In some cases, the videos were never intended to be reflective of the music, but were purposed for it in such a manor anyway.

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Worte sind wie Nadeln, auf jeden Fall gefährlich für schöne, bunte Luftballons

title	Worte sind wie Nadeln, auf jeden Fall gefährlich für schöne, bunte Luftballons
author	Hendrik Kröz
publication	Intro Magazine
date	2002/03
issue	No.92
pages	32-34

"Worte sind wie Nadeln, auf jeden Fall gefährlich für schöne, bunte Luftballons" is an interview (in German) by Hendrik Kröz originally published Mar. 2002 in Intro magazine No. 92, pp. 32-34.

Worte sind wie Nadeln, auf jeden Fall gefährlich für schöne, bunte Luftballons

Boards Of Canada kultivieren seit jeher ein Image des Verschwindens. Sie brüten jahrelang über einer Platte, überreichen das kostbare Geschenk dann in aller Heimlichkeit und ziehen sich wieder komplett zurück. Fotos gibt es keine, Interviews sind rar, und auch live bekommt man sie sehr selten zu Gesicht - das letzte Mal im April 2001 beim All Tomorrow's Parties Festival in Camber Sands, Sussex. Damit lenken Boards Of Canada die Rezeption auf ihre plastisch anmutende, im Niemandsland von Traum und Suggestion operierende Musik. Die Illusion einer persönlichen Verlinkung wird für jene, die in ihren Bann geraten, durch nichts getrübt - weder durch Einblicke ins Privatleben von Mike Sandison und Marcus Eoin noch durch andere Störfaktoren wie Events mit vielen tausend Menschen. Angenehmer Nebeneffekt: Es entsteht ein hübscher Mythos. An diesem wird mit dem zweiten Album "Geogaddi" munter weitergebastelt.

Rückblende. Schottland 1984

Mike und Marcus sitzen in ihrem kleinen Studio in der Nähe von Edinburgh und nehmen zusammen mit Freunden Soundtracks für ihre Super-8-Filme und Videocollagen auf. Hauptinspiration dafür sind TV-Dokus der National Film Board Of Canada. Nicht die einzige Obskurität in ihrem Privatarchiv - die beiden sammeln viel, was im Fernsehen kommt -, aber jene, die ihrer Band den Namen geben soll. Es sind die letzten Tage des Exotendaseins für elektronische Musiker - und so plagen sie sich mit den unzähligen Rock-Coverbands ihrer Stadt herum. Kein langer Kampf, denn der Paradigmenwechsel kam bekanntlich schneller, als diese es sich wünschten. Plötzlich gehörten die Schwarzlicht-Diskos der Vergangenheit an und wurden von hippiesken Outdoor-Happenings abgelöst. Boards Of Canada fanden sich inmitten Gleichgesinnter wieder - was sie damals noch zu schätzen wussten. Doppelt. Und dreifach. Mit ihrer Kombination von Filmprojektion, Kinderschallplatten und monotonen Beats waren sie oft bis zum Sonnenaufgang dabei. Aber es sollte mehr als der Soundtrack für einen Augenblick sein, deshalb gründeten sie flugs ein Label (music70) und schickten Tapes mit dem Namen "twoism" auf die Reise. Ganze sechs Jahre später landete eines davon bei skam records, dem Label von Autechre. Deren Sean Booth zögerte nicht lange und holte all das an Geschwindigkeit nach, was in dieser Geschichte bisher verbummelt wurde: Er fuhr noch am selben Tag gen Norden, um Boards Of Canada für eine 12-Inch zu verpflichten. Allerdings hatte die Sache einen Haken: Die Band musste die Produktion der 500er-Auflage selbst bezahlen. Wenn das für sie in Ordnung ginge, so Booth damals, würde skam die Kosten für die zweite EP, "Hi Scores", übernehmen. Es ging. Danach war aber erst mal Schluss mit Highspeed. Das erste Album sollte erst 1998 erscheinen - dafür aber mit einem besonders pfiffigen Titel: "Music Has The Right To Children".

Traumfänger

"Music Has The Right To Children" hatte es in sich. Um das zu spüren, durfte man sich allerdings nicht vom Kontext blenden lassen - das Label Warp bzw. Vergleiche mit Plaid oder Autechre waren in diesem Fall nur vage Richtungsbestimmungen. Wenn es einem gelang, diese zu ignorieren, malte das Album als großzügige Gegenleistung ein Fragezeichen in den Himmel. Ein seltsames Wechselspiel aus Abgründen und Euphorie, verknüpft zu einem organischen Ganzen, war ihnen da gelungen. In sich irgendwie schizophren. Aber funktional. Und die Klangmixtur war betörend: kaleidoskopartige, seltsam eiernde Synthietexturen, simple Melodien und langsame, in minutiöser Kleinarbeit gezimmerte Beats. Das I-Tüpfelchen aber waren die darauf verwendeten Stimmen, deren Bearbeitung zum Markenzeichen der Band werden sollte. Denn Boards Of Canada interessiert nicht die Stimme in ihrer direkten Verfügbarkeit, sondern ihre Verfremdung - gepitcht, gescratcht und gecuttet, gerade so, wie es die Beats verlangen. Musik zur Zeit - und doch wie aus einer anderen, vergangenen. Ein passender Vergleich: "Strawberry Fields Forever", John Lennons Hommage an seine Kindergartenzeit. In Abgrenzung zu den meisten anderen Veröffentlichungen unserer Tage geht es bei Boards Of Canada nicht um den oberflächlichen Reiz, sondern darum, die Musik tief im Gedächtnis der Hörer einzunisten, damit sie zu gegebener Zeit zurückkehrt - als musikalischer Alien, der wundervolle Dreiklänge im Kopf entstehen lässt. Da wird aus einem Kinderlachen schon mal ein Sonnenstrahl. Nicht nur in unseren Tagträumen, sondern auch nachts, wenn wir nicht schlafen können, weil der Vollmond ins Fenster leuchtet. In diesen Momenten offenbaren sich allerdings auch die Abgründe dieser Musik. Angst fressen Euphorie. Oder wie es der amerikanische Musikjournalist Steve Nicholls (vom xlr8r-Magazin) so schön auf den Punkt brachte: "It was like the tantalizingly elusive parts of a beautiful dream that you struggle to grasp after waking." Boards Of Canada hatten auch für mich immer etwas Morgentau-artiges. Wie einst Carpenter schicken sie einen unschuldig wirkenden Nebel auf die Menschen zu, der diese erst sanft umgibt, bevor sie an ihm festkleben. Dann werden plötzlich auch andere, weniger einladende Facetten sichtbar. Und warum? Sie wollen uns manipulieren. Und das funktioniert auf ihrem ersten Album perfekt: Zuerst wird man mit den Licht- und Schattenspielen, die alles beherrschen, vertraut gemacht. Dann tauchen Nebelhörner und geisterhafte Voice-Samples auf, geraten in die Speichen der Beats - die Maschine kommt in Fahrt. Ein leises Interlude, diffuse dunkle Nebelschwaden kriechen hin und her, ein seltsames Rattern fährt dazwischen, dann der Break - ein weit vorne stehendes schnarrendes Geräusch, nur ganz kurz, prägnant wie ein Stromschlag. Das reicht, um die beabsichtigte Reaktion auszulösen: Entsetzen. Und weiter geht die Klangreise. Eine kalte Rhythmusspur schiebt sich vom Rand ins Geschehen, kommt näher und näher. Doch kurz bevor das Monster zupackt, fällt plötzlich Tageslicht durchs Fenster, und die Wand aus vergilbten Fotos, quälenden Erinnerungen und Schreckgespenstern verschwindet. Jetzt ist man bereit für große majestätische Hits - die mit "Roygbiv", "Aquarius" und "Turquoise Hexagon Sun" gleich reihenweise vorhanden sind.

Warten auf Erlösung

Boards Of Canada sind keine Band für den schnellen Kick. Es wäre geradezu frevlerisch, so etwas bei ihnen zu suchen. Um beim Bild zu bleiben: Man kann die Band als Dauerinfusion sehen, von der man nicht mehr loskommt. Je länger man dran hängt, je mehr man sich mit ihr auseinandersetzt, desto spannender wird der Trip. Irgendwo zwischen den Beats haben die beiden ein Geheimnis versteckt, eine ganz spezielle Mechanik. Wo diese sich genau befindet, ja, was sie überhaupt ist, sie selbst wollten es uns damals nicht erzählen - waren noch nicht mal gewillt, neue Hinweise zu geben. Das Studio sollte für eine viel zu lange Zeit ruhen. Bis 2001 genau geschrieben. Da erschien "In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country", eine EP aus himmelblauem Vinyl. Das war angemessen, denn die Stücke klangen so sanft wie das Rauschen von Blättern im Sommerwind. Trotzdem hing das (schon für viel früher angekündigte) neue Album wie ein reifer Apfel am Baum, wollte aber nicht runterfallen. Das Gerücht, Boards Of Canada säßen in einem Bunker in den schottischen Highlands, um "Geogaddi" den letzten Schliff zu geben, wurde von Warp zwar bestätigt, mehr drang aber nicht nach außen. In den die Band betreffenden Newsgroups im Internet tippten sich Nerds die Finger wund, und manche, die einen neuen Track aus dem Netz gefischt hatten, erzählten den anderen davon (ohne Angabe der entsprechenden URL natürlich). Das las sich dann so: "Track starts off with a typical BOC keyboard, then the beat comes in with bongos playing out of time, voices emerge from the depths of the song, which ends with radio interference sound." Rätsel über Rätsel. Das ließ die Zeit des Wartens wenigstens kurzweilig werden. Irgendwie ist das ja auch schön, dass es noch Bands gibt, deren Alben nicht nach dreimaligem Hören im Regal landen, sondern jahrelange Auseinandersetzung ermöglichen, ja, fordern. Dieses für Boards Of Canada typische Dranbleiben am Backkatalog wird ja auch mit diesem Artikel aufgegriffen. Und eines der schönsten Rätsel vom letzten Track auf "Music Has The Right To Children" - dort hatte eine sachlich klingende Frauenstimme (ähnlich wie die auf Tribe Called Quests "Midnight Marauders") vor einem Gerichtsverfahren gewarnt, das den LiebhaberInnen dieser Platte aufgrund bestimmter Inhalte irgendwann mal drohen könnte. Hmm ...

Mehr als nur Musik

Boards Of Canada betonen die Doppelbödigkeit ihrer Musik stets durch Streuung bestimmter Subtexte, die vortäuschen, Schlüssel zum Verständnis zu sein. Das Gemunkel über versteckte, möglicherweise sublim wirkende Botschaften begleitet jede Veröffentlichung. Auf der letzten EP ist zum Beispiel in den Rillen ein Ausschnitt aus einem Interview mit Amo Bishop Roden, der Führerin der Branch Davidians, einer christlichen Gemeinschaft, die in der Nähe von Waco, Texas wohnt, versteckt. Zuerst versteht man nichts, dann plötzlich den Satz "... come and live in a beautiful place out in the country." Das könnte auch das Lebensmotto von Boards Of Canada sein, von wegen sein Heil in der absoluten Einsamkeit der Natur finden - freilich (bzw. hoffentlich) ohne die sonstigen Aktivitäten der Sekte; diese ist ja vor allem durch ein schlimmes Blutbad berühmt geworden. "Geogaddi" (geo = Erde, gaddi = Kind [auf indisch]), das neue Album von Boards Of Canada, treibt das Spiel mit den Andeutungen auf die Spitze. Aufgenommen wurde es in einem alten Luftschutzbunker, doch über die Beweggründe, einen solch finsteren Ort zum Musikmachen aufzusuchen, hüllt man sich in Schweigen. Dafür ist das begleitende Artwork - verwackelte Aufnahmen von kleinen Kindern, dunklen Engeln und Kaleidoskop-Klimbim im Photoshop-Style - recht beredt in seiner pyramidalen Endzeitsymbolik. Auf dem Cover schwebt ein Mensch mit ausgebreiteten Armen vor einem Sonnenuntergang, der aussieht, als sei er der letzte auf diesem Planeten. Und die Gesamtlänge des Albums beträgt - na klar - exakt 66 Minuten und 6 Sekunden. Sandison und Eoin sind erklärtermaßen Anhänger der Illuminatus-Trilogie von Robert Anton Wilson und Robert Shea (1975). Und bestimmt haben sie auch Kenneth Angers surrealen Horrorklassiker "Lucifer Rising" (1974/76) auf Video. In diesem gibt es eine Szene, die Bobby Beausoleil (Lucifer) in der Badewanne zeigt; der Raum ist in verschossen türkisfarbenes Licht getaucht, und in der Mitte steht eine dunkelrote Pyramide. Legt man die Cover von "Music Has The Right To Children" und "Geogaddi" nebeneinander, ergibt sich haargenau dieselbe Farbkombination. Nur ein Zufall? Vielleicht. Aber es würde schon zu den beiden Verschwörungstheoretikern passen. Die Beatles-Nummer, Paul sterben zu lassen, lieferte ihnen einst die Blaupause für so manch andere Verschwörungsidee. Und man kann sich gut vorstellen, wieviel Spaß es Thomas Pynchons kleinen Brüdern macht, die Spuren zu legen, die von ihren Exegeten in den Newsgroups - berechenbar as berechenbar could be - dankbar für uferlose Diskurse aufgegriffen werden. So wird private Feldforschung zum leckeren Köder: Die Gleichgesinnten hat man sowieso auf seiner Seite, und die Misstrauischen, die zunächst auf Abwehr schalten, werden sich - genau aus diesem Grund - schon irgendwann auf die Suche nach Links zwischen Musik und Verschwörungsfiktion machen. Oder ist alles doch viel weniger clever konstruiert? Könnte ja auch sein, dass Mike und Marcus schlicht und ergreifend Fans sind. Auch gut, dann haben sie ganz ohne Hintergedanken und quasi als angenehmen Nebeneffekt einen Metadiskurs in Gang gesetzt, der nicht mehr zu bremsen ist - zumindest, solange sie sich so wortkarg geben.

Kaffee, Kuchen und Geogaddi

Warp und Zomba haben zur Listening-Session von "Geogaddi" geladen - da die Band untersagt hat, vor der Veröffentlichung Promos zu verschicken. Fick das System. Einmal mehr - auch wenn es Verkäufe kostet. Wie auch immer: Im Roten Salon, Berlin, gibt es Kaffee und Kuchen. Und Musik. Natürlich stilsicher inszeniert. Die Vorhänge werden zugezogen, ein mysteriöses Dia wird eingelegt, und die Show beginnt. Die Spannung steigt. Beim Einstieg verzichten Boards Of Canada diesmal auf das softe Einschmeicheln, statt dessen füllt ein gewaltiges Dröhnen den Raum. Mit "Music Is Math", dem zweiten Stück, kommen die Beats dazu - unglaublich, wie filigran diese wieder zusammengebastelt sind. Und beängstigend, wie dunkel das alles klingt. Die Stimmen kreisen in einer Art Echoschleife durch die Luft, als ob sie keinen Ausgang finden. Und auch drüben, im klanglich angelegten Park bei den Kindern, stimmt irgendwas nicht - die Orgel vom Leierkastenmann kratzt und knirscht ("Beware The Friendly Stranger"). Der Kaffee schwappt kalt in den Tassen. Keine Zeit zum Trinken. Oder besser: keine Ruhe. Gut, dass wir uns nicht selbst Gedanken machen müssen. Boards Of Canada nehmen uns das ab, liefern uns die passende Assoziation: Eine TV-Stimme erzählt etwas von heißer Lava, die ins Meer fließt. Zeit für einen Stimmungswechsel - und einen ersten Hit: "Julie And Candy" biegt mit seiner dahingepfiffenen Melodie und dem euphorisierenden Popflair fast schon erschreckend gutgelaunt um die Ecke. Auch diesmal gibt es wieder Voice-Samples en masse - die ganze Zeit wird irgendwas erklärt, verkündet und gefragt, ganz so, als wollten Boards Of Canada eine große leere Sprechblase durch Überdruck zum Platzen bringen. Erstaunlich, wie es ihnen gelingt, dass dieser Overkill trotzdem nach Musik klingt. Und manchmal gar nach Pop. Beispielsweise, wenn sich bei "1969" eine nymphenhafte Stimme aus dem Kommunikations-Dickicht schält und einfach zu singen beginnt. Anders als bei "Music Has The Right To Children" gehen die Stücke diesmal nicht ineinander über, sondern sind durch Pausen getrennt. Das sorgt für Suspense. Die Gesamtstruktur von "Geogaddi" ist dagegen dieselbe: Längere Exkursionen ins Beat-Entertainment wechseln sich mit atmosphärischen Zwischenepisoden ab: Kinderspielplatz, Meer ("The Beach At Redpoint") und Himmel ("Sunshine Recorder"). Auf "Geogaddi" gibt es euphorische, aber auch verstörende Momente. Der Trick besteht wie immer darin, ganz allmählich die Lautstärke zu erhöhen bzw. Sounds unvermittelt auf den Hörer loszulassen. Bei "Over The Horizon Radar" hat man den plastischen Eindruck, von monströsen Rotorblättern bedrängt zu werden, und die mechanischen Beats von "Gyroscope" (das für die Ausrichtung von Raumstationen zuständige Gerät) beginnen irgendwann regelrecht, Löcher in die Luft zu hacken - Boards Of Canada haben auf "Geogaddi" viel mit Raumklang gearbeitet. "The Devil Is In The Details", der Satanstrack mit Ansage, enttäuscht dagegen: Mönchschor, mystisches Wassertröpfeln und die Schreie des dunklen Kindes klingen eher nach B-Movie als nach Endzeithorror. Soll das alles sein? Nein. Als ich schon nicht mehr damit gerechnet habe, kommt er doch noch, dieser unendlich sehnsüchtige Loop, der als Vorbote von "Geogaddi" auf der BOC-Webseite zu hören war. Alles ist wieder im Lot. Das Stück heißt "A Is To B As B Is To C". Da hätten wir es wieder, das verflixte Dreieck.

... noch Fragen?

Wie nicht anders zu erwarten war, halten sich Boards Of Canada mit Kommentaren zu "Geogaddi" äußerst bedeckt. Ein persönliches Gespräch sei nicht erwünscht, ließen sie via Plattenfirma wissen. Wenn unbedingt nötig, würden sie fünf ausgewählten Magazinen E-Mail-Interviews gewähren. Um es kurz zu machen: Es war nötig. Auch wenn bereits im Vorfeld klar war, dass sie nicht unbedingt aus dem Nähkästchen plaudern würden. Denn Worte sind wie Nadeln, auf jeden Fall gefährlich für schöne, bunte Luftballons. Und deswegen geht das auch in Ordnung für uns.

Unter www.intro.de verlosen wir 5 exemplare des neuen Boards of Canada-Albums "Blue Window"

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El Cielo Herido

title	El Cielo Herido
author	David Broc
publication	Mondo Sonoro
date	2002/03
issue	83
pages	28-29

"El Cielo Herido" is an interview (in Spanish) by David Broc originally published Mar. 2002 in Mondo Sonoro magazine Issue 83, pp.28-29.

El Cielo Herido

Culpables, en parte, de la reconversión musical de Radiohead, Boards of Canada siguen atacando el vacío desde la modernidad, dos conceptos que a día de hoy acostumbran A ir de la mano, pero que en la propuesta del dúo británico halla su definitiva contraposición. “Geogaddi” (Warp/Satélite K, 02), su nuevo disco, araña lágrimas a la contemporaneidad.

Quien abajo firma es consciente que la inmensa mayoría de lectores de Mondo Sonoro habrán fruncido el ceño al ver a Boards Of Canada en la portada de este número de marzo. Unos, por simple desconocimiento de su música. Otros, por conocerla demasiado bien. Y algunos más, estupefactos, por sentir que la revista ha vuelto a traicionar su espíritu rockero con un hijo directo de esa modernidad que tan poco entienden y, en consecuencia, estiman. Pero lo cierto es que en su ya dilatada carrera, Mondo Sonoro nunca ha ejercido de plataforma exclusiva del rock o cualquier otro estilo musical, más bien al contrario. Y lo mismo se le podría decir a ese otro público que, atónito, contempla como la revista que les produce urticaria (ya sabemos que nunca se es suficientemente cool) respalda a uno de sus referentes favoritos. Digamos que la presencia de Boards Of Canada en la portada de marzo responde al mismo criterio que ha empujado a la publicación a situar en sus páginas centrales a Sigur Rós, Mogwai, Nine Inch Nails o Doble V: la búsqueda de emoción infatigable, talento por domesticar y perspectiva de futuro en todos los terrenos franqueables del panorama musical. Y punto.

Boards Of Canada conservan la extraña virtud de conmover a sus seguidores con una ecuación expresiva con pocas probabilidades de traspasar la epidermis. Electrónica invernal, ritmos hip hop, melodías nostálgicas, atmósferas perturbadoras y tradición Warp componen su herencia. A partir de ahí, el dúo inglés se inventa el sonido del desasosiego: esa música herida que las grandes urbes de nuestro día a día evitan sentir como propia. Banda sonora del desconcierto, la distancia y el aliento gris que invaden nuestras ciudades, nuestras vidas, la música de Boards Of Canada contiene la verdad que muchos se niegan a ver o escuchar, y en su función de espejo involuntario recae la tristeza, emoción y ensoñación de las obras que, ahora y mañana, están destinadas a sobrevivirnos. En su aparente abstracción sonora reside otro milagro de la sensibilidad post-moderna. No es contraproducente, pues, comprobar como Radiohead y otros referentes sumidos en crisis creativas han optimizado su reorientación estilística a través de “Music Has The Right To Children”, debut en formato largo (antes llegó un Ep homónimo publicado por Skam) de esta inquietante formación. Su impacto ha respondido a las coordenadas que todos le exigimos al arte: inquietud, aventura, esencia y emoción. “Geogaddi”, segundo disco del dúo británico (dos Ep´s y una peel session se añaden al cómputo global de su legado; todos ellos, salvo “Boards Of Canada”, publicados por Warp), supone, en ese sentido, una de las obras mayúsculas de 2002. No sólo porque en su propuesta cohabiten los aspectos anteriormente citados, sino también porque se trata de un ejercicio sublime que se eleva por encima de su contexto y aspira a la perdurabilidad total. Marcus Eoin y Michael Sandison han invertido cuatro años en la confección de este esperado y ansiado álbum. Un silencio alterado únicamente por “In A Beatiful Place Out In The Country”, un Ep sólido e importante que hizo las veces de aperitivo antes de la definitiva salida al mercado de su deseado regreso discográfico. Y ahora, enmarcados en la vorágine promocional de todo producto, los dos creadores mantienen su fidelidad al hermetismo casi autista. Su renuncia a la concesión de entrevistas telefónicas, nos obliga, así, a la comunicación vía e-mail. Ningún problema: ellos parece más cómodos con el teclado que con el teléfono.

Dividido en dos frentes (por un lado, canciones con introducción, nudo y desenlace, a la vieja usanza; por el otro, breves insertos ambientales que no sólo refuerzan el conjunto, sino que, en ocasiones, funcionan con autonomía propia), este disco no aporta cambios a primera vista dentro del discurso de Boards. Pero es que aquí no se persigue la metamorfosis que, cual impuesto revolucionario, exige la coyuntura y el devenir de la actualidad (¿qué querían: nu school breakz?). Precisamente, el máximo punto de apoyo de este trabajo cabe hallarlo en su funcionamiento interno. Su búsqueda no intenta trascender las leyes del momento, sino las leyes de su propio sonido. Es decir: “Geogaddi” es un valioso paso adelante en la edificación del discurso de Boards Of Canada. Lo mejora, solidifica, envalentona y complementa. Y a partir de ahí, éste se beneficia sobremanera de esa exploración cercana y modesta. Los principales afectados, los ritmos. Cabe detenerse en este elemento, porque un análisis voraz del mismo nos invita al regocijo mayúsculo: los beats de este disco contemplan uno de los trabajos más abrumadores de los últimos meses.

Todo ello, secundado por un cambio de registro en el método de trabajo. Es en la rara percepción que se tiene al escuchar su discurso que uno se tropieza con elementos y miradas añejas. En su proceso de autoconstrucción, la banda enfrenta el toque artesanal y la pulsación orgánica a los patrones esquivos del ordenador y las máquinas. Con esa premisa, ambos absorben sonidos e ideas para llevar a cabo la integración de sus melodías en el armazón rítmico. Más orgánicas, insistimos, y retorcidas que en “Music Has The Right To Children” y su Ep “In a Beautiful Place Out In The Country”, éstas deparan un catálogo emotivo confuso, extrañísimo, casi lisérgico. ¿Trabajo de redescubrimiento y puzzle sensitivo? Para qué preocuparse cuando lo que tenemos aquí, ahora mismo, en el aparato reproductor de cedés, es un salvaje alegato a favor de la emoción pura y desintoxicada. Otro antídoto desesperado contra la sobreestimación de la electrónica como fuente inagotable de lucidez lectiva y progreso creativo sin apego al dictado de la epidermis. Dios sabe que en Boards Of Canada lo único que cuenta es la capacidad de conmoción que su música ejerce en el oyente.

Un punto vital, en todo caso, sobre el que adopta forma una propuesta descorazonadora. Eoin y Sandison se perfilan, disco a disco, como dos nostálgicos crónicos, como dos creadores marchitos por una tristeza incansable que se traduce, sin duda alguna, en cada uno de sus pentagramas. Sin quererlo, quizás, ambos fotografían la calidez del derrumbe, la hambruna de la melancolía. Y eso es, muy probablemente, uno de los aspectos que les distinguen de muchos otros referentes electrónicos que todavía no han optado por sacrificar los imperativos de la psique. Ellos fabrican música infinitamente más humana y cercana que muchas bandas de rock, emocore, pop, folk o techno.

Autor: David Broc

Fotografia: Archivo

Note: Translated by ChatGPT-4o

The Wounded Sky

Partly responsible for Radiohead's musical conversion, Boards of Canada continue to confront the void from modernity, two concepts that today often go hand in hand, but in the British duo's proposal find their definitive opposition. Geogaddi (Warp/Satélite K, 02), their new album, brings tears to contemporaneity.

The undersigned is aware that the vast majority of Mondo Sonoro readers will have frowned upon seeing Boards Of Canada on the cover of this March issue. Some, due to simple ignorance of their music. Others, because they know it all too well. And a few more, astonished, feeling that the magazine has once again betrayed its rock spirit with a direct child of this modernity that they so little understand and, consequently, esteem. But the truth is that in its long career, Mondo Sonoro has never served as an exclusive platform for rock or any other musical style, quite the contrary. And the same could be said to that other audience that, astonished, watches as the magazine that gives them hives (we know one is never cool enough) supports one of their favorite references. Let's say that the presence of Boards Of Canada on the March cover responds to the same criteria that has led the publication to feature Sigur Ró, Mogwai, Nine Inch Nails, or Doble V in its central pages: the tireless search for emotion, talent to be tamed, and a perspective of the future in all the crossable terrains of the musical panorama. And that's it.

Boards Of Canada retain the strange virtue of moving their followers with an expressive equation with little chance of penetrating the epidermis. Winter electronics, hip-hop rhythms, nostalgic melodies, disturbing atmospheres, and Warp tradition compose their heritage. From there, the English duo invents the sound of unease: that wounded music that the great cities of our daily lives avoid feeling as their own. Soundtrack of confusion, distance, and the gray breath that invades our cities, our lives, the music of Boards Of Canada contains the truth that many refuse to see or hear, and in its role as an involuntary mirror lies the sadness, emotion, and reverie of works that, now and tomorrow, are destined to outlive us. In their apparent sonic abstraction resides another miracle of post-modern sensitivity. It is not counterproductive, then, to see how Radiohead and other references immersed in creative crises have optimized their stylistic reorientation through Music Has The Right To Children, the long-format debut (preceded by a self-titled EP released by Skam) of this disturbing formation. Its impact has responded to the coordinates that we all demand of art: restlessness, adventure, essence, and emotion. Geogaddi, the second album by the British duo (two EPs and a Peel session add to the global count of their legacy; all of them, except for Boards Of Canada, published by Warp), represents, in that sense, one of the major works of 2002. Not only because its proposal encompasses the aforementioned aspects but also because it is a sublime exercise that rises above its context and aspires to total endurance. Marcus Eoin and Michael Sandison have invested four years in the creation of this eagerly awaited and desired album. A silence altered only by In a Beautiful Place out in the Country, a solid and important EP that served as an appetizer before the definitive release of their long-awaited return to the market. And now, framed in the promotional whirlwind of any product, the two creators maintain their fidelity to almost autistic hermeticism. Their refusal to grant phone interviews forces us, then, to communicate via email. No problem: they seem more comfortable with the keyboard than with the phone.

Author: David Broc

Photography: Archive

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Play Twice Before Listening

title	Play Twice Before Listening
author	Koen Poolman
publication	OOR
date	2002/03
issue
pages

"Play Twice Before Listening" is an interview by Koen Poolman originally published online Mar. 2002 on the OOR website ^[11]. The abbreviated version (in Dutch) published in the OOR magazine can be found here.

interview by by Koen Poolman, March 2002.

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Even voorstellen

title	Even voorstellen
author	Koen Poolman
publication	OOR
date	2002/03
issue	06
pages	20-22

"Even voorstellen" is an interview (in Dutch) by Koen Poolman originally published Mar. 2002 in Oor magazine Number 06, pp. 20-22. The full interview was available on the OOR website.^[12]

Even voorstellen: Boards Of Canada. Enigmatisch elektronicaduo uit Schotland. Makers van de sprookjesachtig mooie CD's Music Has The Right To Children en Geogaddi. Beatfreaks met een voorliefde voor folkies Joni Mitchell en The Incredible Stringband. Inspiratiebron voor Radiohead en vele anderen. Middelpunt van een heuse cultus. Ambitie: onzichtbaar blijven.

door Koen Poolman

leestijd 7'32"

Het begin van een e-mail correspondentie met Marcus Eion (28) - echte naam Marcus Es - en Michael 'Mike' Sandison (30), samen Boards Of Canada. Mediaschuw elektronicaduo dat zich schuilhoudt in zijn studio in een verlaten atoombunker in de woeste natuur van de Pentland Hills, aan de oostkust van Schotland. Boards Of Canada bewaart graag afstand. Van de media, van de fans (optredens zijn een zeldzaamheid), van hun collega's (wie je ook spreekt, niemand heeft hen ooit ontmoet) en zeker van de muziekindustrie. Niemand lijkt hen persoon lijk te kennen. Boards Of Canada, mythe in een wereld van hypes en trends.

HET IS 28 FEBRUARI 2002, HET SNEEUWT IN SCHOTLAND en Boards Of Canada spreekt, na vier jaar van stilzwijgen en één eerder op niets uitgelopen contact. Toen, rond het verschijnen van de mini-CD In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country (eind '00), deed men uiteindelijk maar drie interviews. Wereldwijd. Nu zijn het er een paar - niet veel — meer. Per e-mail. Het is graag of niet.

schrijft Mike Sandison in zijn eerste reactie. Muziek die in de mallemolen van de muziekindustrie terechtkomt, verliest haar puurheid en haar onschuld en dus haar geloofwaardigheid, is de stellige overtuiging van het duo. Het enige alternatief is je platen stilletjes uit te brengen en vervolgens je handen er vanaf te trekken. Laat de consument zelf maar op zoek gaan en beslissen. De muziek van Boards Of Canada moet je langzaam bekruipen, benadrukt Mike.

Aldus geschiedde met Music Has The Right To Children ('98). Het officiële debuut kwam geruisloos, begon langzaam te groeien en is inmiddels tot haast mythische proporties uitgegroeid. Het is een moderne klassieker, tijdloos en genreloos. Pure schoonheid, nostalgie en mystiek gevat in abstracte beats, warme synthesizers, troostrijke melodieën en vervreemdende kinderstemmetjes: verdraaid, verknipt en achterstevoren afgespeeld. Muziek bij een sprookje dat slecht afloopt. Dartel, speels, onschuldig, maar met een duistere ondertoon. Stukje bij beetje ontrafelde zich ook het mysterie rond de makers. Mike Sandison en Marcus Eion zogezegd. Twee kluizenaars uit Schotland, bleek al snel. Als kind zouden ze allebei naar Alberta zijn geëmigreerd, alwaar ze uren voor de buis gekluisterd zaten, betoverd door de beelden én de muziek van de natuurdocumentaires van de National Film Board Of Canada. De achtergrondmuziek bij deze films geldt nog steeds als een belangrijke invloed op hun eigen werk. Via een tussenstop in Zuid-Engeland keren de twee (geen familie) begin jaren '80 terug naar de oostkust van Schotland. Daar spelen ze sinds '86 samen in een band. Tussen '92 en '94 organiseren ze Redmoon-feesten, happenings eigenlijk, in een ruïne middenin de wildernis van de Pentland Hills, onder Edinburgh. Attracties: Super-8 filmpjes uit hun jeugd, oude kinderliedjes gemixt over elektronische beats, een groot kampvuur en een rode maan. In de eigen Hexagon Sun studio, gevestigd in een atoombunker in de heuvels vlakbij de ruïne, nemen ze in eigen beheer hun eerste LP op, Twoism ('95), die een jaar later via Autechre's Sean Booth bij Skam belandt. Het label uit Manchester neemt direct contact met de Schotten op en brengt de mini-lp Hi Scores ('96) uit. Waarna Warp hen contracteert en het verhaal met Music Has The Right To Children pas echt begint. Weer vier jaar later is er een heuse cultus rond het duo losgebarsten - onlangs werd een van de honderd LP's van Twoism voor maar liefst 710 pond op eBay geveild - en is Geogaddi al op voorhand een van de belangrijkste albums van 2002.

GEOGADDI LOST ALLE HOOGGESPANNEN VERWACHTINGEN IN. Opnieuw creëert 'Boards' zijn eigen sprookjeswereld vol echo's uit een onbekend verleden - een universum ver weg van het hier en nu.

Mike reageert instemmend. vult Marcus aan, Elektronische muziek wordt steevast geassocieerd met sciencefiction, futurisme, cyberspace, een wereld van robots en machinerie. Een cliché, meent Mike. In de muziek van Boards Of Canada weerklinkt de onschuld van een kind, het wonder der natuur, het eeuwenoude land van onze voorvaderen. Hier wordt geen toekomst geschetst, maar een herinnering uit het collectieve onderbewustzijn opgegraven. Het terughalen van een verloren jeugd bijvoorbeeld. aldus Mike, Welke herinnering ligt ten grondslag aan 1969, het enige vocale nummer op Geogaddi, vraag ik. Mike cryptisch: De muziek van Boards Of Canada zit vol met dit soort geheimzinnige boodschappen en verwijzinkjes. legt Marcus uit, Nummers als Music Is Math, A Is To B As B Is To C en The Smallest Weird Number ('70' volgens Mike) verraden een bovenmatige interesse voor wiskunde. Een interesse die als een rode draad over Geogaddi heenloopt, bekent Mike. Marcus bevestigt zelfs het gerucht dat het duo zo nu en dan de cijferreeks van Fibonacci (1, 2, 3, 5, 8,13 enzovoort) in zijn composities verwerkt. meldt hij,

BOARDS OF CANADA IS EEN TYPISCHE EXPONENT VAN DE WARP-SCHOOL. De abstracte elektronica van Aphex Twin, Autechre en Plaid echoot zachtjes na in de warme sound van de Schotten, die op hun beurt weer vele nieuwe techneuten beïnvloeden, en ook megacts als Radiohead, U2 en Björk trouwens. Boards Of Canada is de belangrijkste vernieuwer binnen de elektronische muziek van de laatste jaren. Veel recensenten herkennen echter vooral een folk-invloed in hun muziek.

Terecht, stelt Mike. Leg voor de grap de hoes van Music Has The Right To Children naast die van The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter van The Incredible Stringband (uit '68, het toppunt van hun psychedelische periode) en je hebt een mooi paar. antwoordt Marcus. Net als veel oude volksmuziek is de muziek van Boards Of Canada vergeven van heidense symboliek. bevestigt Mike, Marcus: Hoe Kwaad is Boards Of Canada eigenlijk, vraag je je af na het zien van het occulte artwork van Geogaddi (duur: 66 minuten en 6 seconden) en een nummer als The Devil Is In The Details. Mike:

VEEL DANCECOMPILATIES PLAATSEN BOARDS OF CANADA ONDER DE NOEMER CHILL-OUT. sneert Marcus. Maakt Boards Of Canada dan wel dance? Ook dat is discutabel. In de NME werd - met instemming van het duo - de vergelijking met Loveless van My Bloody Valentine gemaakt. Boards Of Canada is even ondoorgrondelijk. Hun muziek mist de dynamiek van de dansvloer. Het ritme van de natuur gaat hen snel genoeg. Eb en vloed. De zon en de maan. Het ontluiken van een bloem - en hoe de Fibonacci-reeks zich openbaart in het patroon van de bladeren van sommige bloemen, planten en vruchten. Van die dingen. Kom daar maar eens om bij The Chemical Brothers! Dansmuziek bouwt op naar een hoogtepunt, verticaal, langs alsmaar hetzelfde ritme. Boards Of Canada componeert horizontaal, wisselt voortdurend van klank en kleur, en als de melodie eenmaal staat, verdwijnt zij net zo snel als zij gekomen is - als een wolk die even een herkenbare vorm aanneemt, een sneeuwvlok die smelt in je hand. De CD's van Boards Of Canada grossieren in korte, ongrijpbare miniatuurtjes, muziekjes eigenlijk, die voorbij zijn voordat je het weet. Het zijn de klanken bij de beelden in hun hoofd. Beelden van een vulkanische uitbarsting (Gyroscope) of een documentaire over zuinig energieverbruik (Energy Warning), ongetwijfeld geïnspireerd op een oude uitzending van de National Film Board Of Canada. Of een van hun eigen films, want die maken ze ook, als onderdeel van het collectief Music 70. schrijft Mike,

Halleluja!

In mijn gedachten begint het zachtjes te sneeuwen.

Boards Of Canada heeft vooralsnog geen plannen om te gaan optreden, maar houdt alle opties open. Het gerucht dat Warp het eigen beheer-werk opnieuw gaat uitbrengen wordt bevestigd noch tegengesproken. Voor het volledige e-mail interview kun je terecht op www.oor.nl.

Note: Translated by ChatGPT-4o

Introducing: Boards Of Canada. Enigmatic electronic duo from Scotland. Creators of the enchantingly beautiful CDs Music has the Right to Children and Geogaddi. Beat freaks with a love for folk artists like Jonie Mitchell and The Incredible String Band. Inspirations for Radiohead and many others. At the center of a genuine cult following. Ambition: to remain invisible.

By Koen Poolman

Reading time: 7'32""

The beginning of an email correspondence with Marcus Eoin (28) - real name Marcus Es - and Michael 'Mike' Sandison (30), together Boards Of Canada. Media-shy electronic duo hiding out in their studio in an abandoned nuclear bunker in the wild nature of the Pentland Hills, on the east coast of Scotland. Boards Of Canada likes to keep its distance. From the media, from fans (performances are rare), from their colleagues (whoever you talk to, no one has ever met them), and certainly from the music industry. No one seems to know them personally.

Boards Of Canada, a myth in a world of hypes and trends.

IT IS FEBRUARY 28, 2002, IT IS SNOWING IN SCOTLAND and Boards Of Canada speaks, after four years of silence and one previous contact that led nowhere. Then, around the release of the mini-CD In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country (late '00), they did only three interviews. Worldwide. Now there are a few more — not many — more. Via email. It's either that or nothing.

, writes Mike Sandison in his first response.

Music that gets caught up in the whirl of the music industry loses its purity and innocence and thus its credibility, the duo firmly believes. The only alternative is to release your records quietly and then step away from them. Let the consumer find it and decide for themselves.

Mike emphasizes.

This was indeed the case with Music Has The Right To Children ('98). The official debut came quietly, began to grow slowly, and has now reached almost mythical proportions. It is a modern classic, timeless and genreless. Pure beauty, nostalgia, and mystique captured in abstract beats, warm synthesizers, comforting melodies, and alienating children's voices: distorted, cut up, and played backward. Music for a fairy tale that ends badly. Playful, innocent, but with a dark undertone. Bit by bit, the mystery around the creators also unfolded. Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin supposedly. Two recluses from Scotland, it soon became clear. As children, they both emigrated to Alberta, where they spent hours glued to the TV, mesmerized by the images and music of the National Film Board Of Canada nature documentaries. The background music of these films still serves as a significant influence on their own work. Via a stopover in southern England, the two (no family relation) returned to the east coast of Scotland in the early '80s. They have been playing together in a band since '86. Between '92 and '94, they organized Redmoon parties, which were actually happenings, in a ruin in the wilderness of the Pentland Hills, near Edinburgh. Attractions: Super-8 films from their youth, old children's songs mixed over electronic beats, a large campfire, and a red moon. In their own Hexagon Sun studio, located in a bunker in the hills near the ruin, they recorded their first LP, Twoism ('95), which found its way to Skam through Autechre's Sean Booth a year later. The Manchester label immediately contacted the Scots and released the mini-LP Hi Scores ('96). Warp then signed them, and the story with Music Has The Right To Children truly began. Four years later, a genuine cult has erupted around the duo - a recent auction on eBay saw one of the hundred LPs of Twoism sell for 710 pounds - and Geogaddi is already one of the most anticipated albums of 2002.

GEOGADDI MEETS ALL HIGH EXPECTATIONS. Again, 'Boards' creates its own fairytale world full of echoes from an unknown past - a universe far removed from the here and now.

Mike agrees.

, Marcus adds,

Electronic music is always associated with science fiction, futurism, cyberspace, a world of robots and machinery. A cliché, according to Mike.

In the music of Boards Of Canada, the innocence of a child, the wonder of nature, and the ancient land of our ancestors resonate. This does not depict a future but unearths a memory from the collective subconscious. Like the return to a lost childhood.

, says Mike,

, I ask. Mike cryptically:

explains Marcus,

Tracks like "Music Is Math," "A Is To B As B Is To C" and "The Smallest Weird Number" ('70' according to Mike) reveal an above-average interest in mathematics. An interest that runs like a thread through Geogaddi, Mike admits. Marcus even confirms the rumor that the duo occasionally incorporates the Fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc.) into their compositions.

he adds,

BOARDS OF CANADA IS A TYPICAL EXPONENT OF THE WARP SCHOOL. The abstract electronics of Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Plaid gently echo in the warm sound of the Scots, who in turn influence many new technicians, and even mega acts like Radiohead, U2, and Björk. Boards Of Canada is the most important innovator in electronic music in recent years. Many reviewers, however, mostly recognize a folk influence in their music.

Rightly so, says Mike.

Marcus responds.

Mike confirms,

Marcus:

Mike:

scoffs Marcus.

So, does Boards of Canada make dance music? That's also debatable. In the NME, a comparison was made—with the duo's approval—to Lovess by My Bloody Valentine. Boards of Canada is just as inscrutable. Their music lacks the dynamics of the dance floor. The rhythm of nature suits them just fine. Ebb and flow. The sun and the moon. The blooming of a flower—and how the Fibonacci sequence reveals itself in the pattern of leaves on some flowers, plants, and fruits. Things like that. Try finding that with The Chemical Brothers! Dance music builds up to a climax, vertically, along the same rhythm. Boards of Canada composes horizontally, constantly changing tone and color, and once the melody is set, it disappears as quickly as it came—like a cloud briefly forming a recognizable shape, a snowflake melting in your hand. Boards of Canada's CDs are filled with short, elusive miniatures, little pieces of music that are over before you know it. They are the sounds to the images in their heads. Images of a volcanic eruption ("Gyroscope") or a documentary on energy conservation ("Energy Warning"), undoubtedly inspired by an old broadcast from the National Film Board of Canada. Or one of their own films, as they also make those as part of the collective Music 70.

writes Mike,

In my mind, it starts to snow gently.

Boards of Canada has no plans to perform at this time, but they are keeping all options open. The rumor that Warp will re-release their self-produced work is neither confirmed nor denied. For the full email interview, visit www.oor.nl.

---

Generazione Laptop

title	Generazione Laptop
author	Rossano Lo Mele
publication	Rumore
date	2002/03
issue	122
pages	48-50

Generazione Laptop is an interview (in Italian) by Rossano Lo Mele originally published Mar. 2002 in Rumore magazine Number 122, pp. 48-50.

Generazione Laptop

Elusivi e restii a qualsiasi forma di promozione, riaffiorano i Boards Of Canada. Ossia Mike Sandison e Marcus Eoin. Il loro debutto di qualche anno fa ('98) - Music Has the Right to Children - è semplicemente una delle più belle cose accadute alla musica negli ultimi anni: qualcuno lo considera il pioniere di tutta la cosiddetta chili-out "intelligente". Altri - nientemeno - un disco psichedelico. Sia come sia, subito dopo: remix, un ep e l'album Geogaddi - più volte rinviato - finalmente fuori. La presentazione ufficiale tenutasi a Londra hanno preferito disertarla, mandando in loro vece un video. Che sembra un po' come quando gli Aerosmith o chi per loro vincono un qualche grammy per qualche contest di MTV e invece di andarlo a ritirare mandano un filmato dove ringraziano Dio e i fan. La voglia d'invisibilità ormai ce la siamo tolta. Quella di sentire i dischi del duo non ancora: dal Canada al nord della Scozia. Dopo lunghe indagini, ecco infine l'intervista.

Note: Translated by ChatGPT-4o

Generation Laptop

Elusive and resistant to any form of promotion, Boards Of Canada resurface. This refers to Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin. Their debut from a few years ago ('98) - Music Has the Right to Children - is simply one of the most beautiful things that have happened to music in recent years: some consider it the pioneer of all so-called "intelligent" chill-out music. Others, no less, call it a psychedelic album. Be that as it may, shortly after: remixes, an EP, and the much-delayed album Geogaddi finally released. They preferred to skip the official presentation held in London, sending a video in their place. It's somewhat like when Aerosmith or whoever wins some Grammy for some MTV contest and instead of going to receive it, they send a video thanking God and the fans. We've gotten over our desire for invisibility. The desire to listen to the duo's records, however, remains: from Canada to the north of Scotland. After extensive investigations, here is finally the interview.

---

Terra Incognita

title	Terra Incognita
author	Patrice Bardot
publication	Trax
date	2002/03
issue	50
pages	60-62

Terra Incognita is an interview (in French) by Patrice Bardot originally published Mar. 2002 in Trax magazine Number 50, pp. 60-62.

Interview Par Mail

Texte: Patrice Bardot

Photos: Peter Iain Campbell

Le splendide Geogaddi maroue le grand retour du cultissime Boards of Canada groupe le plus mystérieux de toute la sphère électronique et maître incontesté d'une électronica chaleureuse et nostalgique.

Enfin. Pratiquement 4 ans que nous attendions ce moment. Depuis la sortie en avril 1998 du sublime album Music Has The Right To Children, l'électronica à facettes du duo écossais Boards Of Canada n'a cessé de hanter notre platine et d'accompagner nos états d'âmes. Certes, il y a un an et demi, les quatre titres du EP A Beautiful Place Out ln The Country composèrent un intermède de choix, histoire de tromper l'attente de la tribu croissante des amoureux des compositions naïves et nostalgiques de Michael Sandison et Marcus Eoin. Et puis subitement la sortie de Geogaddi, sans cesse repoussée, fut annoncée alors que nous n'y croyions plus. Pas de disque promo envoyé à la presse, nulles déclarations fracassantes: pratiquement une stratégie de l'absence, finalement sans surprise pour un groupe qui a toujours cultivé sinon le goût du secret, au moins celui de la discrétion absolue.

Préférant s'exprimer à travers la grâce, la mélodie, et le mystère émanant de leurs compositions, les deux complices refusent la plupart du temps de rencontrer les journalistes. D'où l'intérêt de cette rare interview, parfois cryptique, dont la concrétisation s'apparente quand même à un parcours du combattant: pas de séances photos, questions transmises par e-mail, un label qui perd leur trace ... Mais seul le résultat compte et après avoir laissé ces derniers temps les légions d'imitateurs s'exprimer sur une scène électronica bien encombrée, place maintenant aux originaux.

Geogaddi (Warp/Pias)

www.boardsofcanada.com

Note: translation provided by ChatGPT-4o

Email Interview

Text: Patrice Bardot

Photos: Peter Iain Campbell

The splendid Geogaddi marks the grand return of the cult-favorite Boards of Canada, the most mysterious group in the entire electronic sphere and the uncontested master of warm and nostalgic electronica.

Finally. We have been waiting for this moment for almost 4 years. Since the release of the sublime album Music Has The Right To Children in April 1998, the multifaceted electronica of the Scottish duo Boards of Canada has been haunting our turntables and accompanying our moods. Certainly, a year and a half ago, the four tracks of the EP A Beautiful Place Out In The Country provided a quality interlude, helping to ease the wait for the growing tribe of fans of Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin's naive and nostalgic compositions. And then suddenly, the release of Geogaddi, constantly postponed, was announced when we no longer believed it. No promo records sent to the press, no sensational statements: practically a strategy of absence, ultimately unsurprising for a group that has always cultivated, if not a taste for secrecy, at least one for absolute discretion.

Preferring to express themselves through grace, melody, and the mystery emanating from their compositions, the two partners mostly refuse to meet with journalists. Hence the significance of this rare, sometimes cryptic interview, which in itself is a bit of an obstacle course: no photo sessions, questions sent by email, a label that loses their trace... But only the result matters, and after recently letting legions of imitators express themselves in an overcrowded electronica scene, it is now time for the originals.

Geogaddi (Warp/Pias)

www.boardsofcanada.com

---

B to the O to the C

title	B to the O to the C
author	Nobuki Nishiyama?
publication	Fader
date	2002/04
issue	Vol.07
pages	A002-A003

B to the O to the C is an interview (in Japanese) by Nobuki Nishiyama? originally published Apr. 2002 in Fader magazine Volume 07, pp. A002-A003.

Note: Transcription by Apple's Live Text on a MacBook Pro

BOARDS OF CANADA
B to the O to the C

3年半は長い。多くの出来事が起こっては過ぎ去り、実
験はもはや実験足り得ず、前衛は瞬時に保守へと廻る。
98年の前作「ミュージック・ハズ・ザ・ライト・トゥ・チルド
レン」以降、マーカス・イオンとマイケル・サンディソンは、
あえて作品を時代の荒波の中へと放置する道を選んだ。
まるで自らの音楽が時代的な新奇さを超越した普遍性を
持つことを、ただそのことによってのみ証明せんとするか
のように。そしてその証明は、見事に果たされたのだ。「ジ
オガディ」。このニュー・アルバムは、徹底してデビュー時
から変わることのないボーズ・オブ・カナダのサウンドその
ものだ。変化よりも成熟を、隔絶された独自性よりも普遍
性を極めた、美しい作品が、ここにある。
「僕は自分たちの音楽と、ある特定の時代性との関わり
合いを意識しているわけじゃない。できたものをただあり
のまま、聴いてもらえればいいと思ってる。だけれど自分た
ちの納得いかないものをリリースするわけにはいかない。

そのためにはいつまでだって曲制作に時間をかけるし、同
じくアルバムのコンパイルにも同様の時間をかける。『ジ
オガディ」はようやく完成した。3年半の間に移り変わった
時代性とは関係なく、それはただ完成したんだ」（マーカス）
しかし、然のことながら『ジオガディ」は単なる過去の
作品の焼き直しなどではない。幻想的で浮遊感に溢れた、
時に隔世的ですらある特徴的なメロディー要素を十二分
に受け継ぎながらも、より抑制された感覚に満ち、単なる
ノスタルジアには留まらない、ある種の力強さを生み出し
ている。また、彼らの持ち味でもあったオールドスクール・
ヒップホップ然としたビート感覚からの影響は多少影を
潜めており、ヒップホップ／エレクトロからの流れから脱
却して、ビートとメロディーは、より有機的で複合的な組
み合わせの域にまで到達、「1969」や「ドーン・コーラス」な
どでの、極端にシンセのピッチを揺らした作りは、シンプル
なアイディアではあるが実に効果的で、ビートやウワモノ

といった概念を、静かに崩していくかのような新鮮な感覚
に満ちてもいる。 「そういった要素はまだ『ジオガディ」にもあると思うよ。で
も、以前ほどそれらの要素を分かりやすく前面に押し出し
たりするようにはならなくなったね。今回のアルバムに関し
ては、そういった要素をもっと音楽の奥深くに覆い隠した
かったんだ。僕はいつも、僕らの音楽のパーツ、もしくは
影響を、分離できないようなポイントにまで達することが
できるように心掛けてる。そうすることで、オーガニックで、
すべての要素が自然にそこにあるような感じを生み出す
ようにしているんだよ。「ジオガディ」は、各部を構成する要
素をバラして処理することができないようなサウンドをクリ
エイトする、というアイディアで成り立っていて、「ジュリー・
アンド・キャンディ」や「ドーン・コーラス」といった曲では、
特にそれが顕著だね｜（マイケル）
「僕らはいつも、自然にインスパイアされてる」（マーカス

というボーズ・オブ・カナダは、そのデビュー以来、一貫し
て自然や大地をモチーフにしてきた。「ジオガディ」も例外
ではない。「サンシャイン・レコーダー」「オーヴァー・ザ・
ホライゾン・レーダー」「ジャイロスコープ」など、自然や大
地に関する曲名が多く見受けられる。「今や誰もがテクノ
ロジカルでアーバンでアンチ自然主義的なものに走って
いるし、僕らが自然から受けた影響を音楽に反映させてい
るのは、それに対する反動が顕れているのかもしれない」
（マーカス）。しかし、反対に、「ミュージック・イズ・マス
（MusicIsMath）」という、理論的な側面からの音楽に
対するアプローチも伺わせるタイトルの曲もまた、ここで
は同列だ。いや、反対というのは語弊があるかもしれない。
音楽を大いなる自然からのギフトであると捉えることと、数
学的にそれぞれの要素を還元して捉えること。両者は共に
欠かすべからず根元的な音楽に対するアプローチであり、
そもそも、そのどちらかを切り離して考えること自体、誤り
なのだ。“各部を構成する要素をバラして処理することが
できないようなサウンドをクリエイトする”。先のマイケル
の言葉は、徹底してそのサウンドのバックグラウンドにまで
貫かれている。
「特にエレクトロニック・ミュージックに関しては、それは興
味深い質問だと思うよ。音楽における数学的な論理のこ
とを、コンポーザーやリスナーによって生み出された、もし
くは課せられたものであると言じている人っているよね。だ
けど重要なのは、自然の中にはたくさんのリズミックでハー
モニックなパターンが存在していて、音楽とはそれら自然
の中のパターンの集まりに過ぎない、ということに気付く
ことなんじゃないかな。数学とは自然の中に、すでに存在
しているものなんだ。人が数学を発明したんじゃない、人
が自然の中に数学を“発見”したんだよ」（マイケル）
こうしたテクノロジーに対する姿勢は、数多のエレクトロ
ニカ・アーティストと彼らとの差違を決定づけるものだと言
えるだろう。ラップトップを駆使した他のエレクトロニカが
際限なく複雑性を増していくのに対し、彼らはあくまでもシ
ンプルかつ的確ないくつかのループを基調にした、オーソ
ドックスな楽曲構成を貫いている。その姿は幾分保守的
に映ることもあるかもしれないが、しかし、シンプルである
からこそ彼らの普遍性は、より一層際立ったものとしての
説得力を増しているものだ。奇をてらうような要素は一切
ない、ストレートな直球勝負。アブストラクトで、曖味なま
まの、ある意味では勝負を避けているようにも思えるサウ
ンドに逃げ込むようなことは、決してない。ベーシックで、
オーソドックスであることに対して、二人は極めて意識的
である。「ジオガディ」の、奇跡的なまでのサイケデリアは、
そしてだからこそ孤高の輝きを放っている。
「僕らは時々、あえてものすごくベーシックなパートを取り
入れることがある。単にそれが好きだから、っていうのもあ
るんだけど、でも、そのベーシックなパートにまったく対照
的な要素を加えた瞬間、そこには生命が宿るんだ。それは
たとえようもないほど美しい瞬間だ。それによってトラック
の目的そのものをまったく別のものにすることもできれば、
目的のないトラックに、目的を与えることだってできる」（マ

イケル）。「僕らは例えばアコースティック・ギターである
とか、たった一つの楽器だけでも楽曲が成り立つような
アプローチが好きなんだ。もしくは歌うだけでもいいけど、
そういうシンプルに演奏できるようなものを作ることがで
きたのならば、そこには基本的な音楽要素が十分にあるっ
ていうことだからね。僕らが作りたいのは音楽だ。僕らに
とって音楽とは、単なるプロダクションやサウンド・エフェ
クト以上のものでなくてはならない。メロディーがなくては
いけないし、人々の感情を揺さぶるような力を持たなくて
はならないんだよ」（マーカス）。
多くの人々が見過ごしがちではあるが、マイケルとマー
カスのメロディーに対する判断基準は、数多くのセッショ
ンをこなしてきたプレイヤーとしての経験に裏打ちされたも
のだ。テープ・マシンに短波ラジオの多重録音でコラー
ジュ作品を制作していたその初期の活動から、並行して
二人は楽器を熟達することにも努めできた（二人は共に熟
練したピアニストであり、マーカスはギターとベース、そ
してマイケルはギター、ベース、ドラムの演奏もこなす）。
ボーズ・オブ・カナダのシンプルなメロディーには、常に多
くの誤解がつきまとう。いや、彼らはもしかすると、あえて
誤解されることを楽しんでいるのかもしれないが。
「今でも楽器は弾いてるよ。スタジオは楽器だらけだしね。
実は僕らは、結構なヴィンテージ楽器のコレクターでも
あって・・・・・・。みんなが思っている以上に、僕らの音楽には
生楽器の音がたくさん入ってるんだ。ボーズ・オブ・カナダ
といえば、いかにもビュア・エレクトロニクス、というイメー
ジが強いと思うんだけど、実際はそうじゃない。わざとそう
聴こえるように作ってるんだ。僕らのプロジェクト、ボーズ・
オブ・カナダには、たった一つだけコンセプトがある。そ
れは、“そういう風にこえても、実は全然達う”というこ
と。ピュア・エレクトロニック・ミュージックのように聴こえ
ても、実はそうじゃない。演奏家の音楽じゃないように聴
こえても、実はそうじゃない。オールド・タイミーな映画や
テレビ番組からサンプリングしてるように聴こえても、実
はそうじゃない。あえて直接的なイメージを持たせるよう
にはしてるんだけど、裏では全然違うことをやっている。
ちょっとひねくれてるかな？僕らにとって、エレクトロニッ
ク・ミュージックは音楽を作るプロセスの拡張に過ぎない
んだ」（マーカス）
『ジオガディ」は、エレクトロニカの雛形を完成させ、多
くのフォロワーを生み出した彼らから届けられた、そのスタ
イルの集大成にして完成形ともいうべき強固なサウンドを
確立した傑作だ。しかし、然本作はその終着点ではない。
その先には、さらなる展開が待ち構えている。それは一体ど
のようなものであるのか？楽しみに待っていたいと思う。
「実はもう、ボーズ・オブ・カナダとして僕らがやってきたこ
ととは正反対、いや、90度ぐらいは違う音楽も作ったんだ。
でも、まだそれはリリースされてはいない。たぶん、将来的
に僕らがそれぞれ、ボーズ・オブ・カナダとは別の独立し
た作品をリリースすることになるのは必然だろうね。今後
の活動についてオープンであることは、ミュージシャンとし
ではエキサイティングなことだよ」（マーカス）（N）

Note: Translated by ChatGPT-4o

BOARDS OF CANADA
B to the O to the C

Three and a half years is a long time. Many events have occurred and passed, and experiments no longer remain experiments, while the avant-garde quickly turns conservative. Since their previous work Music Has the Right to Children in 1998, Marcus Eoin and Michael Sandison have chosen to deliberately let their work drift in the rough seas of time. It was as if they intended to prove that their music transcends temporal novelty and possesses a timeless universality by doing so. And that proof has been magnificently realized Geogaddi. This new album is the essence of the Boards of Canada sound that has remained unchanged since their debut. Here lies a beautiful work that pursues maturity over change and universality over isolated uniqueness.

However, Geogaddi is by no means a mere rehash of past works. While fully inheriting the characteristic melodies that are fantastical and filled with a sense of floating, and at times even otherworldly, it is imbued with a more restrained sensibility, creating a kind of strength that goes beyond mere nostalgia. Additionally, the old-school hip-hop-like beat sense that was their trademark has somewhat faded, as they have moved away from the hip-hop/electro flow. The beats and melodies have reached a more organic and complex combination. The extremely pitch-wavering synthesizer work on tracks like "1969" and "Dawn Chorus" is a simple idea but highly effective, blending beats and upper elements perfectly.

A fresh feeling, as if quietly dismantling such concepts, also pervades.

Since their debut, Boards of Canada have consistently used nature and the earth as motifs. Geogaddi is no exception, with many track titles referencing nature and the earth, such as "Sunshine Recorder", "Over The Horizon Radar", and "Gyroscope".

On the other hand, a track titled "Music Is Math", suggesting a theoretical approach to music, is also present. However, viewing these as opposites might be misleading. Considering music as a gift from nature and understanding its elements mathematically are both fundamental approaches to music that shouldn't be separated.

Michael's earlier words about creating a sound that can't be broken down into elements are deeply rooted in their music's background.

This stance towards technology sets them apart from many other electronica artists. While others increase complexity with laptops, Boards of Canada stick to a simple yet precise loop-based traditional song structure. This approach might appear conservative, but its simplicity enhances its universality and persuasive power. They avoid abstract or vague sounds, opting for a straightforward approach. Michael and Marcus are very deliberate about being basic and orthodox, making Geogaddi stand out with its miraculous psychedelia.

Their criteria for melody, often overlooked, are backed by extensive experience as players. From their early days of creating collage works with multi-track recordings of shortwave radios, they have honed their instrumental skills (both are skilled pianists, with Marcus playing guitar and bass, and Michael playing guitar, bass, and drums).

There are many misunderstandings about Boards of Canada's simple melodies. Perhaps they even enjoy being misunderstood.

Geogaddi is a masterpiece, solidifying their sound and serving as the culmination of their style, which has inspired many followers. However, this album is not the endpoint. There's more development ahead.

(N)

---

Magical, Mystery, Cycling

title	Magical, Mystery, Cycling
author	Tsutomu Noda, Naohiro Kato
publication	Remix (Japanese Publication)
date	2002/04
issue	130
pages	42-47

"Magical, Mystery, Cycling" is an interview (in Japanese) by Tsutomu Noda, Naohiro Kato originally published Apr. 2002 in Remix magazine (Japanese Publication) Number 130, pp.42-47.

Note: Transcription by Apple's Live Text on a MacBook Pro

Boards of Canada:
マジカル・ミステリー・サイクリング
ついにセカンド・アルバムを出したボーズ・オブ・カナダ、その円環的な夢幻性

ついに、と言えばいいのか、ようやく、と言えばいいのか、あるいは忘れた頃に、と言え
ばいいのか、あーもうよくわからない。いずれにしてもボーズ・オブ・カナダの新譜が出
る。出るんですよ、加豚さん！ところでポーズ・オブ・カナダとは何？オウテカ以降の
注目度だんとつのエレクトロニカだって？いやー、そんなB級評論家みたいな野暮な
こと言わないで。これこそ進歩と頽廃が共存する”現在”のサイケデリックなんだから。

words Tsutomu Noda . Nachiro Kato

translation Kyoko Fukuda . Kana Muramatsu

ボーズ・オブ・カナダのどこが魅力かって、言うまでもなく、そ
の極端な遊戯に尽きる、でしょう。人気の高い"アクエリアズや
"ハッピー・サイクリングのような曲、それらに共通しているの
は、悪戯めいた夢性だ。
例えば”ハッピー・サイクリング。あの最小限の反復のなかで
発話されるナンセンスな言葉の連続、その果てに広がるのはい
たってドライな夢の世界だ。そこにはラヴだとか精神性だとか、
そうした大人の言語が入る隙間なんかない。なかば幼児的な価
値観によるドライな夢幻性、乾ききりながらも叙情的な夢、ナン
センスが交錯する瑞々しい世界、ボーズ・オブ・カナダはいまだ
徹底的にそれでしかない。このサイケデリックはもう、現実社会
に目を向けようとする態度からも、あるいはまた夢幻のなかに
意味を見出そうとする態度からもおおよそかけ離れている。か
くして、僕たちはボーズ・オブ・カナダの”ハッピー・サイクリング
幸福な回転）のなかをぐるぐると永遠に回り続けることになる。
その音楽を聴いている限りは、夢はどこまでもどこまでも回転するのだ・・・...

お姉さんはまた目をあけさえすれば、何もかも退屈な現実に戻っ
てしまうのだということは知っていましたが.....
ルイス・キャロル『不思議の国のアリス」

そんなことお姉さんじゃなくたって知っている、と思う
1998年にリリースされた『Music Has The Right to
Children』、”音楽は子供たちのための権利を持づ”と題された
彼らのファースト・アルバムを聴いて「この音楽が好きだ」と思
ったひとはたぶん、目覚めることで幻滅したくないのだ。子供が
意味のない言葉遊びに夢中になっている最中に、大人がしたり
顔で芸のない理屈をこねても場が白けるだけのように、サイケ
デリックであれファンタジーであれ、ときとしてそこに大人の言
詰が入ると白々しくなることを僕たちは知っている。教訓めい
た意味性が読みとれたり、整合性を持ったロマンティシズムだっ
たり、ワン・ラヴだったり、もうそんなことはうんざりするほど聞
き飽きている。だったらもうそんな場所から徹底して隔離され
たほうがいい、ということで日本でレイ
ヴ・カルチャーが盛り上がった90年代後半に、それとはまるで別種の乾ききった叙情
的な夢幻性を持つボーズ・オブ・カナダの音楽は日本のダンスフロアで必要とされていたのだ。
“アクエリアズでのミニマリズムのなかでは、途中から数字
が読み上げられる。1から順番に読み上げられる数字は、途中か
ら脈絡なく飛ぶ。が、そんなことはある意味どうでもいい。僕た
ちはただそのナンセンスで乾いた夢幻に遊んでいる。”アクエ
リアズや“ハッピー・サイクリングだけではない。ミニマリズ
ムを基調としているボーズ・オブ・カナダの曲では、あらゆる位
相で反復が続き、そのなかを子供声や夢的な音が煌めく。B
0Cサウンドとしか表しようのない、少しばかりこもり気味のあ
の幻のような音が回転する。その閉ざされた円環はあたかも誘
惑の声のように聴こえる。ファースト・アルバムの冒頭の”ア

ン・イーグル・イン・ユア・マインド、あの曲で聴こえる子供声の
“アイ・ラヴ・ユー”という言葉、現実をあざ笑っているようなあ
の響き、あれはどう考えてもやっぱ、僕たちを誘っている。閉ざ
された円環の、しかし広漠とした夢幻の世界に。
イギリスではボーズ・オブ・カナダをエレクトロニカではなく、
どちらかと言えばサイケデリックに分類しているようだが、たし
かに彼らの音楽の特殊性はオウテカよりも、ビートルズの『サー
ジェント・ペパーズ〜』やビーチ・ボーイズの「ペット・サウンズ』、
あるいはピンク・フロイドのファーストなんかにより近い、と思う。

ボーズ・オブ・カナダのセカンド『Geogaddi」は、基本的には、
というか、まるっきりファーストの延長線上にあるアルバムだ。
リズムに対する懲りようとか、音楽的なところでの多少の変化
はあるけれど、これはもう、見事なくらいにファーストの続編だ。
リチャード・ジェイムズがアルバムごとにころころ違った側面を
見せつけていることを思えば、スコットランドのマイク・サンディ
ンソンとマーカス・エオインのふたりは、実直なまでに彼らの夢
幻をふたたび作り上げ、彼らの隔離されたあちら側の世界を提
示した。「現実のことを考えれば僕たちも仕事したりとか、排便
したりとか、税金払わなければならないわけで・・・・・・」と加藤さ
んは言った。「そう、そうなんですよ加藤さん、当たり前の話、だ
から僕たちは一生夢幻に遊んでいるなんて不可能なんですよ」
と彼は言った。「それはつまり、不可能性の追求なんですよ。そ
こからの痛みが彼らの乾いた叙情性に行き着いているのでは
ないでしょうか」「ほおー、なんとも世知辛い話ですな、なははは」
と加藤さんは焼しそうに笑った。

まずはふたりの出会いから。
マーカス：かなりの時間をアウトドアで過ごして創意工夫を学
んだ。子供の頃はかなり映画に興味を持っていた。とくにSF映
画や両親が観て欲しくないと願うような種類の映画にね。その
頃観た映画は音楽やイメージに大きな影響を与えた。荒涼たる
ヴィジョンの未来につねに興味を持っていて、とくに1970年代
の視点での未来には影響されたね。
ふたりはスコットランド北部～イングランド南部～カナダ（アルバータ）などいろいろな土地を転々としていたそうですが。
マーカス：親が建設業界で仕事をしていたから、仕事のある所へ引
っ越しをしていたんだよね。
もっとも印象に残っている場所はどこですか？
マイク：スコットランド北部だろうね。あそこはすごくシンプルで
気楽だった。だから重要なこと、例えば本を読んだり、新鮮な空
気を吸ったりすることに集中できるんだ。でも人里離れたコミ
ユニティに住むことで払わなければいけない代償は、ポピュラ
～カルチャーの大半を見逃すことになるということだ。誰にと
っても理想なのは人生のどこかの時点でその両方を経験する
ことじゃないかな。視野が広がるからさ。
好きなロック・バンドを3つ挙げてください。

マーカス：コクトー・ツインズ、ジュリアン・コープ、ビートルズ。
マーク：マイ・ブラッディ・ヴァレンタイン、ジュリアン・コープ、ヴ
エルヴェット・アンダーグラウンド。
マーカス：ほかに素響を受けたのは、ディーヴォ、ニッツァー・エ
ブ、DAF、それからさまざまなアンダーグラウンドなヒップホッ
プのレコードだったね。
好きなブラック・ミュージックのアーティストを3人挙げてください。
マーカス：スティーヴィー・ワンダー。彼がいなかったら、現在
のポップ・ミュージックはまったく違うサウンドになっていただ
ろうな。そしてメアリー・」・ブライジ。実は彼女の音楽のほと
んどは好きじゃないんだけど。でも、彼女の歌にはすごい痛み
や感情があって、ひょっとしたら洗濯をしていることでも歌え
ちゃうんじゃないかって思うほどだよ。で、僕はそこから何かを
感じるんだ。3つ目はアース・ウィン
ド＆ファイヤー。今日のミュージシャ
ンの多くに影響を与えているにも関
わらず過小評価されているバンドさ。
彼らの歌の構成や、奇妙な中東の数
秘学、占星術の影響は、ディスコ・バン
ドという名のもと見落とされている
と僕は思う。彼らの現代ヴァージョン
はウータン・クランだよね。かなり似
た影響をもってるだろ。天才のRZA
が同様に今日のバンド・サウンドに影
響を与えているようにね。
ボーズ・オブ・カナダというユニット名
は『National Film Of Canada」という映像制作会社のドキ
ユメンタリー・シリーズに由来しているそうですが。
マーカス：州が出資するカナダの映画／ドキュメンタリー制作
機関さ。彼らの専門はドキュメンタリーだけど、芸術作品もたく
さん作っている。僕らがカナダに住んでいた頃、16ミリで撮影
した野生動物の番組がトレンドだったんだ。視覚的に素晴らし
くて、例えば、鷹が眼下に広がる広大な景色に空から舞い降りて
くる映像にナレーターの声がまるで詩のように絡むといった感
じ。映像に伴う音楽はシンセサイザーをベースにしたものだっ
た。まるで実験的なシンセサイザー・ミュージックという感じだ
ったんだけど、レコーディングがいつもパーフェクトだとはいい
難かったけど。
この番組から音楽的なヒントも得たんですか？。
マイク：”公的な情報映像”ってあるだろ。例えば「電線の近くで
凧をやるのは危ない」とか、「正しいはしごの登り方」とか。カナ
ダではNFBがこれらの映像のほとんどを請け負っている。これ
らの映像に使われる音楽にはひとを脅すような底意があると思
うんだ。それはつねにインスピレーションを与えてくれた。普通
のポップ・レコードよりもかなり奇怪なものだし。ほかに大きな
インスピレーションを受けたものは、古いSF映画で使われてい
るような、シンセひとつのサウンド・エフェクト。イギリスの「ドク

映画は音楽やイメージに大きな影響を与えた。荒涼たるヴィジョンの未来につね
に興味を持っていて、とくに1970年代の視点での未来には影響されたね。

ター・フー」とか『チャッキー」とかの映画に使われているよう
なね。事実、僕らはポップ・ミュージックなんかよりも、テレビや
映画から大きなインスピレーションを受けてきた。あとは、アメ
リカのテレビ・シリーズのジングル、日本のアニメの『ガッチャマ
ン』なんかで最後に流れるやつとか（笑）。
影響を受けた映像、あるいは映画を具体的に教えてください。
マーカス：イマジネーションの入り込める余地がある映画が好
きなんだ。同時に、美しいショットと現実世界に沿ったルーズな
アドリブの対話がインスピレーションを与えるような作品が好み
かな。僕のヴィデオ・コレクションではたぶん、SF映画のほとん
どを網羅している。でも、本当に好きなのはニコラス・ローグの
『美しき冒険旅行」、ミケランジェロ・アントニオーニの「砂丘』
あるいは「パピヨン』や『アラビアのロレンス』だ。これらには共
通のテーマがあると思う。あと、サーフィンの映画も好きだ。で
も、現代のやつじゃなくて、70年代に
録られたもので16ミリのでサイケデ
リックなサウンドトラックがついてるや
つ『ビッグ・ウェンズデー」とか。スロー
モーションのウェイヴ・チューブのカラ
一映像には非常に美しいと感じさせる
何かがあるんだよね。いっぽうで、アシ
ッドなサイケデリック音楽が観ている
者の意識を満たすんだ。
マイク：『ピクニック・アット・ハンギン
グ・ロック」『いれずみの男』（ブラッド
ベリ原作）、『ウィッカーマン』（イギリス
の超カルト映画）。これらすべての映
画は観る者の心を働かせるスペースを残している作品だから
ね。それによって心をかきみだされるけど、効果的な映画だ。
BOCの音楽はスコットランドの田園風景や霧がかかった夜明けの風景などをイメージさせますが、あなたたちの制作において地域性というエレメントは重要な意味がありますか？日本では生まれ得ない風景描写だと思うんですが。 マイク：面白いことを言うなあ。というのも、僕はつねに日本
の景色っていうのはスコットランドに似ているんじゃないかと
想像してたからなんだ。山や木々があって、たくさん雨が降る
だろ。でも、おそらく君は日本の都会のことを言っているんだ
ろうな。僕はどこへ行っても自然の景色からインスピレーショ
ンを受ける。
僕にとって音楽へのインスピレーションを消耗させるものが
ひとつあるとしたら、それは都会の影響だ。都会の環境ではあ
まり長く暮らせない。すぐにもっと静かなところへ逃げる必要を
感じるんだ。閉所恐怖症的な気持ちになるだけでなく、街に大
勢のひとたちが押し合いへし合いしているっていうのがダメな
んだ。もちろん、ひとづき合いは好きだ。でも、電車の中や混み
合った店に押し込められているって感じるのが嫌なんだ。僕は
スタジオから空や水平線が見えないとダメなんだよ。
1996年、オウテカのショーン・ブースから連絡があって＜スカ

ムンからのリリースが決まったそうですね。 マーカス：嬉しかったよ。＜スカム＞は興味深い音楽を作るこ
とに対して真剣に取り組んでいるレーベルだと知っていた
し、くスカム＞とオウテカの両方が僕らのサウンドに興味をもっ
ているっていうのは、時厳しい状況に置かれていた自分たち
にとって、とても気づけられることだった。
そうしてリリースされたファースト・アルバム『Music Has
' The Right To Children』のタイトルの意味するところは？ マーカス：このタイトルはね、70年代後半の環境保護論者のス
ローガン「Children Have The Right To Music（子供たち
は音楽をやる権利がある）」を遊んだものなんだ。彼らは子供た
ちに、よりポジティヴなことへのインスピレーションを与える手段
として音楽をプレイすることを学んで欲しいと願った。つまり僕
らはその言葉をパロディって音楽がリ
スナーをコントロールしているんだ、
という意味をほのめかしてみたんだ。
あのアルバムのスリーヴには顔のな
い写真が載っていますが。
マイク：悲劇的な底意をもたせる意図
があった。写真は馴染みがあるものに
見える、まるでリスナーの家族の写真
かのようにね。でも何かくすんでいて、
はっきりしない。それが不安をそそる。
操作したり破壊したサウンドや、自分
自身の過去の影響を取り入れた音楽
を作るのなら、それがリスナーにも共
有され、リスナー自身の経験となるような作り方をしなければ
いけないんだ。

数学の本を読むのが本当に
好きなんだ。僕らの音楽やアイディアに
巨大な影響を与えているよ。そして、
それを知れば知るほど、毎日の生活の
中の事柄にミステリアスな数学的理由を
より見つけるようになるんだ。

“アクエリアズ”や“ハッピー・サイクリングのような曲ではカ
ットアップされた言葉が面白い効果を醸し出していますが、あ
あいう意味のない言葉遊び的なアプローチの意図するところ
は何ですか？
マーカス：あれば”考えを誘発するテクニックだよ。言葉をあ
あいう風に使うのが好きなんだ。それを聴いているとリスナー
が認識することなしに、ちょっとした謎や方程式を音楽の中に
構築することができるからね。
“アクエリアズ”で出てくる言葉、あれば“オレンジって言って
るんですか、“ナレッジと言っているんですか、なにぶん英語
が苦手なんで教えて下さい。
BOC：（無回答）
新作『Geogadd」に“Music Is Math（音楽とは数学である）※
という曲がありますね。その曲の中でも数字を読み上げていま
すが、いったいあなたがたが数字に惹かれる本当の理由は何で
すか？
マイク：数学の本を読むのが本当に好きなんだ。僕らの音楽や
アイディアに巨大な景響を与えているよ。そして、それを知れば
知るほど、毎日の生活の中の事柄にミステリアスな数学的理由
をより見つけるようになるんだ。それから、パーフェクトなア

ートと呼べるようなものをクリエイトするために数学を使うこと
は、大きな魅力でもある。自分たちのやっていることは何でも
パーフェクトだ、って言っている訳じゃないよ。でも、レオナル
ド・ダ・ヴィンチなどのアーティストがアートの数学的性質に取り
憑かれてからというもの、僕らにも数学を用いてパーフェクトな
音楽を作ろうというある種”聖なる理想”があったんだよ。彼の
ような熟練の画家が数学を使い”パーフェクドな絵をクリエー
トしょうとしたようにね。
“The Smallest Weird Number （最小の奇妙な数字）”とい
う曲もありますよね。いったいこれはどういう数字なんですか？
マーカス： 70。
好きな小説家は誰ですか？
マイク：ウンベルト・エーコ、ニール・ガン（スコットランドの作
家）、ロバート・アントン・ウィルソン
（神秋／幻想文学）、キム・スタンリ
ー・ロビンソン（レッド・マーズ』で知
られるSF作家）。
マーカス：グレッグ・ベア、ロバート・ア
ントン・ウィルソン。
ルイス・キャロルとジェイムズ・ジョイ
スとではどちらが好みですか？質問
者の予想ではキャロルなのですが。
マーカス：そうだよ、ルイス・キャロル
だよ。何故なら彼はひとつのアート作
品を別のアートの中に隠すというアイ
ディアを理解しているから。とは言っ
たものの、ジェイムズ・ジョイスも同じことをやった。でも、キャ
ロルの非ファンタジー的なストーリーを伝えるのにファンタジ
ーを使うやり方は天才的だよ。
『ハリー・ポッター」についてひとこと。
マーカス：あの本はまだ読んでいない。映画は観たけど、面白
かったよ。でも、もう少し先が予想できないものを期待してたけ
どね。世界中の子供が『ハリー・ポッター」の本を
読んで影響を受けるっていうのは素晴らしいことだと思うよ。携帯電話、スニ
ーカー、大量生産されたポップ・ミュージックにとり憑かれた世
界で、いまでも本を読み、想像力を使 いながら育っている子供
もいるんだというのを知ってほっとしたよ。希望を与えられた。
ビョークの「ヴェスパタイン」についてはどう思います？
マーカス：『ヴェスパタイン」を聴いていないんだ。
でも、エイフェックス・ツインには共感する部分は大きいんじや
ないですか？とくに彼の幼児性が出ているところとか。
マイク：リチャードの音楽には僕らとのつながりを感じるよ。彼
があまりユーモアを使ってないときのことだけど。彼の場合、幼
児的な瞬間でさえもアシッド的で理知的なんだ。彼は音楽の天
才だよ。
新作のタイトルの意味するところを教えてください。
マーカス：『Mucis Has The Right To Children」は僕らに
とって特定の意味をもったものだった。でも、僕らはリスナーに

自身の意味をタイトルから見つけて欲しいと思っている。ある
特定の意味に狭めてしまうよりは、クエスチョン・マークを残し
ておいた方がインスピレーションを与えるからね。
（Geogaddi」はコンセプトありきのアルバムではないんですか？
マイク：コンセプトがあるとしたら、めちゃくちゃの状態におかれ
たときの楽しさ。音楽、サウンド・ヴィジュアル、そして知覚が二
ントロールの効かない状況でおかしな動きをみせ、幻覚のよう
に無秩序にあちこちへと動き回る。ヴィジュアルに例えると、普
通のポップ・ミュージックのアルバムを粉々に打ち砕いたオレン
ジのガラス製のボトルを通して見る感じかな。
サイケデリックと定義されることに違和感はありますか？
マーカス：ないよ。もし、それが科学的な意味でのサイケデリア
という意味で、バンドや映画が信奉する使い古されたカルチャ
ーとしての意味でなければね。サイケデリックな経験っていうの
は60年代のカルチャーやヒッピーのクリシェの外側に存在する
んだよ。サイケデリックな経験は新石器時代の穴居人であろう
と、遠くの惑星にいる宇宙人であろうとできることなんだ。
サイケデリックというものをどのようなものだと考えていますか？ マイク：アートという意味かな。正常であることの退屈を打ち破
ることによってインスピレーションを与えるアートすべて。増長
した、または破壊されたマインドをもつという経験を喚起する
ものすべて。
曲のなかで子供声を多用するのは、どうした理由からですか？ マイク：リスナーに即座に効果を与えることのできるサウンドな
んだ。しかし、その意味はいろいろな捉え方ができる。例えば
幸福感、喪失感、恐怖、興奮、悲しみなど。ある楽曲のなかでこれ
らの声を聴くと、それらの感情が増強されるんだ。とくにその
声を取り入れた意味がわからないときにはね・・・。
音楽的経験において、BOCがもっとも重要視することは何で
すか？
マーカス：自分が想像したものを再構築してレコーディングす
ること。それが作曲の究極の目的なんだ。つまり、中間部分を
取り除いて、自分の頭のなかで最初に聴いたものをリスナーに
対しダイレクトに伝える。僕は、もし神がいるとしたら、神は音楽
を通じてコミュニケートするのだと思っている。いままで、音楽
を通じて神に到達しようとしたミュージシャンについて自分な
りに研究をしてきた。そして、無然にも彼らの作った音楽という
のは、僕をもっとも奇妙な気持ちにさせたものだったんだ。ま
るでそれらの曲がアーティストによって作られていないような
感じだったんだ。ブライアン・ウィルソンの”ゴッド・オンリー・ノ
ウズを聴いてみてよ。祈りを捧げる神がいるんだったら、僕も
これを試してみようと思う。口

albumreviews

KICK THE CAN CREW

Vitalizer

キックは何も変わっちゃいない。彼らは見事に前作「Young King」の延長線上で新しいアルバムをつくり上げ
た。ここではやっぱり堂々巡りの自問自答とナイト・クラビングの楽しさが語築豊かなライミングの中で歌われる。
特集の原稿では「前作より確言犯的に大味に仕上げられた作品」と書いたが、聴けば聴く程、やっぱり変わってはいないという印象の方が勝っ
ていく。それなのに、前作が大好きだった自分が今作を積極的に支持できな
い理由は、例えばこういう事なのかもしれない。僕はキックの、ヒップホップ・サークルにおける類型的な「不良
的表現」へのアンチとして打ち出される「ナイーヴな表現」にこそはっきりと引かれてきた部分がある。しかし彼
らが、いざヒップホップ・シーンから出て、Jポップ・シーンの中に殴り込んでいったら、そこには「不良的表現」よ
りも「ナイーヴな表現」の方がずっと多くて、しかも求められていて、彼らは溶け込むようにすんなりと受け入れら
れてしまった。そして彼らの「アンチ」の部分はうやむやになってしまったのだ。「大味」に感じたのはそこだろう。
しかし、だからこそ、これは大きな結果を出すアルバムになるのだ。間違いなく僕が少数派である。（磯部涼）

BOARDS OF CANADA

Geogaddi

これは対岸の火事を眺めるような音楽だ。ボーズ・オブ・カナダはこの時代に起こっている全てのことに素知ら
ぬ顔をして、ただただ機能的なトリップ・ミュージックを用意する。逆回転するドラムや、繰り返される古びたヴォイ
ス・サンプルが象徴するように、彼らにとってのトリップとは／スタルジーに浸ることである。そして、今作にははっ
きりと”1969”という曲があり、そのノスタルジーは楽天的ではなく、悪い予感に満ちている。ノスタルジックなト
リップを用意しておきながら、ボーズ・オブ・カナダが連れていくのは、ラブ＆ピースの挫折を予感させるようなウッ
ドストックがあった年、1969年だ。そのことを警告するために、彼らは美しいメロディには沈み込んでいくマイナ
！コードを、麻薬的なドラム・ループには崩れ落ちる瞬間を忍ばせている。が、しかし、これはハーメルンの笛吹
きのような音楽でもある。淡自か空騒ぎかというこの時代は居心地が悪いと思っていて、その向こうに待ってい
るのが例えどんなバッド・トリップであろうと、この魅惑的なメロディーとリズムならついていってしまう人は大勢い
るだろう。約3年半ぶりのセカンド。無気味な程タイミングの良いリリースだ。（磯部涼）

SHING02

400

「400」をライヴで聴いて以降、固唾を飲んでただその時を待っていた。「400」をアカペラで聴いたときの微動
壁蝨出来なかった沈痛な苦々しい迄の衝撃を思い出す。リリックが思いっきり突き刺さってくるんだ。ブルブル
と震えたグーに固まった拳の鉾先は次第に何時もの処に。そう遂にシンゴ02の新作が完成したんだ。シンゴ
02の魅力のひとつに、彼の作詞の他より秀でた能力がある。それは、現代の闇の部分にも深い共有部分を有
していると思われるから、不思議と共感を覚える。それはボクに限ったことじゃないかもしれないが。闇の部分は、
少なからず、含み笑いにも似た笑いを伴う。それはシンゴ02の作品からも読み取られ、それは痛痒い箇所をくす
ぐられ火炙りにされるそんな趣。つまりは、リリックに共感出来る曲々に面白みみたいなものを強く感じる。そこ
で、ふと、あっ『400」は、「400」のリリックは全部日本語なんだと、ふと我に還る。日本語ラップに何もリアルを

感じない若人の方々には共感を得られるんではないのでしょうか？何故かって？シンゴ02の世界は確実に
独創的で、でも日常的で、それは成立してるから。リアルさで比較すると「緑黄色人種」の120%。（北川達哉

Note: Translated by ChatGPT-4o

Boards of Canada:

Magical, Mystery, Cycling

Finally, Boards of Canada have released their second album, showcasing their cyclical, dreamlike quality.

Should we say “finally”? Or perhaps “at long last”? Or maybe “just when we'd almost forgotten about them”? Honestly, I'm not sure. Either way, Boards of Canada have a new release. Yes, it's happening, Mr. Katon! But wait, what is Boards of Canada? The hottest name in electronica post-Autechre? Oh please, let's not reduce them to some B-grade critic's cliché. This is the psychedelic of the now, where progress and decay coexist in harmony.

words Tsutomu Noda . Nachiro Kato

translation Kyoko Fukuda . Kana Muramatsu

The appeal of Boards of Canada lies, without a doubt, in their extreme playfulness. Their popular tracks like "Aquarius" and "Happy Cycling" share a playful dreamlike quality. For example, in "Happy Cycling", the nonsensical words spoken repeatedly within the minimalistic loops create a dry, dreamlike world. There's no room for adult concepts like love or spirituality in this space—it's a dream built on an almost childlike perspective. The dry yet lyrical quality of the dream, with its intersections of nonsense, is where Boards of Canada remains fully committed.

This type of psychedelia is far removed from both an attempt to engage with reality and the search for meaning within the dreamworld. As a result, we find ourselves endlessly spinning within Boards of Canada's "Happy Cycling" (a literal cycle of happiness). As long as we listen to the music, the dream continues spinning infinitely.

It's like in Alice in Wonderland when the sister knows that simply opening her eyes would bring her back to the dull reality. And honestly, it's not just her who knows this.

When Music Has the Right to Children was released in 1998, many who fell in love with it probably didn't want to wake up to disillusionment. Much like how a child is engrossed in playful nonsense, only to have the mood ruined by an adult's dull reasoning, we all know that whether it's psychedelia or fantasy, adult logic can often feel out of place. We've grown tired of preachy meanings, neatly packaged romanticism, or the same old “one love” sentiment. In that case, it's better to be completely isolated from such things.

In the late 90s, while rave culture flourished in Japan, Boards of Canada's music, with its dry, lyrical dreaminess, offered something entirely different, filling a unique need on Japanese dance floors. In "Aquarius", numbers are recited in a minimalist style but eventually jump randomly. The randomness doesn't matter, though; we're simply playing in this dry, dreamlike nonsense. This is the essence of Boards of Canada's music, a continual repetition that plays with minimalism, children's voices, and dreamlike sounds. It's a sound that's hard to describe as anything other than BoC, a slightly muffled, rotating, dreamlike sound.

In the first album's opening track, "An Eagle in Your Mind", the child's voice saying "I love you" sounds like it's mocking reality, beckoning us into this closed, expansive dreamworld. In the UK, Boards of Canada is classified as psychedelic rather than electronica, and indeed, their music has more in common with The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's or wikipedia:The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds than with Autechre. Their second album, Geogaddi, is essentially a direct continuation of their first. Although there are some minor changes in rhythm and sound, it's essentially a sequel.

While Richard James (Aphex Twin) constantly shows different sides of himself with each album, the Scottish duo of Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin faithfully recreated their dreamworld again. They presented their isolated, otherworldly space. "When we think about reality, we have to work, defecate, pay taxes..." said Kato-san. "Exactly, Kato-san. That's the reality. It's impossible to play in this dreamworld forever," he replied. "In fact, this is the pursuit of the impossible. Perhaps that's what leads to their dry lyricism." "Ah, that's quite a bleak perspective," Kato-san laughed.

albumreviews

KICK THE CAN CREW

Vitalizer

Kick hasn't changed at all. They have masterfully created a new album as a direct extension of their previous work, Young King. Once again, they explore the endless cycle of self-questioning and the joy of nightclubbing, expressed through their lyrically rich rhymes. In my feature article, I wrote that this work is "a more boldly crafted piece than their previous one", but the more I listen, the more the feeling that nothing has changed overpowers me. Yet, despite my love for their last album, I can't wholeheartedly support this new one. Perhaps the reason lies in something like this: I was particularly drawn to Kick's "naive expression," which stood out as a clear contrast to the stereotypical "bad-boy expression" common in hip-hop circles. However, once they stepped out of the hip-hop scene and dove into the J-pop scene, they found that "naive expression" was far more prevalent—and even in demand—than "bad-boy expression". They were easily accepted, seamlessly blending into the J-pop world, and their "anti" stance became muddled in the process. That's where the "boldness" I mentioned stems from.

But for that very reason, this album will likely achieve significant success. There's no doubt that I'm in the minority. (Ryo Isobe)

BOARDS OF CANADA

Geogaddi

This is music that feels like watching a fire on the other side of the river. Boards of Canada keep a nonchalant face toward everything happening in this era, simply providing functional trip music. As symbolized by the reversed drums and repeated, worn-out voice samples, for them, a "trip" means indulging in nostalgia. And in this work, there's a clear track titled "1969", but the nostalgia it evokes is not optimistic; it's filled with a sense of foreboding. Despite offering a nostalgic trip, where Boards of Canada take us is back to 1969—the year of Woodstock—a year that foreshadows the disillusionment of love and peace. To warn us of this, they weave minor chords into their beautiful melodies, sinking them, and moments of collapse into their hypnotic drum loops. Yet, this is also music like the Pied Piper's. In this unsettling time, whether we're caught up in shallow frivolity or not, no matter what bad trip awaits on the other side, many will likely follow this mesmerizing melody and rhythm. Their second album in about three and a half years. An eerily well-timed release. (Ryo Isobe)

SHING02

400

Ever since I heard “400” live, I've been holding my breath, just waiting for this moment. I remember the painful, bitter shock I felt when I first heard “400” a cappella—it left me utterly motionless. The lyrics pierced straight into me. My clenched fist, shaking and tense, gradually relaxed into its usual state. And now, finally, Shing02's new work is complete.

One of Shing02's greatest talents is his exceptional lyricism. His words resonate deeply, as they seem to connect with the darker parts of modern life, creating a strange sense of empathy. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way. These darker elements often come with a smirk, a kind of laugh that feels like it's hiding something. This nuance can be found in Shing02's work too—it's as if he's tickling the most sensitive spots, setting them aflame. In other words, the songs with lyrics we can empathize with are incredibly compelling.

Then, suddenly, it hits me—oh right, “400”, its lyrics are all in Japanese. For the younger generation who don't find anything real in Japanese rap, perhaps they'll connect with this. Why? Because Shing02's world is undeniably unique, yet also relatable—it works. If we're talking about realism, “Rhyme and Reason” hits 120%. (Tatsuya Kitagawa)

---

Ritmo e Dolore

title	Ritmo e Dolore
author	Otto Gordini
publication	Rock Sound
date	2002/04
issue	48
pages	84-85

Ritmo e Dolore is an interview (in Italian) by Otto Gordini originally published Apr. 2002 in Rock Sound magazine Number 48, pp. 84-85.

Ritmo e Dolore

Dopo l'eccellente "Music has the right to children" del 1998, torna il duo scozzese con la sua elettronica dalle multiple sfaccettature. II nuovo lavoro si intitola "Geogaddi" e saprà conquistare gli amanti di un certo tipo di sonorità malinconiche. I Boards Of Canada sono due personaggi schivi e discreti che preferiscono lasciar parlare la loro musica...

Boards Of Canada sembrano due persone alquanto misteriose, che vorrebbero essere altrove e non costrette a rispondere a domande riguardanti la loro musica. Pensate che non si sono nemmeno presentati al party di presentazione del loro disco, preferendo apparire soltanto in video. Come dire... il presenzialismo non piace a tutti: ci spiega Mike. Eppure i Boards Of Canada vengono spesso etichettati come uno dei migliori gruppi di elettronica. Ma anche questo sembra quasi spaventare i due diretti interessati: Qual è la definizione ideale di "Geogaddi": La fase creativa sembra generare sensazioni contrastanti nei due musicisti: Mike e Marcus hanno sempre manifestato un particolare interesse per le sonorità degli anni '60 e '70: E su questo credo proprio che parecchi di noi saranno d'accordo.

Note: translated with ChatGPT-4o

Rhythm and Pain

After the excellent Music Has the Right to Children from 1998, the Scottish duo returns with their multifaceted electronic music. The new work is titled Geogaddi and is sure to win over lovers of a certain type of melancholic sound. Boards Of Canada are two shy and discreet individuals who prefer to let their music do the talking...

Boards Of Canada seem to be quite mysterious people, who would rather be elsewhere than being forced to answer questions about their music. In fact, they didn't even attend the launch party for their album, preferring to appear only on video. As if to say... not everyone likes to be in the spotlight:

, explains Mike. Yet Boards Of Canada are often labeled as one of the best electronic groups. But this also seems to almost frighten the two main individuals:

The creative phase seems to generate conflicting sensations in the two musicians:

Mike and Marcus have always shown a particular interest in the sounds of the '60s and '70s:

And on this, I believe many of us will agree.

---

We're making music that has its own universe and time

title	We're making music that has its own universe and time
author	Ryota Kato/Jiro Dai
publication	Snoozer
date	2002/04
issue	30
pages	40-45

We're making music that has its own universe and time was an interview (in Japanese) by Ryota Kato/Jiro Dai originally published April 2002 in Snoozer magazine Number 30 pp. 40-45.

Note: Transcription by Apple's Live Text on a MacBook Pro

BOARDS

OF

CANADA

by RYOTA KATO / JIRO DAI

BOARDS OF CANADA

Interview with MARCUS EOIN & MICHAEL SANDISON

僕らは、それ自身の宇宙や時間を持っているような音楽を作って る。その場所っていうのはつまり、もう一つの現実。それは曲がり 角の向こう側に、鏡の向こう側に、いつも存在しているんだ

スコットランドの山奥でコミューン生活を営むという二人組が誘う、この甘く危険なノスタルジアへの トリップこそが、エレクトロニカ・ブームの最もポピュラーな象徴にして、最大の異端である。 これは顔廃か、それとも現実への変革か？世界中からの熱狂にも、ハーメルンの笛はただ奏でられ続ける。 3年半ぶりの2ndアルバム『ジオガディ」を機に、遂に実現したインタヴューは、e-mailにて行われた

●僕は2001年の（オール・トゥモローズ・パーティーズ） に行ったのですが、あの時点からあなた達は、ニュー・ アルバム制作のために人払い状態に入ると聞きました。そ うした環境は、ボーズ・オブ・カナダ（以下、BOC）の 音楽自体が要請するものなのでしょうか？

マイケル・サンディソン（以下、マイク）「その通り。す べての人との関係を絶つことが必要なんだ。自分達がや っていることに対して、頭をクリアにさせておくには、そ うするしかない。他の人達が周りにいると、音楽が悪い 意味で影響を受けてしまうんだ」

●BOCが、アナログ・シンセのサウンドに拘る理由は何 なのでしょうか？オウテカが使うような、MAXMSPな どのソフトウェアによるDSPに、関心はありますか？

マーカス・エオイン（以下、マーカス）「僕らは、クリー ンで“モダンな”サウンドの音楽を作ることには興味が ない。誰にでも出来ることだから。今日では、コンピュ ータやソフトウェアが非常にパワフルになったおかげで、 ほとんど何の努力もなしに、プロフェッショナルに聞こ える音を作れる。クリーンなデジタル・ミュージックのサ ウンドは嫌いなんだ。完璧すぎるし、口当たりが良すぎ る。個性がないんだよ。僕らはもっと、過去のある時代 の特徴が聞こえてくる音楽を作りたい一例えば、80年 代初期のテレビ音楽とか。だから僕らは、わざわざ自分 から話を面倒くさくして、サウンドの“グレードを落と ず”ために長い時間かけて作業するんだ」

●オウテカのショーンが、「BOCの音楽はいいけど、僕が 聴くにはノスタルジックすぎるところがある」と言ってい ました。僕個人は、それはオウテカとBOC両方の性質を よく表したコメントだと思うのですが、あなたはこれにど う応えますか？

マイク「彼らの音楽は大好きだ。常に新鮮だし、常に新 しいものが見つけられる。でも僕らは、彼らとはまったく 異なるバンドなんだ。彼らはパターンに取り憑かれている けれど、僕らはメロディとテクスチャー、音の手触りに 取り憑かれている」

●あなた達にとって、アシッド・ハウスやエクスタシーの カルチャーはどのような体験だったのでしょうか？現在 でも、そこからの影響を受けていると思いますか？

マーカス「初めてアシッド・ハウスがやって来た時に、ご く短い間、夢中になった。だけど大きな影響を受けては いないね」

●BOCの音楽は基本的にメロディ・オリエンテッドだと 思います。その認識が正しいとすれば、あなた達にとっ てメロディとは、主に何を表するものなのでしょうか？

マイク「僕にとって、メロディは、人間の感情に対して 極端に強く作用する、ある種の言語なんだ。絶対に言葉 には出来ないことがらを、表現することの出来る言語。ど んなバックグラウンドを持つどんな人にも、その言語は 理解出来るんだ」

●では、BOCの音楽において、“ビート”とは何を表現、あるいは代表していると言えますか？

マイク「句読点」

●“musicismath（音楽は数学だ）”という曲名は、あなた達の音楽に対する態度表明の一つなのでしょうか？それともアイロニーなのでしょうか？

マーカス「両方だと思う。というのも、第一に僕らはハ ートからメロディを生み出すことに関心があるけれど、同 時に、それを裏付けるサイエンス（科学、知識体系）に も魅せられているから」

●サイケデリック・カルチャーは、人種やセクシュアリ ティ、階級や仰といった、様々なバリアを突き崩して いくものだったように思います。BOCと、サイケデリッ ク・カルチャーとの関係は、どのようなものなのでしょ うか？

マイク「僕らにそれは当てはまらないと思う。サイケデリ ック・カルチャーと言うと、僕はヒッピー・カルチャーや ニューエイジ・カルチャーのことだと思っているんだけ ど、それは僕らとはまったくかけ離れているからね。明ら かに僕らはラヴ＆ピース的ではあるけれど、ニューエイ ジ・カルチャーにはアイデンティファイしてないんだ。僕 らがサイケデリアに興味を持っているのは、純粋に、そ の生物学的なプロセスと、そこから生み出されるアート、 という観点においてだね」

●ポップ・ミュージックは、オーディエンスにある種の共 同体的な感覚を与えるものとして誕生しました。60年代 のサイケデリック・カルチャーは社会の外部にある新た な共同体を志向しましたし、ダンス・ミュージックのか かるクラブには一晩限りの共同体が生まれるようなとこ ろがあると思います。では、BOCの音楽は、コミューナ ルな性格を（部分的にでも）持っていると思いますか？

マーカス「わからないけどおそらく、ある特定のタイプ の人がそういうものにアイデンティファイしているんだろ うな。僕らが世界について思考するのと同じ考え方をす る人たちが、世の中には大勢いるーーそして彼らは、僕 らのような音楽への関心を共有することによって、集ま ってくるーーそう僕は思いたいね」

●1969”という曲タイトルがありますが、この年号は、 あなた達二人の生まれた年を表しているのでしょうか？ それとも、歴史的・文化的な事実への言及だったりする のでしょうか？

マイク「僕らはまだその年には生まれてなかったよ。ある アメリカの宗教グループの歴史における、特別な年号の ことを指してるんだ」

●上の曲では、「inthesunshine」という声を聞き取るこ とが出来ます。この言葉は何を意味しているのか、教え

てもらうことは出来ますか？

マイク「その宗教グループがその当時に感じていた、希 望と確のフィーリングを、反映させたかったんだ」

●以前にも“sixtyniner”という曲がありましたが、BOC にとって「1969」というのは、特別な感慨をもって振り 返る年だったりするのでしょうか？

70年代というのは、ある意味で、一つの黄金時代の終焉だと思えるんだ。それは、 利己主義と物質主義が蔓延する、新しい時代の始まりだった。90年代末の二度目の ウッドストック・フェスティヴァルが、どれほど失望させられるものだったか。 そう、つまり、僕らのジェネレーションというのは、ずっとスポイルされてきたんだ

マーカス「あのタイトルはダブル・ミーニングで、二重 の意味があるんだ・・・・・少なくとも英語ではね。つまり、あ のトラックの元になったのは、1969年に経験した自分の 最初の性体験を、ある男が描写したテープなんだよ」

●翌年の1970年、ワイト島でのフェスティヴァルが歴史 的な失敗に終わるように、その頃は「ヒッピー・カルチ ャーの終焉の季節」として記憶されています。そこに何 らかの個人的な記憶を重ねているところはありますか？ マーカス「特に個人的な記憶があるわけじゃないよ。 1970年には僕はまだ一匹の精子だったし。でも確かに僕 らは、あの時代のカルチャーに入れ込んでいる。70年代 というのは、ある意味で、一つの黄金時代の終焉だと思 えるんだ、実際。それは、利己主義と物質主義が蔓延す る、新しい時代の始まりだった。90年代末の二度目のウ ッドストック・フェスティヴァルが、どれほど失望させ られるものだったか、考えてみるだけでもわかるだろ。あ の時キッズたちは、会場をめちゃくちゃにし、車を燃や し、レイプまで犯した。そう、つまり、僕らのジェネレー ションというのは、ずっとスポイルされてきたんだ」

●安直な対比ですが、BOCの音楽は、陽光の下と、夜の 闇とでは、どちらが似合うと思いますか？また、夏と冬 とでは、どうでしょうか？ マーカス「真冬の、明るい陽光の中」

●これまでBOCのアートワークは、ブルーを中心とする 寒色系でした。ところが新作では、大胆に赤や黄色とい った暖色をフィーチュアしています。ここには、何らか の意味が込められていますか？ マイク「このアートワークは、火と、宗教的なイコノグ ラフィー（図像）とのコンビネーションを、表したかっ た。万華鏡の映像における幾何学的バターンというのは、 宗教画によく見られる完璧なシンメトリー（対称性）に 似ているんだよ。そしてすべてが、赤く燃えさかる夏の儀 式、という一つのイメージに統合されているんだ」

●BOCの音楽を、自分ではどのようなシチュエーション で聴きますか？

マーカス「僕らは自分達の音楽を、いつも聴いているよ。 リリースされたことのない曲が巨大なアーカイヴになっ ていて、それを聴き直すのが大好きなんだ。僕自身が聴 いていて一番楽しめるのは、完璧に独りっきりの時だと 思う。野外に出ている時とか、車を走らせている時とか。 自分のイマジネーションを自由に広げられるんだ」

●あなた達の楽曲タイトルはいつも神秘的なものです。そ こに、何らかのケルト文化からの響を見て取ることは 可能ですか？

マーカス「ケルトの影響を受けたものを意識的に作った ことは、これまでのところはないと思うんだけど、実際、 伝統的なスコットランド音楽の中には好きなものもある ね。特に、アカペラのゲール語の歌。まるで逆回転にし た音楽みたいに、本当に奇妙に響くんだ。どこか超自然 的な効果をもたらすんだよ」

●以前、モグワイのスチュアートにインタヴューした時、 「スコティッシュやウェルシュの文化はすごくポジティヴ だけど、未だにどこか負け犬（アンダードッグ）っていう 感覚が付きまとってる」と語っていたんですが、彼の言 葉に同意するところはありますか？

マイク「その通りだね。僕はスコットランド人についてし か話せないけど、スコットランド入っていうのは、外の世 界に出ていって、ちょっとでも上昇してやろう、ってい う前向きな志向が全然ないんだよ。すごくフレンドリー で、知的で、親しみやすい連中であるっていうのは事実 なのに、もっと良くなろうってお互いに励ましあうことさ えしない。始まってもいないうちから負けちゃってるよう な、敗北主義的アティテュードがあるんだ。多分、一般 的に見て、周囲の国に比べてかなり貧しい国だからだと 思う。歴史の最初から最後まで、イングランド人に利用 され続けたおかげで、ずっと貧しいままの国だからね」

●BOCの作品には、声”によって、こっそりとメッセー ジを忍ばせておく、という手法を感じることがあります。 実際、そのようなアングルはあるのでしょうか？ マーカス「もちろん。僕らは、音楽の中にいろんなもの を隠しておくんだ。君たちに発見してもらうためにね」

●ケルトの歴史の多くは、悲劇の歴史だと言われます。彼 らの多くは文字を持たなかった。あなた達は、その彼ら の歴史を語り継ごうとしているーーそんな意識はありま すか？ マーカス「アーティスティックな意味では、自分達がケ ルト的であるとはまったく思ってないんだ。僕らは、もつ とずっと遠く離れたところからの影響を受けている。で も、スコットランド人であることについては、確かにいく らかの誇りを持っているよ。ケルトの伝統や言語といっ たものの継承を支持しているし、スコットランドの政治 学には関心があるね」

●レディオヘッドの「アムニージアック」に代表される ように、現代文明への背反的意識に駆られたアーティス トの中には、そのカウンター的要素として、古代文明の 引用を取り入れることがあります。BOCにも、そのよう なニュアンスはありますか？

マイク「自らの文化を、過去と比較せずに分析するのは、 不可能だと思うんだ。例えばこの2002年を、第一次大戦 や第二次大戦の時代と比較すると、僕らは大きな平和の 時代に生きている、と言うことも出来る。だけど、ドル イドたちや農夫たちが暮らしていた古代と比較すれば、 我々は野蛮な時代に暮らしているように見える。全般的 に見て、僕らはアーティストとして、この今日の世界を、 たくさんの可能性に満ちた世界だと考えているけれど、で も同時に、膨大な数の恐ろしい脅威に満ちた時代だとも 思っている。僕ら自身はすごくポジティヴな人間だけど、 僕らのジェネレーションがこの巨大なパラノイアの時代 にいかにして生まれてきたのかーーそして僕らはそのこ とを、映画や本や音楽といった自分達の文化の産物に、ど のように反映させているのかーーっていうことに興味を 持っているんだ」

●ケルトやネイティヴ・アメリカンを始め、多くの古代 人の文化の持つ、「自然は誰の所有物でもない」という思 想に共感するところはありますか？

マーカス「イエス。この自然と環境は、君や僕よりも、そ していかなる政府や国やジェネレーションよりも、長く 存在してきているんだ。そしてこれからもずっと存在し ていくべきだけれど、そのためには敬意を持って接しな きゃ無理だね」

●では、ドルイド数とキリスト教とのシンクレティズムに ついて、あなた達の見解がもしあれば教えてください。 マイク「僕が想像するに、現在世界で仰されている宗 数はすべて、実いろんな別々の古代宗教のアマルガム だと思う。だからこそ、宗教における極端な原理主義と いうのは馬げているんだ。現代の儀式や教えが、もと もとの神の言葉でありうるわけがないんだからね。そう したものはすべて、長い年月を経るうちに、その時代時 代の体制の都合に合わせて調整され、混合され、編集さ れてきたっていうことなんだ」

●ケルト美術の渦巻模様や、遺跡や装飾品によく出てく る組紐模様は、エターナル・ノットと呼ばれ、ケルト人 の「始めも終わりもない死生観」を表していると言われ ます。BOCの音楽も、楽曲それぞれはすごく個性的なん だけれど、聴き終わってみると、まだずっと音楽が続い ているような感覚を聴き手に与えてくれます。そこに何 らかの関連性は存在すると思いますか？

マイク「渦巻模様について君が言いたいことは、理解出 来るよ。僕らの曲における、反復したり循環したりする エレメントのことだよね、きっと。アルペジオとか・・・・・。 僕らは、多くの場合、まるで永遠に続いていくみたいに 聞こえるよう、トラックをデザインしている。レコードか ら聞こえる部分が、まるで巨大な無限の何ものかの、ほ んの小さな一部分であるかの如く思えるように、エディ ットするんだ。しばらくの間ふっと浮かんできたかと思う と、また自然に消えていくーあたかもそんな風にね。そ うすると、どこか別の場所で、それがいつまでも鳴り続 けているような、そんな気がしてくるんだ。僕らは、それ

僕は、自分なりのユートピアについてのヴィジョンを思い描いている。きっとそれは、 人々がそれぞれの差異を持ちうるようにしっかり教育を受けていながら、暴力に訴える 代わりにお互いにゲームを挑みあうような、そんな未来。そこでは、木々がたったの 10秒間で30フィートにまで育ち、色の違う10個の太陽が一日中輝き続けているんだ

自身の場所、それ自身の宇宙や時間を持っているような 音楽を作っている。その場所っていうのはつまり、もう 一つの現実 この今という時代を抽象化した、現実の ファンタジー・ヴァージョンみたいなものだね。だからま るで、別の場所や時間の中へと、踏み入っていくような 気持ちになるんじゃないかと思う。その場所は、曲がり 角の向こう側に、鏡の向こう側に、いつも存在している んだ。ポピュラーなファンタジーには、必ずそんな作用 があるよね。そう、人は、音楽とともに自分のイマジネ ーションを解き放つことで、いつでも好きな時に、自分 自身のライフからしばし離れることが出来るんだ」

●ヒッピーイズムをどのように捉えていますか？

マーカス「“ヒッピーイズム”と僕らの間にある、唯一の リアルな繋がりは、1960年代に花開いたすべてのファン タスティックな音楽。僕らはそれについてよく知ってい るし、大好きだから」

●60年代にヒッピーのグルとされた作家リチャード・ブ ローティガンは、「西瓜糖の日々』という作品で、ある種 の理想郷を描きました。それは、「IDEATH」という名の 理想郷で、つまりミーイズムを始めとするエゴを殺す（な いし縮小する）ことにより成立する、平和で変化のない 世界でした。あなた達は、そのような理想郷をどう思い ますか？肯定しますか？

マイク「でも、それは同時に、ゾンビだけが住む世界に もなりうるよね。一人ひとりの個性もなく、何の驚きも なく、オリジナルな思想もなく、進歩もない。摩擦によ ってのみ、生まれる進歩というのもある」

●では、BOCの音楽は、何らかの理想郷を実現させるも のだと思いますか？そうだとすれば、それはどのような ユートピアですか？

マイク「僕らの音楽が、今ある現状に対するオルタナテ イヴ（別の選択肢）を示すものであってほしいと、僕は 思う。つまり、僕が作曲するときに望むのは、現実世界 のこの単調なリアリティから切り離された音楽であって ほしい、ということなんだ。そして多分、そのとき僕は、 自分なりのユートビアについてのパーソナルなヴィジョ ンを思い描いているんだろうな。きっとそれは、人々がそ れぞれの差異を持ちうるようにしっかり教育を受けてい ながら、暴力に訴える代わりにお互いにゲームを挑みあ うような、そんな未来。そこでは、木々がたったの10秒 間で30フィートにまで育ち、色の違う10個の太陽が一日 中輝き続けているんだ」

●BOCの音楽を特徴づけているのは、明らかに世間とは 違う、ゆったりとした時間の流れをデザインしているこ とだと思います。「自分達の音楽によって、聴き手の時間 感覚に何らかの“変更”を促したい」 そういった意識 はあなた達のアングルにありますか？

マイク「イエス！それこそ、トリックの一つなんだ。サ イケデリックスの最も明白なエフェクトの一つだね。音 楽によって僕らがそれを目指すためには、たくさんの手 法のリストが挙げられる。例えば、音楽をスパイラル（渦 巻）のように構成したり。アルペジオを使ったり。注意 深く耳を傾ければ傾けるほど、どんどん膨れ上がっていく ようなディテールを込めたり。そして、レコードが鳴り終 わった後も頭の中で延々続いていくみたいに感じるよう な、メロディのループを作ったりいくつか転調を配 置したり、ある主題をまったく未解決のままに放置した

りすると、そういう効果が生まれるんだよ」

●BOCのアートワークや曲タイトルには、特に前作EP を始めとして、田園的（rural）なものへの言及が数多く 見られます。「ruralなもの」とは、単純に言って、文明の 外部だと言うことが出来ると思いますが、あなた達の中 にそのようなアングルはありますか？

マーカス「うーん、曲を書くときに、それがどこか他の環 境で、他の誰かに聴かれるところって、想像したりはし ないんだ。だから、僕らにとっては100パーセント、僕ら 自身のまさに目の前にある環境や、自分達の生活、記憶 なんかと関係している。それがたまたま、とても田園的 な影響となっているんだよ」

●BOCのruralness（田園性）とは、marginality（社 会の主流から取り残されること、無視されること、辺境 や周辺にあること）の表現と捉えることは可能ですか？

マイク「それは単に、僕らのいる場所を、そして僕ら自 身を、反映しているんだ」

●では、BOCの音楽を、積極的に周辺的であろうとする、 あるいは周辺的であることを肯定する音楽である、と言 うことは可能ですか？

マイク「音楽を作るとき、僕らが一番想像しないのは、レ コードが店に並んでるところとか、リスナーがレコードを ハイファイで聴いてるところなんだ。僕らはただ、僕らの スタジオの中の僕らだけの小さな世界で、やることをや ってるだけ。それが地球の反対側で誰かに聴かれてるっ てことを知るときでさえ、やっぱり具体的には想像しに くい。だから、僕らが人々からどのように見られているか ってことには、まったく影響されることがないんだ。ト ラックを作ってるとき、僕が想像するのはただ、自分と

マーカスがそれを聴いているところでしかない」

●BOCの音楽は、無意識の領域や、既に忘れたつもり になっている記憶の領域に、アクセスしようとしている

というようなアングルはあなた達にあるでしょうか？

マーカス「僕らは既にそうしているよ。ある特定の記憶 への鍵になりうるような、音楽的なトリガーや引用を、曲 に取り入れることでね」

●BOCの音楽は、何らかの“逃避”、エスケイプを提供 していると思いますか？

マイク「そうであってほしいね」

●資本主義の社会において、ある種のエスケイプやサボ タージュというのは、最も本質的な危険さを秘めている、 という言い方に同意しますか？

（無回答）

●徹底してノスタルジックな表現は、直接的に現実への 変革を促しうる→そうした視点は、あなた達の中にあ りますか？

マイク「質問の意味にちょっと自信がないんだけど、今 この時の現実を変容させたりとか、少なくともそれに対 する僕らの知覚に変化を加えたりすることは、可能だと 思ってる。結局それしかないんだよ。自分のムードを変 えるってこと。もし、ふっと感じた匂いや、かすかに聞こ えた旋律が、生き生きとした記憶を呼び起こせるとした ら、音楽にはほとんど時間を超越する力がある、って言 えるんじゃないかな」

●音楽表現の中に、バッド・ヴィジョンや警鐘的なイメ ージを含ませることに、意識的ですか？意識したことが ないとしたら、今後、そのようなことを試してみる可能 性はありますか？

マーカス「イエス。もちろんだよ。悪夢や恐怖を取り入 れなければ、それは僕らの精神を忠実に反映したものに はなりえないから。だけど僕らが今までやってきたのは、 ダークな要素を、音楽の中に埋めこんでしまうっていう 方法なんだ。そうすると、もし望むなら、ただ美しい情 緒的なメロディとして楽しむことも出来るし、分析し、解 きほぐしていくことも出来る一すると、ダークな顔が 現れて、君をじっと見つめ始めるんだ」

●サンフランシスコにあるフランシス・フォード・コッポ ラのスタジオの名前、「ゾエトロープ」を曲名に引用した のは何故ですか？

マイク「僕らは引用してないんだ。あれは、あるジャー ナリストがでっち上げた話さ。あれは、初期のアニメー ・ション装置（＊回転のぞき絵）にちなんで名付けたって わけ」

●アルバム・タイトルの『geogaddi」（入り江の王、地 の王？）というのは、どのような存在のことを指すのでし ょうか？

（無回答）

（BOC「亮太、ジロー、ありがとう」）

この無限と夢幻のアナザー・ワールドは、誰がために鳴るのか？ 隠遁者デュオが描く「鏡の国」に迷いこんだ、アリスならぬヨゴレ編集部の珍道中、「南青山異次完談24時」

文＝田中宗一郎✕加藤太✕基次郎

ダイ「うおー、カッコいいじゃん！！メールの返事！グッ
とくるねー」
加藤「（笑）質問作ってて、妄想炸裂かなあって気もして
たんだけど、すごい面白かったね」
田中「考えてることがしっかりあるから、こっちの仮説
がかなり暴走してても、ちゃんと引っ掛かりのある答え
が返ってくるし、それが必ずしも的外れでなかったりし
てんじゃん？でも、やっぱ鋭いよねー、俺達」
ダイ「出た、必殺の自画自賛！」
加藤「でも、エレクトロニカの人達って、基本的にあん
ましゃべりたがらないっていうイメージもあるから、驚い
たは驚いたかも。特にボーズ・オブ・カナダなんて、海外
誌見てもネット見ても、ほとんど発言見かけないような
存在だったから」
田中「1stアルバムが、スカムとワープとの共同リリース
になったってことだけで、騒がれたぐらいだもんな」
ダイ「でも、ボーズにこんな風に真剣に答えられちゃう
と、そういうエレクトロニカの匿名性を隠れ蓑にして、気
分で打ち込みやってるような人達は、ショック受けるん
じゃないかな。ちょっと可哀想になるなあ（笑）」
加藤「確かに。テクノっていうのはフィーリングだけだ
からいい、っていう言い方もあるけど、だからって気分
で作りゃいいかっていうと、そういうわけじゃないもん
ね。おそらく本当に気分だけでプログラミングされたも
ので、聴くほうにとってはどこにも参照点持てない味
な音楽って、エレクトロニカには山ほどあるし」
田中「だね。やっぱり快楽の参照点はないと楽しめない」
加藤「あとは、問題意識の持ち方が、「テクノ以降』って
いうスパンじゃなくて、音楽でいえば60年代から始まっ
てる歴史の中で考えてるよね。そこはやっぱり、欧米に
は歴史がちゃんとあるっていうか」
田中「日本の音楽ジャーナリズムには、あまりにも歴史
が欠けてるからなあ。俺は最近、もう少し正史らしい正
史を作んなきゃっていう意識が、すごいあるんだよね」
加藤「まあ、ポストモダンもオルタナティヴも、それな

田中「そう。それも普通に寝るとかじゃなくて、窮屈な
飛行機の中で眠るために聴くには、最適。俺の中での「飛
行機の中で眠るときに聴くレコード』は、ボーズと、ザ・
フーの「バイ・ナンバーズ』」
加藤「あんまり意味がわかりませんが（笑）」
田中「要は、最も不快な状態におかれたときに、完璧に
現実を忘れるための音楽。だから、家でチルしたり、リ
ラックスするっていう聴き方とは、ちょっと違う」
ダイ「『ドラゴンクエスト」の戦闘シーンで、攻撃したり
魔法使ったりする他に、「なにもしない」ってコマンドが
あるじゃないですか？僕としては、あんな感じ。それに
近いですか？」
田中「いや、文字通り、ドリーミーっていうか。だから、
いわゆるエレクトロニカって、“リズム”と“音色”に比
重が置かれてるじゃん？そういうのって、やっぱり直接
的に感覚とか肉体に刺激を与えて、興奮させたり、逆に、
落ち着かせたりするわけだろ。でも、ボーズの場合、リ
ズムは基盤でしかなくて、ポイントは“メロディ”と“和
音”なわけでさ。それは、やっぱりひたすらゆるやかにイ
マジネーションを刺激するんだよね」
ダイ「ああ、やっぱりすごく映像的だし」
田中「だね。どこかミニマル・アートみたいなヴィジュ
アルの設計図があって、それをむしろ音が模倣してる感
じさえする」
加産「あ、その辺りが、下手すると、ちょっと稚拙に思
う人がいたりするとこなのかな」
田中「ハラカミさんとかが、ボーズにまったく興味を持
てないのはよくわかる気がするな」
ダイ「それで言うと、僕はやっぱ、1stのヴィジュアルが
好きなのかもなー。どこかイノセントというか」
加藤「へえー。ヴィジュアルのイメージの完成度が高い
方がいいじゃん。だから俺、新作は大好きだよ」
田中「うん、やっぱ絵が上手くなった感じはするよな」
ダイ「ボーズが屏風に上手にボーズの絵を描いた？」
加藤「うわっ、これで終わり？！」

Note: Translation by ChatGPT-o4

BOARDS

OF

CANADA

by RYOTA KATO / JIRO DAI

BOARDS OF CANADA

Interview with MARCUS EOIN & MICHAEL SANDISON

"We create music that seems to have its own universe and time. That place is another reality. It always exists just around the corner, or beyond the mirror."

This sweet and dangerous trip into nostalgia, invited by a duo living communally in the mountains of Scotland, is both the most popular symbol and the greatest anomaly of the electronica boom. Is this escapism, or a transformation of reality? Despite the worldwide enthusiasm, the pied piper's tune continues to play. The long-awaited interview, conducted via email, was finally realized with the release of their second album in three and a half years, "Geogaddi".

"The 1970s, in a sense, marked the end of a golden age. It was the beginning of a new era, one rife with selfishness and materialism. Think about how disappointing the second Woodstock Festival in the late '90s was. Our generation has always been spoiled."

I have a vision of my own utopia. I'm sure it would be a future where people, well-educated to embrace their differences, would challenge each other to games instead of resorting to violence. In that future, trees would grow to 30 feet tall in just 10 seconds, and ten suns of different colors would shine all day long.

---

Der Eckige Kreis

title	Der Eckige Kreis
author	Holger In't Veld/Heiko Zwirner
publication	Spex
date	2002/04
issue	253
pages	72-75

Der Eckige Kreis was an interview (in German) by Holger In't Veld/Heiko Zwirner originally published April 2002 in Spex magazine Number 253 pp. 72-75.

Der Eckige Kreis

Die Geschichte beginnt in einer Vollmondnacht. Eine Gruppe Pubertierender ist in ihrem Lieblingsclub zusammengekommen, einer Burgruine im Nordosten Schottlands. Sie tragen sechseckige Amulette und haben Tonbandgeräte, Kabel, Verstärker, Musikinstrumente und Projektoren mitgebracht. Und einen dieselgetriebenen Stromgenerator, der als friedfertiger Drache unten im Festungsgraben vor sich hinbrummt. Ein Feuer wirft flackerndes Licht auf die alten Steine. Durch die Schatten erscheinen Aufnahmen von Wäldern. Die Filmrolle stammt aus dem Archiv des National Film Board of Canada. Seltsame Geräusche hallen durch die Nacht. Elektronischer Puls, langsam drehende Spieluhren, Kinderlieder, digitales Sirren und rückwärtslaufende Sprachfetzen aus Radio und Fernsehen.

Der Abendnebel über dem Moor hat sich verzogen. Marcus Eoin lehnt an der Bassbox. Er hält einen Käfer in der Hand, den er vor den Schuhen seiner tanzenden Freunde gerettet hat, betrachtet ihn aufmerksam und setzt ihn vorsichtig zurück ins Gras. Etwas abseits schaufelt Michael Sandison eine Grube. Als sie mannsgroß ist, legt er sich hinein und starrt in den klaren Nachthimmel.

In einem Proberaum weiter unten im Süden schreit eine Gitarre. Kevin Shields probt zum ersten Mal mit seiner Band My Bloody Valentine. Ein paar Meilen poshwärts fährt Jimmy Page seinen Aston Martin in die Hotelgarage. Er ist nicht mehr nüchtern. Drüben auf dem Kontinent testen Florian Schneider-Eissieben und Ralf Hütter das programmierbare Oberheim Stage-Piano. Es macht leise »Pling«. George Orwell dreht sich im Grabe herum. Wir schreiben 1984 und die Welt ist für einige alt, für andere neu.

Michael ist 13 Jahre alt, Marcus 14. Marcus bewegt sich zu den langsamen, mulchigen Rhythmen seiner Musik. Michael richtet sich auf. Zahlen, Buchstaben und geometrische Figuren kreisen in seinem Kopf und ergeben immer neue Bedeutungsketten. Michael Sandison. A Dimension Clash. Hi Sonic Leadsman. Held As lnsomniac. Handline Mosaics. Marcus Eoin. Mosaic Rune. lnsure Coma. Sour Cinema. No Music Era. A Crime On Us.

Das Sechseck. Immer wieder das Sechseck. Einmal mehr hatte man sich bei Warp darum bemüht, dem Buch der Prama-Strategien ein neues Kapitel hinzuzufügen. Im Netz tippten sich die Newsgrouper wund: welche Tracks, wo wie wann und sind wirklich Teufelsköpfe im Artwork? Um keine Missverständnisse aufkommen zu lassen, wurden in England, Schottland, Japan, Frankreich und New York Kirchen für die »Geogaddi«-Listening Session angemietet. Plastik-Hexagons ersetzten die Gebetsbücher. In Deutschland musste der Rote Salon der Volksbühne ausreichen, um einen besonders tristen Berliner Januarnachmittag mit Schleifen, Drones und Bildern zu veredeln. Auf der Leinwand: organische/anorganische Sechsecke und immer wieder die Farbe, mit der sich »Geoqaddi« verpackt: rost-biut-alt-rot.

»Geogaddi« holt aus zur Imax-Musik, Widescreen-Panoramen kündigen sich an:

Gletscher, Lavaströme unter Wasser, die Sonne über dem Mount Everest. Aber kurz bevor sie ins Pittoreske abschweift, erinnert sich diese Musik daran, dass sie gemacht ist und nicht gegeben. Der Projektor im Imax-Theater gerät aus dem Lauf, die Bilder verziehen sich. Die Platte beginnt zu eiern. Sie verweigert sich der Einheit von Ton, Bild und Gefühl. Die Strukturen öffnen sich. Referenzen: Autechre hier, The Orb dort. Und da hinten in der Ecke grinst Boyd Rice. Nicht ganz die reine Mathematik, nicht ganz der fiese Kolorismus. Das Runde rollt ins Eckige. Ein bisschen Magick ist im Spiel. Und ein bisschen Horror. Der in Zeitlupe. Das Kettenkarussel kreist noch, aber es ist leer, die Kinder springen plötzlich gaaanz langsam auf und ab, das Bild wird körniger, der Film reißt. Dreht euch nicht um! Es passiert viel im Hintergrund und nicht alles ist gut.

Enter Neunziger. My Bloody Valentine veröffentlichen »Loveless«, den Schwanengesang des lndierock. Kraftwerk sind in ihrem eigenen Mix. Mike, Marcus und ihre Freunde treffen sich immer noch in der Ruine. Mit jedem Mal werden es mehr. Aus den beiden ist eine Band geworden, der musikalische Teil des Kollektivs Boards Of Canada, wiederum Teil des Kollektivs Hexagon Sun. So heißt auch das Studio in der Nähe. Ihr Studio. Marcus und Mike sind Techno-Hippies. Sie sind auf dem Land geblieben.

Boards of Canada rütteln an den Pforten der Wahrnehmung. Das Raum-Zeit-Kontinuum hat viele Fenster und dahinter geht's noch weit und weiter. Die mit psychedelisch nur ungenügend beschriebenen Chöre und Texturen, rückwärtslaufenden Spuren, die ungreifbare Distanz, in der sich die Musik abspielt, das immer wieder an »Loveless« erinnernde wow & flutter (vulg. »eiern«) - alles Futter für die Schnappmechanismen der Psycho-Heads. »Music Has The Right To Children« steht in der NME-Liste der »Psychedelic Records of All Time« auf Platz 25. »Geogaddi« dürfte höher einsteigen. Während sich bei My Bloody Valentine durch die Abwesenheit von Stille eine Totalität des reinen Klangs manifestiert, operieren Eoin und Sandison immer wieder überfallartig mit semantischen Einheiten, deren Unmittelbarkeit dem friedlich dahingleitenden Headphonauten so mir nichts dir nichts den Teppich unter dem Hintern wegzieht. Word up. Bei »Alpha and Orneqa« sagt eine weibliche Stimme plötzlich »Yellow«, Einfach nur: »Yellow«, Bei »1969« fällt die Zeile »969 in the Sunshine« aus dem Vocoder und stellt sich wie ein neonschimmerndes Hologramm in den Raum. Wer das mit erweiterten Synapsen zum ersten Mal hört, dürfte diesen Moment für den Rest seines Lebens nicht mehr vergessen.

Nicht nur die Vokalspuren, auch viele Teile der Musik erscheinen rückwärts gespielt.

Die Suggestivkraft dieser Informationsbündel ist schon erstaunlich. Eines der weniger subtilen Stücke heißt »The Devil ls In The Detail« und es hält, was es verspricht. Ein Kind weint, während sich eine Frau mit heruntergepichter, zusätzlich verflutterter Stimme in Selbsthypnose versetzt. Ein Musik gewordener Alptraum.

Enter 2002. Noch keine Tribal Gatherings dieses Jahr. Nebel liegt über Schottland - mist, myst, haze, fog, dust, smoke, shade, clouds und was auch immer noch an Gasförmigkeiten zwischen Himmel und Hölle herumflottiert. Der Beautiful Place Out In The Country hat gerade seine Blair Witch-Woche. Weiter unten im Süden wird Kevin Shields auf der Straße angesprochen und muss eine »Loveless«-CD signieren. »Geogaddi« steigt in Britannien auf Platz 21 in die Charts ein. Jimmy Page streichelt seinen Pentagramm-Ring. Er ist komplett nüchtern. Florian Schneider-Eissieben und Ralf Hütter testen den neuen Bordeaux-Jahrgang. Es macht leise »gluck«.

BOC veröffentlichten auch unter dem Pseudonym »Hell lnterface«. Um die CD auf die Gesamtlänge von 66 Minuten und 6 Sekunden zu bringen, haben sie noch ein paar Bytes Stille angefügt.

»Geogaddi« von Boards Of Canada ist bei Warp/Zamba erschienen.

---

Stoned Immaculate

title	Stoned Immaculate
author	Philip Sherburne
publication	Alternative Press
date	2002/05
issue	Vol. 166
pages

"Stoned Immaculate" by Philip Sherburne was an interview published in Alternative Press magazine Vol. 166 (May 2002).

Four years after their classic debut album, these scottish IDM stars return with a new downtempo masterpiece, Geogaddi

--Philip Sherburne

---

Innaturale Digitale

title	Innaturale Digitale
author	Ugo Malatacca/Tatiana Bazzichelli
publication	Il Mucchio
date	2002/06
issue	491
pages	12-14

Innaturale Digitale was an interview (in Italian) by Ugo Malatacca/Tatiana Bazzichelli originally published June 2002 in Il Mucchio magazine Number 491 pp. 12-14.

Innaturale Digitale

Per anni, la musica elettronica è stata associata alla fantascienza, alla tecnologia, al fu­turo, al virtuale, alla perfezione, all'alta fedeltà, al mondo dei computer e dei robot. Il mondo è cambiato. Organicità, natura, nostalgia, imperfezione ed emozioni a bassa fe­deltà sono invece i tratti somatici di un "altro" cmodo di sentire il digitale. Le macchine di­ ventano uno strumento come un altro per tracciare percorsi che esplorano il sogno, la vi­sione, il mondo che è (ed era) intorno. E creare paradossi naturali

Boards Of Canada

Due ragazzi per metà scozzesi e per metà canadesi, chiusi in uno studio fatto di pareti di vetro e immerso nella campagna, regi­ strano i loro synth su nastro per poi danneggiarlo. Ci miscelano frammenti polverosi di strumenti in carne e ossa ed effetti sonori dai documentari televisivi sulla natura. Si chiamano Boards Of Ca­nada e hanno 8 e 14 anni ... almeno, cosi loro dicono. Della fama o del successo non vogliono neanche sentir parlare, agli articoli o alle recensioni dei loro dischi sono totalmente disinteressati. I Boards Of Canada sono comunque un forte punto di riferimen­ to per la nuova scena elettronica che si è costruita dopo l'era dei rave. Il loro primo album, Music Has The Right To Children (1998) è un classico. Geogaddy (n. 476) , il nuovo lavoro pubblicato da Warp, ha tutte le carte in regola per diventarlo.

Umano tecnologico

Nella copertina di Music Has The Right To Children un gruppo fami­liare in gita, sul ciglio di un belvedere, si taceva ritrarre in una foto ri­cordo . Abbigliamento e look anni '70, immagine sfocata e impolverata. Un particolare: i volti sono tutti vuoti, non hanno lineamenti, nè dettagli. Sono in bianco. Non servono altre parole per trovare il link con i pezzi deÌl'album, musica che cerca continuamente una verosimiglianza con il naturale e con l'organicità; ma nasconde consape­ volmente, ad ogni angolo, uno stretto legame con l'artificio digitale. Music Has The Right To Children rimane, a distanza di anni, una chia­ve di svolta della scena elettronica che, dopo l'illusione del "futuro"; ha perso fiducia per le potenzialità infinite della tecnologia e si avvicina a una umanizzazione dei suoni e della narrazione. Come? È Mike Sandison , uno dei due Boards Of Canada, a spiegarci nel dettaglio come è possibile mettere la tecno­logia su un piano completamente differente. E il socio Marcus Eoin continua:

Verso il passato

Ritorno al passato, ai momenti della propria vita che la gran parte di noi vede (sia nel bene che ne male) come un momento felice, pie­no di speranze per il futuro, certezze e semplicità misteriosa delle cose. L'infanzia è uno degli ambienti spazio/temporali (per dirla al­la Marcus) che i Boards Of Canada preferiscono. Si tratta di una vi­sione che parla contemporaneamente del "fanciullino" capace di meravigliarsi di fronte alle scoperte di tutto ciò che lo circonda, ma anche del fascino per l'ignoto che genera incertezza, paura, perdita di coscienza. È la stessa contraddizione del canto di un bambino: può essere la melodia più soave, ma anche il suono più tetro e an­gosciante che si possa ascoltare.

Psichedelica naturale

Per i due Boards Of Canada, che fin da piccoli hanno giocato con la musica, l'evocazione del passato combacia con uno sguardo incantato e impaurito sulle cose. In Geo­gaddy tutto ciò si fa immagine ca­leidoscopica. Del resto, quella del caleidoscopio (da cui le immagini di copertina e i recenti gadget) è una metafora perfetta per sfiora re alcuni dei significati della loro musica. Il caleidoscopio trasforma ciò che vediamo in qualcosa di meraviglioso, infinito, indistingui­bile, perpetuo. Allo stesso tempo il mondo visto da un caleidoscopio si trasforma, diventa irrico­ noscibile, assume nuove relazioni, dà vertigine, smarrimento. E soprattutto svela analogie im­previste tra le cose. È questo il gioco delle im­magini che si affettano, spezzano, distruggono, ma continuano a rimanere insieme strette da un forte legame geometrico. Non a caso uno dei pezzi di Geogaddy ha il titolo di Music ls Math e un altro The Devii /s In The Details. A tal pro­posito: Le venature scure della musica a cui si riferisce Mike sono quella continua ambiguità di suoni, spesso apparentemente soavi ma pieni di sfaccettature.

Il video

Il nome Boards Of Canada viene da una serie di documentari sulla natura degli anni '70 appun­to nominati The National Boards Of Canada. Questo tipo di documentari metto­no in scena una natura in continua mutazione, che affascina, ma che in fondo fa sempre paura, perché è più grande di noi, perché sappiamo di appartenerle anche nei suoi cicli di evoluzione. In più, la visione del­la realtà attraverso il tubo catodico si arricchisce di ulteriori paranoie (avete mai visto, in proposito, le opere di Cristiano Pintaldi?).

Note: Translated by ChatGPT-4o

Unnatural Digital

For years, electronic music has been associated with science fiction, technology, the future, the virtual, perfection, high fidelity, and the world of computers and robots. The world has changed. Organicity, nature, nostalgia, imperfection, and low-fidelity emotions are now the hallmark traits of another way of feeling the digital. Machines become just another tool to trace paths that explore dreams, visions, and the world around (and past). And to create natural paradoxes.'

Boards Of Canada

Two boys, half Scottish and half Canadian, secluded in a studio with glass walls and immersed in the countryside, record their synths on tape only to damage it. They mix in dusty fragments of real instruments and sound effects from nature documentaries. They are called Boards Of Canada and claim to be 8 and 14 years old... at least, that’s what they say. They don't want to hear about fame or success and are completely disinterested in articles or reviews of their records. Nevertheless, Boards Of Canada are a significant reference point for the new electronic scene that emerged after the rave era. Their first album, Music Has The Right To Children (1998), is a classic. Geogaddi (No. 476), their new work released by Warp, has all the qualities to become one too.

Technological Human

On the cover of Music Has The Right To Children, a family group on an outing, on the edge of a viewpoint, is captured in a souvenir photo. 70s attire and look, blurred and dusty image. One detail: the faces are all blank, without features or details. They are white. No more words are needed to find the link with the album tracks, music that continuously seeks a resemblance to the natural and organic but consciously hides, at every corner, a close connection with digital artifice. Music Has The Right To Children remains, years later, a turning point in the electronic scene, which, after the illusion of the "future" lost faith in the infinite potentials of technology and moved towards a humanization of sounds and narration. How?

Mike Sandison, one of the two Boards Of Canada, explains in detail how it is possible to put technology on a completely different level. And partner Marcus Eoin continues:

Towards the Past

Return to the past, to moments in life that most of us see (for better or worse) as a happy time, full of hopes for the future, certainties, and the mysterious simplicity of things. Childhood is one of the space/time environments (to use Marcus' term) that Boards Of Canada prefer. It is a vision that simultaneously speaks of the "child" capable of marveling at the discoveries of everything around him, but also of the fascination for the unknown that generates uncertainty, fear, and loss of consciousness. It is the same contradiction as a child's song: it can be the sweetest melody, but also the most dark and distressing sound one can hear.

Natural Psychedelia

For the two Boards Of Canada, who have played with music since they were kids, evoking the past matches with an enchanted and fearful gaze at things. In Geogaddi all this becomes a kaleidoscopic image. After all, the kaleidoscope (from which the cover images and recent gadgets come) is a perfect metaphor for touching on some of the meanings of their music. The kaleidoscope transforms what we see into something wonderful, infinite, indistinguishable, perpetual. At the same time, the world seen through a kaleidoscope is transformed, becomes unrecognizable, assumes new relationships, gives vertigo, and disorientation. And above all, reveals unexpected analogies between things. This is the game of images that slice, break, and destroy but remain together, bound by a strong geometric connection. It is no coincidence that one of the tracks on Geogaddi is titled "Music Is Math" and another "The Devil Is In The Details". On this subject:

The dark veins of music Mike refers to are that continuous ambiguity of sounds, often seemingly sweet but full of facets.

The Video

Worn soundtracks and the raw quality of 16mm films. These things remind me of times when TV and cinema seemed obsessed with science and science fiction, a kind of dark influence that generated paranoia and underlying fears, like in the Cold War. I even think of educational documentaries.

The name Boards Of Canada comes from a series of nature documentaries from the 70s, specifically named The National Film Board of Canada. These types of documentaries depict a continuously changing nature that fascinates but is ultimately frightening because it is bigger than us, because we know we belong to it even in its cycles of evolution. Additionally, the view of reality through the cathode tube is enriched with further paranoia (have you ever seen Cristiano Pintaldi's works on this topic?).

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Country Comfort

title	Country Comfort
author	Alexis Georgopoulos
publication	URB
date	2002/06
issue	Vol.12 No. 94
pages	86-87

"Country Comfort" was an interview by Alexis Georgopoulos originally published June 2002 in URB magazine Volume 12 Number 94.

Country Comfort

Rural shut-ins Boards of Canada fit nightmares, rainbows and David Koresh into the melodic mathematics of their beautiful new album.

If Boards of Canada's songs could, they would come to life. Children would appear dressed in striped T-shirts and corduroys, shaggy hair framing their fresh faces, grass stains on their knees. The sun would beam down rippling rays of golden white and kaleidoscopic pastels. And honey laughter would careen off the sky's canopy, quivering with he rush of playground love and infinite possibility. Alas, lest you think this a spotless utopia, someone would be hidden in the bushes watching. And not with the best of intentions.

Back after four years holed up in a remote bunker in rural Scotland, Marcus Eoin and Michael Sandison are following up 2000's In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country EP with the psychedelic diorama that is Geogaddi. Like nearly all the releases that have preceded it, Geogaddi is less a collection of songs than a world unto itself, unfurling in sheaths of warbling analog synth melodies and tripped-out Sugar Hill-meets-Autechre beats. It's the aural equivalent of sitting on your analyst's couch, rummaging through a past you're still trying to make sense of.

Loathing publicity and its trappings, the reclusive duo decided on doing minimal promotion for Geogaddi. What follows is one of the very few interviews to follow the album's release.

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The Power of Myth

title	The Power of Myth
author	Piotr Orlov
publication	Grooves
date	2002-07
issue	08
pages

"The Power of Myth" is a 2002 interview by Piotr Orlov It originally appeared in Grooves issue 08.

Note: Not an original interview. Source material from the NME interview, HMV interview and Fader interview.

Since 1996, Boards of Canada has spun a self-styled legend around its existence. Time to time the webs of intrigue together, and sew a yarn.

Among the most interesting things about Boards of Canada has always been the fully constructed focus of thought within their music. Scotsmen Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin have produced two albums (1998's epic Music Has the Right to Children and this year's spectacular Geogaddi) and four EPs of luminous, digi-log ambient-pop vignettes (think Satie/Eno melodic melancholy basking in Whitman's pastoralism) underpinned by second-line hip-hop rhythms. More so, they have, for all intents and purposes created a brave new universe of sound and thought. Nature, films, childhood nostalgia, spirituality, the apocalypse, geometrical shapes, and mathematical equations, the old emotions, the new emotions, the in-the-way emotions – all swirl together in their compositions, forming a symbolist manifesto for a new way of life.

But, hey, BoC record for WARP – isn't an idiosyncratic outlook part of the artist contract there? Yet unlike similarly hermetic label-mates Aphex Twin and Autechre, Sandison and Eoin have never allowed their mythology to stand outside of the world they inhabit. If anything, much of the power of BoC's music comes from the inherent interaction between their belief systems and the environment these're expressed in. That nobody has coerced BoC into an in-depth exploration of just what they're getting at, says as much of the short-sighted abilities of third estate interrogators as it does of their deftly built defense systems against pseudo-intellectual wank intruders. Until now – or so I thought.

Chase an enigma for answers you believe promised to you by the all-powerful decree of the music-press machine, and you'll inevitably find yourself spending time describing the outlines, the textures, the release dates, and musical influences yet no closer to fitting together the puzzle you imagined could be completed just over the horizon.

Consider me Oedipa Maas – Sandison and Eoin twin Thomas Pynchon. While they're ensconced in relative, creative isolation, a studio bunker called Hexagon Sun in the rural outland of Scotland's Petland Hills, dropping musical hints of muted horns and orchestrating a mythological fantasia, I'm stuck on the outside, looking for clues and wondering to myself “what does it all mean?” Only difference is, I'm not the product of their imagination and the focus of my frustration does not conclude when the bidder for lot "sixtyten" is revealed.

How did I get here? Around the time of Geogaddi's release, BoC agreed to a handful of interviews (including one with Grooves) that would be conducted by e-mail. Send in some questions, wait awhile, and expect thought-through answers from behind the turquoise curtain. But a funny thing happened on the way back from the inquisition: The answers never arrived in my in-box. After weeks of waiting and a story still expected, I had to take a different approach. And the approach was basically side two of Neu 2.

What follows then is a collage of answers BoC gave in interviews they did complete on the Geogaddi press tour. Yet rather than focusing on recording techniques, length of time spent following-up Music, their “musical influences”, and other standard operating inquiries of pop musician interviews, I chose to look for the very insights I initially went seeking. We may never know just how much of Sandison and Eoin's philosophies of life have specific political or literary seeds: whether they feel an affinity towards the work of Glenn Gould, another musical modernist/traditionalist inspired by his isolated natural surroundings who chose to interact with society on his own terms; or if the Gaddi portion of their recent masterpiece refers to the so-named peoples of northern India, a cast of “untouchables” known for their love of the land, honesty, and mysticism. Yet we can, however briefly, glimpse upon BoC's psychological scroll and the symbolic make-up of their holographic universe. One day, we'll hopefully get more.

(Many thanks are due to HMV.com's Mike Pitlyk, the NME's John Mulvey, The Fader Japan's Nobuki Nishiyama, and Grooves contributor Philip Sherburne, whose own Q&A can be read in Alternative Press, for the material remixed here.)

"Sunshine Recorder"s

Children Have the Right of Music

Music is Math – Vision of the Implicate

"Energy Warning"s to City Dwellers

The Dawn's Chorus

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Northern Exposure

title	Northern Exposure
author	Ken Micallef
publication	Remix
date	2002/07
issue	Vol. 4 No. 7
pages	22-30

"Northern Exposure" is an interview by Ken Micallef originally published July 2002 in Remix magazine Vol. 04 No. 07.

Exploring Uncharted Analog Frontiers With Boards of Canada

By Ken Micallef * Photos By Peter Iain Campbell

Although Marcus Eoin and Michael Sandison - the duo known as Boards of Canada - allegedly live in a commune on the northern coast of Scotland, near Edinburgh (not the Great White North as their name suggests), their music is neither pastoral nor hippie-dippy-like. Instead, their odd combination of ambient electro and downtempo experimentalism is about as warm and fuzzy as a horror-porno B-movie soundtrack.

Boards of Canada's debut album, the oddly titled Music Has the Right to Children (Matador, 1998), was a mini-revolution in ambient electronic music, a travelogue of spiraling space loops and woozy melodies that introduced the post-Nevermind generation to the Brian Eno-esque joys of chilling out. BoC's sophomore effort, Geogaddi (Warp, 2002), is even more stripped-down and beautiful than its predecessor, featuring simple circular rhythms, eerie melodies and unusual samples that create an airless, ethereal ultraworld. An overwhelming feeling of darkened, almost dangerous sentimentality permeates Geogaddi's surreal atmosphere, like a child recalling a nightmare to another small friend. Perhaps this is music for the inner child who everyone has left behind.

Many of Geogaddi's songs use spoken-word samples to embellish their bizarre moods, such as the sexually heated female voice that repeatedly counts from one to 10 in "Gyroscope." Naked Gun actor Leslie Nielsen speaks of "when lava flows underwater" in "Dandelion," and from there, the album grows more involved and detailed, with all manner of deranged children and computer voices mumbling over hopscotch hip-hop and cranky trip-hop.

says Eoin about Geogaddi.
adds Sandison. Although Sandison notes that they generally tried to accomplish this sound without simply sampling old TV recordings, a few notable exceptions made their way to the final recording. Trainspotters will enjoy ferreting out various actors' voices or bits of '70s television-show and commercial dialog, which, according to BoC, could originate anywhere from ill-fated actor Robert Blake's Baretta to The Rockford Files to the horror-movie schlockfest, Final Victim.

Eoin and Sandison learned to play various musical instruments when they were children. Sandison formed a band and began making experimental tracks with old synths, drums and tape decks in 1980, when he was only nine years old. Influenced by television documentaries and soundtracks, particularly those by the National Film Board of Canada, Sandison named his band Boards of Canada. When Eoin became the band's bassist in 1986, Boards of Canada were mixing real instruments with computer effects and found sounds from radio and television broadcasts. Sandison dabbled with Super 8 home-movie visuals for the band early on, and by the late '80s, BoC were making full-length films accompanied by their own soundtracks.

BoC's first official release was Twoism (1995) on their own Music 70 label, followed by the 1996 Hi Scores EP on the Skam label. Gigs at the UK's Phoenix Festival and opening for Autechre brought the group to the attention of Warp Records, which signed Boards of Canada in 1998. BoC's first Warp release, Music Has the Right to Children, was met with overwhelming critical and popular acclaim, scooping up several Top 20 spots in 1998 year-end polls in UK music publications such as DJ Magazine, Jockey Slut, Muzik, NME and The Wire.

Since releasing Music Has the Right to Children, Boards of Canada have remained conspicuously out of action. They performed only a small handful of live performances, including a John Peel Session for the BBC's Radio 1, and released the 4-track EP In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country in 2000. Eoin and Sandison spent most of the past four years recording Geogaddi, which, incidentally, is exactly 66 minutes and six seconds long. Like its predecessor, Geogaddi is garnering rave reviews from critics, showing skeptics that BoC's early success was not a fluke.
The incredibly elusive duo stepped away briefly from the soothing hum of the analog machines in their studio to give some insight into the thought process behind Boards of Canada's strange, beautiful music.

Interview by Ken Micallef, July 2002.

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Fractal Press 131

title	Fractal Press 131
author	Christos Karras
publication	Fractal Press
date	2002/10
issue	131
pages	20-21

"Fractal Press 131" was an interview (in Greek) by Christos Karras originally published October 2002 in Fractal Press magazine Number 131 pp.20-21

Η αναμονή της κυκλοφορίας του δεύτερου δίσκου τους έφτασε σε σημείο υστερίας ανάμεσα στα ακροατήρια της λεγόμενης leftfield -ήτοι προοδευτικής- electronica. Και δεν πρόκειται για περίπτωση εφαρμοσμένου hype. οι Boards Of Canada κέρδισαν τη συμπάθεια τον μοντέρνου αστού χάρη στη δύναμη που φέρει ο ήχος τους να σε μεταφέρει σε χωροχρόνο μακρινό. Το πλάνεμα της ψυχής που επιτεύχθηκε πριν από τέσσερα χρόνια με το Music Has The Riqht Το Children και επαναλαμβάνεται ξανά με το φετινό διαμαντένιο Geogaddi, είναι αυτό που κάνει τους Marcus Eion και Michael Sandison να θεωρούνται πια οι ηγέτες ενός κινήματος της ηλεκτρονικής μουσικής αποτελούμενο από ονόματα (Mum, Minotaur Shock, Manual, Casino Vs Japan[]) που συνδυάζουν τον αναλογικό με τον ψηφιακό ήχο, ανασύρουν το παιδί που κρύβει κάθε ακροατής μέσα του και χτίζουν ατμόσφαιρες σύνθετες μα συνάμα γλυκές και ελκυστικές. Η δόξα είναι πια πραγματικότητα για τους δύο κατοίκους της σκοτσέζικης επαρχίας οι οποίοι, σα να μη θέλουν ή μπορούν να πιστέψουν αυτό που τους συμβαίνει, εξακολουθούν να είναι αποστασιοποιημένοι από τις μουσικές μητροπόλεις, να εμφανίζονται σπάνια και να αφήνουν να αιωρείται γύρω τους ένας αέρας μυστηρίου.

Στη συνέντευξη ωστόσο που μας παραχώρησαν μέσω e-mail, τα έκαναν όλα λιανά.

Κείμενο / συνέντευξη: Χρήστος Καρράς

Note: ChatGPT3 translation by Moz

The anticipation for the release of their second album reached a point of hysteria among the audiences of the so-called leftfield or progressive electronica. And this is not a case of manufactured hype. Boards Of Canada earned the favour of the modern urbanite thanks to the power of their sound to transport you to a distant spacetime. The enchantment of the soul that was achieved four years ago with Music Has The Right to Children and is repeated again with this year's diamond-like Geogaddi is what makes Marcus Eion (sic) and Michael Sandison now considered the leaders of a movement in electronic music comprised of names (Mum, Minotaur Shock, Manual, Casino Vs Japan) that combine analog with digital sound, evoke the child hidden within each listener, and build atmospheres that are complex yet sweet and alluring. Glory is now a reality for the two residents of the Scottish countryside who, as if unwilling or unable to believe what is happening to them, continue to be distant from the musical metropolises, appear rarely, and let an air of mystery surround them.

However, in the interview they granted us via e-mail, they made everything clear.

Text / Interview: Christos Karras

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Let's Open The Time Capsule

title	Let's Open The Time Capsule
author	Naohiro Kato
publication	Remix (Japanese Publication)
date	2003/01
issue	139
pages	pp.82-83

"Let's Open The Time Capsule" is an interview (in Japanese) by Naohiro Kato originally published Jan. 2003 in Remix magazine (Japanese publication) Number 139, pp.82-83.

Boards of Canada

さ、タイムカプセルを開けてみよう

ボーズ・オブ・カナダが送り出した奇妙なトリップ・サウンドは

世界中に中毒者を生み出した。この度、マニアの間では高額で取り引き

されていたという幻のファースト・アルバムがとうとう再発される。

文加藤直宏

words Naohiro Kato

コアなファンの間では800ポンド（およそ15万円）で取引 されていたというボーズ・オブ・カナダのファースト・アルバム 「Twoism」がついにくワープンより再発される（日本はく ビート・レーコズンから）。これは彼らがくワープンと契約する 以前に作られていた作品で、80年代後半にエジンバラ辺の 地区で彼ら自身がデモ・トラックを送り出すために立ち上げた レーベル＜MUSIC70ンからリリースされていたものだ。本 作はボーズ・オブ・カナダからの奇妙な贈り物のようなもので ある。僕は本作を癒きながら、まるで地中に埋めたタイムカプ セルを掘り起こして開けるときのような気持になった。数年前 の作品がこれまで世に送り出されずに（待ちきれずに覗いてし まった人もいるにはいるにれど）僕たちの前に届けられるなん て、何とも不思議で奇妙な感覚になる。ここでは敢えて中身に ついては触れないでおこう。そのほうがこのミステリアスなユ ニットには相応しい。その代わりと言ってはなんだが、まだあま り語られたことのない彼らの初期の活動について訊いたイン タヴューをお届けすることにしよう（このインタヴューは本誌 2002年4月号に掲載されたインタヴューのアウトテイクによ るもの）。

ボーズ・オブ・カナダイ」のファースト・アルバム

Twoismiはぐビート・レコーズ＞より発売中！

Note: This translation is powered by ChatGPT-o4.

Boards of Canada

Let's open the time capsule.

The strange trip sounds sent out by Boards of Canada have created addicts worldwide. This time, the elusive first album, which has been traded at high prices among enthusiasts, is finally being reissued.

Words by Naohiro Kato

Boards of Canada's first album, Twoism, which had been traded among hardcore fans for 800 pounds (approximately 150,000 yen), is finally being reissued by Warp (and by Beat Records in Japan). This work was created before they signed with Warp and was released in the late '80s through their self-established label , which they set up to release demo tracks around the Edinburgh area. This album is like a strange gift from Boards of Canada. Listening to this work made me feel like I was digging up and opening a time capsule buried underground. It's quite a mysterious and peculiar feeling to have a work from years ago, which hadn't been released to the public (though some people couldn't wait and peeked), now delivered to us. Here, I won't deliberately touch on the contents. That's more fitting for this mysterious unit. Instead, let me share an interview about their early activities, which hasn't been widely discussed (this interview is an outtake from the one published in our April 2002 issue).

Boards of Canada's first album, Twoism is now available from Beat Records!

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The Campfire Headphase era

The Downtempo Duo

title	The Downtempo Duo
author	Heiko Hoffmann
publication	Pitchfork
date	2005/09/26
issue
pages

"The Downtempo Duo" is an interview by Heiko Hoffmann originally published online Sept. 2005 on Pitchfork.com. ^[13]

The Downtempo Duo

With their Warp albums Music Has the Right to Children and Geogaddi, Boards of Canada have become one of the most well-loved and critically revered contemporary artists without releasing singles, videos, or even going on tour. At the same time their sound of electronic psychedelia has been copied so often as to make the duo wonder what to do next. In this interview, which took place at the Royal Museum in Edinburgh, Scotland, Mike and Marcus Sandison speak for the first time about their backgrounds, obsessive reactions to Geogaddi, and their upcoming new album The Campfire Headphase.

Recorder is switched off. Mike asks Marcus if it's ok to talk about it. Marcus says yes. Mike checks if the recorder is off and explains that they are in fact brothers, but have concealed that as they didn't want to provoke comparisons to Orbital, the electronic duo of brothers Phil and Paul Hartnoll, when they started to release records in the mid-90s. Recorder is switched on again.

interview by Heiko Hoffmann, September 2005.

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Spirit, Logic & Mathematics

title	Spirit, Logic & Mathematics
author	Hendrik Lakeberg
publication	De:Bug
date	2005/10
issue	93
pages	p.28

"Spirit, Logic & Mathematics" is an interview (in German) by Hendrik Lakeberg originally published Oct. 2005 in De:Bug magazine Number 93. ^{[14] [15]}

Die mysterösen Superstars der Elektronika haben wieder ein Album gemacht. Drei Jahre haben die beiden Schotten dafür gebraucht. “Zurück zu den Anfängen” war ihre Premisse. Warum alle so aufgeregt sind, verstehen sie am aller wenigsten.

Rückwärts wird’s auch nicht besser

Seit 1990 findet im Norden Schottlands in der Nähe des Boards-of-Canada-Studios einmal jährlich eine Outdoor-Party statt. Vor der imposanten Naturkulisse Schottlands und verstreut brennenden Lagerfeuern lauschen die Besucher rückwärtslaufenden Sprachcollagen, verfremdeter Filmmusik und starren auf flimmernde Leinwände, beschienen von kruden Film-Obskuritäten. Unter dem Namen Hexagon Sun kollaborierten die Zeremonienmeister der Veranstaltung Mike Sandison und Marcus Eoin regelmäßig mit befreundeten Musikern. Wabernder Elektronika-Prog weht über einen Strand irgendwo im nördlichen Schottland. In der Nacht des ersten Festivals leuchtete der Mond blutrot und der Name dieses nebligen Gatherings war geboren: Red moon nights.

Vielleicht waren diese Abende die Geburtsstunde der Boards of Canada, wie wir sie heute kennen. Alles scheint dagewesen zu sein: die Faszination für Natur, dieses düstere, esoterisch angehauchte Neo-Hippietum, die Anspielungen auf bedeutungsschwangere mathematische Konstruktionen. Keine andere Elektronika-Band hat in den letzten Jahren mehr Rätsel aufgegeben. In Internet-Foren werden ihre Platten mit pedantischer Präzision auf versteckte Hinweise untersucht, Samples rückwärts abgespielt, Zahlenfolgen gedeutet. So finden sich auf der EP A Beautiful Place In The Country im Artwork der Platte beispielsweise Hinweise auf den Kollektiven Selbstmord der Davidianer-Sekte im texanischen Waco. Und auf ihrem vorletzten Album Geogaddi soll man in einem rückwärtslaufenden Sprachsample den Satz “A God with Horns” hören können.

"The Devil Is In The Details" nennt sich ein Track auf Geogaddi. Bei den Interpretationen handelt es sich also nicht nur um Phantasmagorien obsessiv veranlagter Fans. Boards of Canada selber sind nicht ganz unschuldig an den Mysterien und Verklärungen, die sich um sie ranken. Doch die Zeiten scheinen sich geändert zu haben. Durch Campfire Headphase, die neue BOC-Platte, weht im Gegensatz zum düster vernebelten Surrealismus von “Geogaddi” der illuminierende Wind der Aufklärung. Die Tracks sind strukturell glasklar, die Beats rumpeln präzise abgezirkelt vor sich hin. Darüber schweben diese typischen BOC-Flächen, wie pastellige Farben, die langsam ineinander laufen, sich vermischen und vorsichtig gerinnen. Vielleicht ist Campfire Headphase die Abendröte der Elektronika. Zeitlos schön und gerade deshalb so zeitgemäß. Fast wie ein klassisches Lehrstück, eine Essenz. Und für BOC die logische Konsequenz ihrer bisherigen Arbeit. Natürlich ist auch Campfire Headphase durchsetzt mit Anspielungen, Konzepten, Rätseln. Das Bild, dass sich aus der Musik herauslesen lässt, rückt eine andere Seite ins Licht: Marcus Eoin und Mike Sanderson ging es niemals allein darum, in opake, mystische Welten herabzuführen, sondern eher darum, das Seltsame, schwer Verstehbare der Welt in Musik umzusetzen. Rätsel aufzugeben, die danach verlangen, enträtselt zu werden. Eine epische Inszenierung fundamentaler Konflikte auszubreiten: Magie vs. Logik, Spiritualität vs. Vernunft.

The mysterious Superstars of electronica have made an album again. It took the two Scots three years to make it. "Back to the origins" was their premise. Why everyone is so excited they understand least of all.

It doesn't get any better backwards

Since 1990, an outdoor party has been held once a year in the north of Scotland near the Boards of Canada studio. Against the imposing natural backdrop of Scotland and scattered burning campfires, visitors listen to backmasked voice collages, alienated film music and stare at flickering screens, illuminated by crude film obscurities. Under the name Hexagon Sun, the event's masters of ceremonies Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin regularly collaborated with musician friends. Wobbling electronica prog wafts across a beach somewhere in northern Scotland. On the night of the first festival, the moon glowed blood red and the name of this misty gathering was born: Red moon nights.

Perhaps these evenings were the birth of Boards of Canada as we know them today. Everything seems to have been there: the fascination with nature, that gloomy, esoteric-tinged neo-hipsterism, the allusions to meaningful mathematical constructions. No other electronica band has posed more riddles in recent years. In Internet forums, their records are examined with pedantic precision for hidden clues, samples played backwards, sequences of numbers interpreted. For example, on the EP "A Beautiful Place In The Country", the record's artwork includes references to the collective suicide of the Davidian sect in Waco, Texas. And on their penultimate album, "Geogaddi", the phrase "A God with Horns" is said to be heard in a backmasked voice sample.

"The Devil Is In The Details" is the name of a track on "Geogaddi". So the interpretations are not just phantasmagorias of obsessively inclined fans. Boards of Canada themselves are not entirely innocent of the mysteries and transfigurations that surround them. But times seem to have changed. Through Campfire Headphase, the new BOC record, the illuminating wind of enlightenment blows in contrast to the darkly fogged surrealism of "Geogaddi". The tracks are structurally crystal clear, the beats rumble along precisely circled. Above them float these typical BOC surfaces, like pastel colors that slowly run into each other, mix and carefully coagulate. Perhaps "Campfire Headphase" is the evening glow of electronica. Timelessly beautiful and precisely for that reason so contemporary. Almost like a classic didactic piece, an essence. And for BOC the logical consequence of their previous work. Of course, "Campfire Headphase" is also riddled with allusions, concepts, riddles. The image that can be gleaned from the music brings another side into the light: Marcus Eoin and Mike Sanderson were never solely concerned with descending into opaque, mystical worlds, but rather with translating the strange, hard-to-understand of the world into music. To give up riddles that demand to be unraveled. To unfold an epic staging of fundamental conflicts: magic vs. logic, spirituality vs. reason.

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De var först med

title	De var först med
author	Billy Rimgard
publication	Sonic
date	2005/10
issue	25
pages	40-45

"De var först med" is an interview (in Swedish) by Billy Rimgard originally published October 2005 in Sonic magazine Issue 25 (Fall 2005), pp.40-45

De var först med

De var först med det som ibland brukar kallas folktronica. De var också länge ett av världens hemligaste band. Nu har Boards Of Canada brörjat prata. Billy Rimgard hör myter krossas i ett regnigt Edinburgh.

Text Billy Rimgard

MIN FLIGHT TILL Edinburgh skulle gå om mindre än tio timmar men jag visste fortfarande inte var, när och hur jag skulle träffa Boards Of Canada. Klockan var 22.00 och jag kröp på väggarna av oro när ett SMS kom. Museum Of Scotland på Chambers Street, in genom svängdörrarna, uppför trapporna, genom huvudutställningen, kafeornrådet till höger, klockan fem. Undertecknat "X".

Inte förrän ett dygn senare var jag säker på att den här artikeln faktiskt skulle bli skriven.

Få band är lika mytomspunna som Boards Of Canada. Deras genombrott, "Music Has the Right to Children", förändrade hela kartan för elektronisk musik när det kom 1998. Albumet var speciellt eftersom det inte hämtade sin energi från framtiden utan snarare från gårdagen. "Music Has the Right to Children" lät som om duon hade försökt återskapa sin barndom med samplers och sequencers men inte riktigt fått allt rätt - utan i stället byggt bilden på hur de mindes den som vuxna. Musiken var framåttänkande men känslan nostalgisk.

Efter "Music Has the Right ... " drog sig Boards Of Canada tillbaka till sin bas på landsbygden utanför Edinburgh, tog fyra år på sig att släppa uppföljaren "Geogaddi" och tappade därmed också kontrollen över sin image. "Geogaddi" var kryddad med ockultism, matematiska formler, referenser till religiösa kulter och geometri. Varje gång man lyssnade på den dök något nytt upp och varje liten detalj betydde något.

Denna electronicans motsvarighet till "Da Vincikoden" bidrog tillsammans med bandets vägran att göra annan promotion än ett fåtal mejlintervjuer till att rykten började spridas. Det sades att de var satanister, att de levde under sektliknande förhållanden i ett kreativt kollektiv, att de försökte hjärntvätta folk genom musiken, att de var hippies.

Så vad skulle jag tro?

Om jag blev förvånad när de tackade ja till en intervju blev jag närmast skräckslagen av det där sms-et. Varför skulle några som inte gjort intervjuer på åtta år plötsligt vilja träffa en förvirrad svensk om det inte fanns ett syfte med det? Jag såg mig själv bli murbruk i byggandet av myten om Boards Of Canada, en rolig anekdot att ta upp i framtida pressreleaser: "En gång lurade de till och med en intet ont anande svensk journalist till ett museum i Edinburgh för att ... "

KLOCKAN ÄR TVÅ MINUTER i fem dagen därpå. Jag går motströms bland tyska backpackers och japanska turister in i museet, men när jag kommer fram är kafeet tomt. Prick fem börjar dussintals gamla kyrkklockor att ringa, personalen staplar stolar på varandra och en vakt stegar fram och ber mig att lämna lokalen eftersom de stänger. Jag tror fortfarande inte att det ska bli någon intervju. Jag textar till numret som jag dagen innan fick meddelandet ifrån och ber om en uppdatering. "Om tio minuter utanför huvudentrén", lyder svaret.

En stund senare sitter jag i balesätet på en bil. Där fram sitter Marcus Eoin och Michael Sandison och diskuterar vilket ställe som är bäst att göra intervjun på, baserat på var det finns parkeringsplatser. Duon som är Boards Of Canada berättar att de flesta inte vet om det men att hälften av befolkningen i Edinburgh är lapplisor. De är vänliga, frågar hur resan var, ursäktar regnet som piskar utanför och säger att jag borde försöka komma hit någon mer gång så jag får se hur vacker stan är med bättre väder. De är själva motsatsen till de motsträviga UNA-bombarliknande excentriker som jag hade förväntat mig att träffa.

berättar Marcus när vi satt oss ner i en bar.

De har köpt dyr importerad lager till mig och viftar bort pengarna när jag vill betala. De är uppriktigt förvånande över att någon kan tänka sig att åka från Sverige bara för att prata med dem och säger att det minsta de kan göra är att bjuda på öl.

fortsätter Michael.

skrattar Marcus.

DET MÄRKS ATT Boards Of Canada utgörs av två personer som känt varandra sedan sandlådan. De pratar hela tiden om "vi" eller "oss". De avslutar varandras meningar. När den ene kör fast i ett resonemang plockar den andre upp tråden och fortsätter . Marcus kommer med spontana åsikter, säger rakt ut vad han tycker och skämtar mycket. Michael är lite mer återhållsam och försiktig. Han funderar innan han svarar och förklarar ofta något som Marcus sagt med en längre utläggning som en mer medievan artist förmodligen skulle ha sett som onödig, eftersom långt teoretiserande sällan gör sig bra i en artikel, I en intervju med Pitchfork Media, gjord efter mitt besök i Edinburgh, påstod de att de faktiskt är bröder. Vilket så klart kan vara sant men precis lika gärna inte behöver vara det.

Min intervju med Boards Of Canada är deras tredje inför släppet av det nya albumet " The Campfire Headphase" och därmed har de gjort fler intervjuer på en vecka än de gjort de senaste åtta åren. Efter "Music Has the Right to Children" tröttnade de på att bli felciterade och började därför bara kommunicera med omvärlden genom epost. Fast inte heller då utan restriktioner, Förutom en mejlintervju med NME valde de att inte svara några större tidningar utan i stället fick mindre, nischade musikmagasin möjligheten att "prata" med dem. Bandet upptäckte då att även tystnad och mejlintervjuer kan feltolkas.

säger Marcus.

säger Michael och ler.

>>GEOGADDI<< VAR ETT mörkt album. Det fanns en pre-apokalyptisk stämning över det, som om Boards Of Canada visste något om världen som vi andra inte kände till.

Jag älskade det. I alla fall efter ett tag. När jag recenserade "Geogaddi" i Sonic nummer sex hade jag inte ens börjat förstå omfattningen av det. Även om skivan inte var ett uttalat konceptalbum krävde den engagemang. Man var tvungen att koncentrera sig för att upptäcka detaljerna och komma musiken inpå livet. Men när jag väl kommit dit gillade jag det faktiskt mer än föregångaren.

"Geogaddi" var inte bara resultatet av ett band som försökt ta sig vidare i sin musik, det var också ett album så fyllt av symboler att sidor där albumet analyserades snart började dyka tipp på internet. Läser man där står bland annat att ett spår som "1969" innehåller en sampling med namnet "David Koresh" spelat baklänges. Låten är 4:19 lång, vilket överensstämmer med datumet, 19 april 1993, när Koreshs sekt i Waco, Texas, stormades av FBI. Låttiteln "1969" anspelar på det år som det blev förbjudet för den amerikanska armén att använda den typ av gas som Koresh tog livet av sig själv och sektmedlemmarna med vid massakern i Waco.

skrattar Marcus.

säger Michael. säger Marcus.

OM "GEOGADDI" SKAPADE den stora myten om Boards Of Canada var det deras första stora album, "Music Has the Right to Children", som lade bandets namn på allas läppar.

Marcus, Michael och deras kompisar hade experimenterat med musik bokstavligen sedan barnsben. Sedermera blev de en duo och släppte på egen hand debutalbumet "Twoism" 1995, men det dröjde ytterligare tre år innan genombrottet kom.

Under nittiotalet var det ofta skivbolaget Warp som gav ut de mest innovativa elektroniska producenterna. Namn som Aphex Twin, Luke Vibert och Squarepusher släppte skivor med galna jungletrummor och sabbade läten som gjorde albumen till oväsensymfonier i något slags blandning av ravekultur, fusionjazz och avancerad elektronisk ljudbehandling.

När Warp ställde sig bakom "Music Has the Right to Children" blev Boards Of Canadas lägereldselectronica en kontrast till bolagets övriga, lätt hysteriska profil. Duon lät verkligen inte som någonting annat. Visst hade det funnits producenter som i många år gjort ambient elektronisk musik men det handlade ofta om att mixa in delfinljud och att det skulle låta fint. "Music Has the Right ... " var harmonisk men samtidigt väldigt skev. Det var hela tiden någonting som "inte stämde". Boards Of Canada spelade vackra ackord fast med trasiga, ostämda ljud. De samplade informationsfilmer och glada små barn som de spelade upp över spöklika analogsynthar. Dessutom använde de sig av hiphopbeats och akustiska instrument som de samplade och sedan förstörde, vilket gav en egen klang.

Marcus berättar att det skeva kommer från när en av dem ber den andra att "göra något diagonalt". Uppmaningen att "göra något diagonalt" betyder i deras studio att lägga till ljud som bryter av det linjära, något som går rakt emot hur låten är uppbyggd.

När "Music Has the Right ... " gavs ut blev den för mig ett uppvaknande. På den tiden levde jag nog i en värld där elektronisk musik antingen var psykedelisk ravegalenskap eller ambient myspys. Boards Of Canada landade någonstans mitt emellan. I sin musik var de inte heller rädda för att fånga känslan från dimmiga höststränder eller från tysta campingnätter på höglandet. Skivan satte helt enkelt en standard. Boards Of Canada influerade elektroniska producenter ( från mindre kända som Ten And Tracer eller Faction till större namn som Four Tet), de nämndes hela tiden av Radiohead som inspiration vid inspelningen av "Kid A" och de vari princip det första bandet i en lång rad som senare lite tveksamt skulle etiketteras som "folktronica",

Jag anser att de har varit för den drömska elektroniska musiken vad Ramones var för punkrocken, men Boards Of Canada själva håller inte med om det.

säger Marcus.

säger Michael.

fortsätter Marcus.

SJÄLVA TYCKER MARCUS och Michael att "Twoism" kändes betydligt mer banbrytande närd de gjorde det och att albumet som kom att bli deras första framgång bara var en naturlig uppföljning.

Jag frågar om de helt ärligt verkligen inte har märkt vilken påverkan deras genombrott hade på den elektroniska musiken under åren som kom. De svarar att de inte kan se sådant från sitt perspektiv och att de respekterar andra kompositörer för mycket för att kunna ta på sig någon sorts ära. Först vet jag inte vad jag ska tro, men vartefter timmarna går förstår jag att det inte är någon påklädd ödmjukhet utan att de faktiskt bara gjort musik de själva gillar och på ett lite naivt sätt faktiskt inte förstår hur jag kan sitta och komma med sådana påståenden.

De medger dock att soundet från "Music Has the Right ... " inte längre är unikt. För någon som blev intresserad av elektronisk musik nyligen framstår albumet förmodligen som ganska standardiserad electronica, eftersom det släppts så myket musik vars utgångspunkt finns i det albumet.

ler Michael.

säger Marcus.

"THE CAMPFIRE HEADPHASE" är mer avskalad och innehåller fler akustiska instrument än tidigare. Som vanligt kräver den tid för att förstås men de direkta associationerna är lika starka som vanligt. Jag satt med albumet i hörlurarna på väg till Edinburgh. Musiken ackompanjerade vackert och perfekt när flygplanet bröt upp genom molntäcket och mötte solljuset. Samtidigt kändes det som att jag satt på en dömd flight, ett plan som snart skulle ligga i spillror på en skotsk åker. Kontrasterna har alltid varit styrkan i Boards Of Canadas musik.

förklarar Michael.

säger Marcus och rycker på axlarna.

Boards Of Canadas sparsamma utgivningstakt har inte bara bidragit till rykten om deras förmodat märkliga liv utan också byggt upp stor förväntan bland fansen inför varje släpp.

säger Michael. säger Marcus. säger Michael.

DET REGNAR FORTFARANDE när vi bryter upp från baren. Jag erbjuds skjuts hem till mitt hotell och på vägen upprepar Marcus att det är en fördom att det alltid regnar i Edinburgh och påminner om att jag borde komma hit igen för att se stan från sin rätta sida. Jag har precis tackat för skjutsen och ska kliva ur när det slår mig att den viktigaste frågan faktiskt inte har ställts. Den röda tråden genom Boards Of Canadas alla skivor är ju ändå lägerelden. Vare sig den är med bokstavligen eller bara i stämningen finns det alltid en lägereld med i deras låtar. Är den också bara en del av den stora myten som Michael och Marcus under de senaste timmarna hackat i bitar framför min bandspelare?

säger Marcus. tillägger Michael snabbt.

Note: translation by twoism.org user "bungler666")

They were the first to join

They were the first with what is sometimes called folktronica. For a long time they were also one of the world's most secret bands. Now Boards Of Canada have started talking. Billy Rimgard hears myths being debunked in a rainy Edinburgh.

Text: Billy Rimgard

My flight to Edinburgh would leave in less than ten hours but I still didn't know where, when and how I would meet Boards Of Canada. The time was 22:00 and I was crawling on the walls with worry when a text message came. The Museum Of Scotland on Chambers Street, through the swinging doors, up the stairs, through the main exhibition, the cafe area on the right, five o’clock. Signed "X".

Not until a day later was I sure that this article would actually be written.

Few bands are as shrouded in myth as Boards Of Canada. Their breakthrough, "Music Has the Right to Children", changed the entire map for electronic music when it came out in 1998. The album was special because it did not derive its energy from the future but ratherly, from the past. "Music Has the Right to Children" sounded like the duo had tried to recreate their childhood with samplers and sequencers but hadn’t got everything quite right. Instead, they had built the picture on how they remembered it as adults. The music was forward thinking but the feeling was nostalgic.

After "Music Has the Right …”, Boards Of Canada retreated to their base in the countryside outside Edinburgh, took four years to release the sequel "Geogaddi" and thus also lost control of their image. "Geogaddi" was spiced with occultism, mathematical formulas, references to religious cults and geometry. Every time you listened to it something new appeared and every little detail meant something.

This electronic equivalent to the "Da Vinci Code", together with the band's refusal to do any promotion other than a few interviews by email contributed to the spread of many rumours. It was said that they were Satanists, that they lived under cult-like conditions in a creative collective, that they tried to brainwash people through the music, that they were hippies.

So what would I believe?

If I was surprised when they said yes to an interview, I was almost terrified by that text message. Why would anyone who has not done interviews in eight years suddenly want to meet a confused Swede if there was no purpose for it? I saw myself becoming another brick in the construction of the myth of Boards Of Canada, a fun anecdote to address in future press releases: "Once upon a time they even tricked an unsuspecting Swedish journalist into a museum in Edinburgh to ..."

The clock is to minutes to five the next day. I walk counter-current among German backpackers and Japanese tourists into the museum but when I arrive, the cafe is empty. At five o’clock sharp, dozens of old church bells start ringing, the staff starts piling chairs on top of each other and a guard steps forward and asks me to leave the room as they are closing. I still don't believe any interview is going to take place. I text the number I got the message from the day before and ask for an update. “In ten minutes outside the main entrance," the answer reads.

A few moments later I’m sitting in the back seat of a car. In the front seat, Marcus Eoin and Michael Sandison are discussing which place is best to do the interview, based on where there are parking spaces. The duo who are Boards Of Canada tell me that most people don't know about it, but about half of Edinburgh's population are meter maids. They are friendly, ask me how the trip was, apologize for the rain hammering down outside and say that I should try to come here again some other time so I can see how beautiful the city is with better weather. They are the very opposite of the abrasive UNA bomber-like eccentrics that I had expected to meet.

says Marcus when we have sat down in a bar.

They have bought me expensive imported lager and when I want to pay them for it, they wave the money away. They are genuinely surprised that anyone could think of traveling from Sweden just to talk to them and say that the least they can do is buy me a beer.

continues Michael.

There has been so much strange things written about us that most people think they will come here to meet two druids in caftans who make sacrifices on top of a volcano. Now we really want to meet them to show that we are just two ordinary guys.

Marcus laughs.

It is noticeable that Boards Of Canada are two people who have known each other since the sandbox. They always talk about "we" or "us". They end each other's sentences. When one gets stuck in reasoning, the other picks up the thread and continues. Marcus comes with spontaneous remarks, are not afraid to say what he thinks and jokes a lot. Michael is a little more restrained and careful. He contemplates before answering and is often caught explaining something Marcus has said with longer explication and more detail. Something that a more media-savvy artist would probably have seen as unnecessary, since drawn-out theorizing rarely does well in an article. In an interview with Pitchfork Media, done after my visit in Edinburgh, they claimed to be brothers. Which of course might be true but might just as well not be.

My interview with Boards Of Canada is their third before the release of the new album "The Campfire Headphase" and thus they have done more interviews in a week than they have in the last eight years. After "Music Has the Right to Children" they got tired of being misinterpreted and therefore started communicating with the outside world only via email. Although not without restrictions. Excluding a mail interview with NME, they chose not to talk to any major magazines but instead gave smaller, more niche music magazines the opportunity to "talk" to them. The band then discovered that even silence and email interviews can be misinterpreted.

says Marcus.

says Michael and smiles.

Geogaddi was a dark album. It had a pre-apocalyptic feeling to it, as if Boards Of Canada knew something about the world we others didn't know.

I loved it. At least after a while. When I reviewed "Geogaddi" in Sonic number six, I hadn't even begun to understand the extent of it. Although the album was not a pronounced concept album, it required dedication from the listener. You had to concentrate to discover the details and get into the music. But once I got there, I actually liked it more than its predecessor.

"Geogaddi" was not only the result of a band trying to move forward with their music, it was also an album so packed with symbolism that entire pages where the album was analyzed soon began to appear on the internet. If you read there it says, among other things, that a track like "1969" contains a sample with the name "David Koresh" played backwards. The song is 4:19 long, which corresponds to the date, April 19, 1993, when Koresh's cult in Waco, Texas, was stormed by the FBI. The song title "1969" refers to the year when it became illegal for the US Army to use the type of gas that Koresh killed himself and the cult members at the Waco massacre with.

Marcus laughs.

says Michael.

says Marcus.

If “Geogaddi” created the great myth of Boards Of Canada, it was their first major album, "Music Has the Right to Children", that put the band's name on everyone's lips.

Marcus, Michael and their friends had been experimenting with music literally since childhood. Later they became a duo and released their debut album "Twoism" in 1995, but it took another three years before the breakthrough came.

During the 1990s, it was often the record label Warp that released the most innovative electronic producers. Names such as Aphex Twin, Luke Vibert and Squarepusher released records with crazy jungle drums and messed up sounds that made the albums noise-symphonies in some kind of mix of rave culture, fusion jazz and advanced electronic sound processing.

When Warp released "Music Has the Right to Children", Boards Of Canada's campfire electronica became a contrast to the label’s other, slightly hysterical profile. The duo really didn't sound like anything else. Sure, there had been producers making ambient electronic music since many years back but that music was mostly about mixing in dolphin sounds and making it all sound nice. ”Music Has the Right ..." was harmonious but at the same time quite wacky. There was always something that was "not right". Boards Of Canada played beautiful chords with broken, out of tune sounds. They sampled informational videos and happy little children and played it over ghostly analog synths. In addition, they used hip-hop beats and acoustic instruments that they sampled and then processed to death, giving them their own sound.

Marcus says that the wackiness comes from when one of them asks the other to "do something diagonal". The call to "do something diagonal" means, in their studio, to add sounds that break off the linear, something that goes directly against how the song is constructed.

When "Music Has the Right ..." was released it became an awakening for me. At that time, I lived in a world where electronic music was either psychedelic rave madness or comfy ambient. Boards Of Canada landed somewhere in between. In their music, they were also not afraid to capture the feeling of foggy beaches in the autumn or of quiet camping nights in the highlands. The record simply set a standard. Boards Of Canada influenced electronic producers (from lesser known acts such as Ten And Tracer or Faction to bigger names like Four Tet), they were constantly mentioned by Radiohead as inspiration in the recording of "Kid A" and were essentially the first band in a long line to later be doubtfully labeled as "folktronica",

I believe that they have been for dreamy electronic music what Ramones were for punk rock, but Boards Of Canada themselves disagree.

says Marcus.

says Michael.

continues Marcus.

Marcus and Michael themselves think that “Twoism" felt a lot more groundbreaking when they made it and that the album that came to be their first success was just a natural follow-up.

I ask if they honestly have not really noticed what impact their breakthrough had on electronic music over the years to come. They respond that they cannot see such things from their perspective and that they respect other composers too much to be able to take on any sort of pride. At first I do not know what to believe, but as the hours go on I understand that there is no faked humility and that they have actually just made music they like and in a slightly naive way do not understand how I can sit and make such claims .

They admit however that the sound of "Music Has the Right ..." is no longer unique. To someone who has recently became interested in electronic music, the album probably appear as pretty standard electronica, since so much music rooted in the sounds of that album has been released since.

Michael smiles.

says Marcus.

"The Campfire Headphase" is more stripped down and contains more acoustic instruments than before. As usual, it requires time to be understood, but the direct associations are as strong as usual. I sat with the album in my headphones on my way to Edinburgh. The music beautifully and perfectly accompanied the moment when the airplane broke through the clouds and met the sunlight. At the same time it felt like I was sitting on a doomed flight, a plane that soon would lie in ruins on a Scottish field. The contrasts have always been the strength in Boards Of Canada's music.

explains Michael.

says Marcus and shrugs.

Boards Of Canada's frugal release rate has not only contributed to rumors about their supposedly strange life, but has also built up a lot of expectation among the fans before each release.

says Michael.

says Marcus.

says Michael.

It still rains when we exit the bar. I am offered a ride home to my hotel and on the way Marcus repeats that it is a prejudice that it always rains in Edinburgh and reminds me that I should come here again some other time to see the city from its right side. I have just said thanks for the ride and started to exit the car when it strikes me that the most important question has not actually been asked. After all, the common thread through Boards Of Canada's records is the campfire. Whether it is there literally or just in the mood, there is always a campfire in their songs. Is it also just a part of the big myth that Michael and Marcus during the recent hours have chopped into pieces in front of my tape recorder?

says Marcus.

Michael quickly adds.

---

The Great Escape

title	The Great Escape
author	Mark Robertson
publication	The List
date	2005/10
issue	Issue 533
pages	18-19

"The Great Escape" is an interview by Mark Robertson originally published Oct. 2005 in The List magazine Issue 533, pages 18-19.

They have made some of the most evocative and uncategorisable music of recent times. Mark Robertson speaks to BOARDS OF CANADA about making records, starting families and the spaces between the notes.

Boards of Canada's music is weird. Weird in a good way, that is. Good music should make the listener feel, be it happy, sad, adrenalised, even angry or confused. An emotional response is the most an artist can hope for from the listener. Boards of Canada’s music - and even after speaking to them it's still not entirely clear why - is among the most emotive, touchy feely noise you could find.

There is a sense of vast space, an air of melancholy. Keyboards burble, snare drums twang and barely audible children giggle and shriek in delight. And there’s an odd, off-centre, almost wobbly quality to the music that is truly their own. It casts up vivid shapes, colours and landscapes. It invokes the spirit of old kids' TV shows, corny 70s sci-fi and the noise made by the wind. Few moments of modern music feel quite this nostalgic.

Quick history lesson: they formed in earnest in the early 80s - their moniker derived from the National Film Board of Canada - in and around Edinburgh as a sextet playing trippy indie rock which 'still had a definable edge that made it Boards of Canada‘. Alter several years of experiments the hand was pared down to a duo - who are in fact brothers, though they refrained from divulging the fact, keen not to be likened to Orbital's Hartnoll brothers or indeed the Osmonds. Alter several highly sought alter. limited run sell-releases, they hooked up with Warp to release Music Has the Right to Children in 1998. Regarded by many as one of the finest electronic albums ever made, it has a quality and texture that sets it apart from most conjuring with sounds of this kind. Hip hop beats roll against pastoral surges of synth and unidentified noises pulse and surge. In the same way as no one quite sounds like Bob Dylan, Mogwai or Shellac, no one quite sounds like Boards of Canada. A second record, Geogaddi followed in 2002, sounding like a huge maths equation unfolding extremely slowly, and went deeper and darker than its predecessor. A clutch of re-releases and a couple of EPs surfaced in the meantime. including the tremulous In a Beautiful Place out in the Country EP. Skip forward to 2005 and the arrival of The Campfire Headphase, a record which builds on the energy and otherness of what has gone before but broadens their palette, with more live instruments recorded, stretched and mutated while remaining quite odd, sad and mostly brilliant.

The pair happily exist outside the radar of any cultural scene. ensconced in the Scottish countryside with their own studio and alchemist‘s cupboard, Hexagon Sun. They continue to thrive and seem as content as any musicians you‘re likely to meet.

---

Protect and Survive

title	Protect and Survive
author	Rob Young
publication	The Wire
date	2005/10
issue	260
pages	40-47

"Protect and Survive" was a face to face interview by Rob Young in The Wire, 2005-10, issue 260, pages 40-47. ISSN: 0952-0686

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

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. "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 our music."

When you think about Boards Of Canada, the idea of hermits is never too far away. For the best part of a decade and a half now 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." "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." 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."

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 extend 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."

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. 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 what 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?"

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. "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." 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. "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. "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."

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."

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 place 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. "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." 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. "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."

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. "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." 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." 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..." 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 Details": their mastery of numbers and geometry has its own part to play in the Confucian confusion.

"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.

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." Google Boards 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. "Not in the slightest," counters Sandison when I ask him for a definitive answer on their 'cult' status. "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." 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..." "And the outrage at what happened," interjects Sandison. "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." "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..." 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." 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..."

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. "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.'

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La Part du Feu

title	La Part du Feu
author	Frank Bedos
publication	Trax
date	2005/10
issue	88
pages	32-37

La Part du Feu was an interview (in French) by Frank Bedos originally published October 03 2005^[16] in Trax magazine Number 88 pp.32-37.

Trois ans qu'on attendait que l'aigle Boards Of Canada se pose à nouveau sur nos platines. À l'occasion de la sortie de The Campfire Headphase, événement brûlant de cette rentrée électronique, le duo le plus psychédélique de l'électronica accepte enfin de parler à visage découvert. Conversation autour du feu.

La lune est rouge et basse en cette nuit glaciale sur une plage quelque part au sud de l'Écosse, aux abords des Pentland Hills. Pourtant, comme dans un étrange rite païen, un cercle d'une vingtaine de personnes s'est formé autour d'un large feu crépitant qui semble glorifier la communion des éléments, les forces de la nature avec les puissances de l'esprit. Rassemblement post-hippie? Culte d'initiation magique? Cérémonie clandestine du Temple Solaire? Rien de tout cela, car point de sorcier, gourou ou autre médium surnaturel pour atteindre les étoiles ici. A la place et pour tout intermédiaire, un ghettoblaster. Nous sommes en hiver 2002, Boards Of Canada, quatre ans après le sacre international de Music Has The Right To Children, leur premier album, convoquent leurs amis d'enfance et célèbrent leur façon la fin de l'enregistrement de Geogaddi, qui leur apportera une reconnaissance critique universelle. rigole Michael l'un des membres du duo.

Un cas à part

Retour en arrière. Quand Warp a annoncé la sortie programmée du troisième album de Boards Of Canada, à la fin du mois de juin, immédiatement des tas de forums se sont fait l'écho d'une attente insupportable pour beaucoup. On n'a jamais autant glosé sur de simples titres de tracks, jamais frôlé d'aussi près la pâmoison vide et prospective, et jamais ensuite tant angoissé l'idée que ce que l'on venait de télécharger n'était pas le sacro-saint nouvel album du duo écossais, mais un ensemble de few old tunes que quelques malins avaient sournoisement maquillés. C'est que Boards Of Canada est devenu en quelques années un cas part dans le milieu de l'électronique underground, une situation qui pourrait cependant s'élargir et, par une magie concentrique, quitter la lisière confinée des cercles d'adeptes pour gagner une sphère à l'échelle du globe et se transfigurer ainsi en phénomène mainstream.

Reclus dans leurs terres froides, n’accordant que de rares interviews et seulement par e-mails, ne se produisant pour ainsi dire jamais en live, cites par Thom Yorke lui-même comme les inspirateurs directs du chef-d’œuvre Kid A, acclamés dès leur première réalisation grand format et portés par une rumeur grandissante installant Music Has The Right To Children parmi les 25 meilleurs disques psychédéliques de tous les temps au milieu des Beatles et des Pink Floyd, la légende Boards Of Canada est en marche. Aussi, quand Warp nous a confirmé après de multiples ajournements que Michael Sandison et Marcus Eoin acceptaient finalement de nous rencontrer près de chez eux Edimbourg, nous nous retrouvions ni une ni deux et malgré une date de bouclage imminente dans l'avion qui allait enfin nous rapprocher de la plus grande énigme, l'astre le plus noir de la galaxie électronique.

Totem et tabou

Nous voilà donc en ce mois de septembre dans la cité médiévale d'Edimbourg, surgie de l'époque des chevaliers avec son château fort défiant la brume haut sur la falaise, sa cathédrale gothique, ses ruelles pavées et les collines roussies par le vent la ceinturant. Hors considérations romantiques, c'est dix degrés, pluie glaçante et un misérable jacquard pour toute défense : la foutue douche écossaise. On s'empresse alors de trouver dans cette contrée inamicale le Royal Museum où nous avons rendez-vous avec le groupe afin justement de faire craquer la glace dans laquelle beaucoup se sont sentis prisonniers à l'écoute de leur nouvel album (cf. p 65), et libérer le feu qui couve et semble fragilement irradier ses compositions. C'est d'ailleurs très chaleureusement que Marcus et Michael nous accueillent dans l'enceinte du musée, une lumineuse verrière blanche où trône un immense et sévère totem, garant d'une spiritualité ancestrale. On s'installe au pied de la tutelle sacrée et nos deux artistes ont tôt fait de plaisanter sur notre piteuse apparence, chassant immédiatement la crainte de nous retrouver en face de deux grizzlys condescendant à nous servir leur plus polie langue de bois. Au contraire, ils sont d'emblée très soucieux de la réception de The Campfire Headphase et nous pressent de passer aux aveux. On leur explique l'accueil divisé de la rédaction, le chaud-froid qu'il a provoqué, réaction à vif. En gros et pour faire vite, l'esthétique BOC (pour les intimes). C’est l'équivalent en France de notre Message à caractère informatif et c'est vraiment très intéressant.

La bohème

D'abord, il y a ce nom, Boards Of Canada, qui ne sont pas les troncs flottants sur lesquels se prélassent les castors aux abords des Grands Lacs mais qui est inspire de la National Film Board Of Canada, société cinématographique qui diffusait toutes sortes de documentaires animaliers et de programmes sociaux, avec ce grain très particulier de la pellicule donnant une sorte de lavis a l'image et que l'on retrouve sur l'artwork de la plupart des réalisations du duo. Cela pourrait paraitre anecdotique et ne constituer que la matière d'un disque, mais la force de Boards Of Canada est d'avoir relie cet univers visuel un peu flou et désuet une identité musicale qui, en reprenant ou samplant les éléments sonores faisant la matière auditive brute de ces vidéos et en les couplant des steel guitars, des synthétiseurs et des boites à rythmes d'époque, et des voix d'enfants en arrière-plan, se charge d’une forte puissance évocatrice et nostalgique. Écoutez n'importe quel disque de BOC et, pour peu que vous soyez trentenaire, vous voilà transporté dans ce monde si familier de pattes d'éph’, chemises col pelle tarte, lunettes fumées, sous-pulls qui grattent, le tout nimbé d'une atmosphère fin d'utopie un peu bohème.

Chasse au trésor

Il n'en faudra pas plus pour pétrifier l'inconscient des jeunes Mike et Marcus qui, à leur retour dans leur Écosse natale, alors adolescents s'amusant comme beaucoup d'autres à cet âge à tripatouiller des cassettes audio, puiseront systématiquement leur inspiration au cœur de cette portion d'esprit gelée quelque part dans les glaces de l'Alberta. C'est au début des 80s qu'ils commencent à monter des films en Super-8 et réaliser leurs propres soundtracks tout en apprenant à jouer toutes sortes d'instruments live, batterie, guitare, synthétiseur. Un collectif de musiciens nait de cette boulimie musicale qui comptera jusqu'à quatorze membres, incluant des vocaux comme une formation classique mats avec déjà une nette préférence pour les atmosphères crépusculaires, les structures minimales les manipulations électroniques et les distorsions propres à installer un climat dérangeant et instable. À la fin des 80’s tout en poursuivant leurs montages vidéo, ils se dotent d'un studio d'enregistrement qu'ils baptisent Hexagon Sun, un "junkshop" selon leurs mots, plutôt que le bunker dans lequel la presse, avide d'excentricités, les a un peu vite rangés, une sorte de musée analogique où les samplers côtoient les guitares, les séquenceurs les flûtes, l'ordinateur la harpe éolienne.

La loi du silence

Parallèlement à la création de leur studio, ils lancent leur label, Music70, qui demeurera, même aujourd'hui, une plate-forme d'expérimentation visuelle et sonore. Tous les vieux morceaux inédits, souvent enregistrés sur de bonnes vieilles cassettes et que les fans s'arrachent, datent de cette période allant de 90 à 95, où la formation se sédimente vraiment, abandonnant la configuration de groupe pour se consacrer à des compositions strictement électroniques. Un temps trio, Boards Of Canada devient finalement le duo que nous connaissons et sortent leur premier vinyle autoproduit, il s'appelle Twoism et il va atterrir dans les bureaux de Skam à Manchester et dans les oreilles de Sean Booth d'Autechre, qui les appelle et les signe sur le champ. Suivra immédiatement après le maxi "Hi Score" qui, avec des titres comme "Turquoise Hexagon Sun" ou "Everything You Do Is A Balloon" et leurs boucles en spirale, leur mélancolie obsédante, leur rythmique hip hop en apposition, installeront lentement le son BOC dans la psyché électronique britannique. C'est en 1998 que sort le premier album de BOC, il est signé conjointement sur Warp et Skam et ouvre enfin au groupe les portes d'une audience Internationale. Bombe à fragmentation dans sa forme, à retardement dans le fond, il provoquera un étrange effet papillon noir, un battement d'aigle en Écosse remuant alors une mélancolie ignorant les frontières.

La vie en retrait

Le temps va se charger de sculpter le mythe Boards Of Canada. Ces deux gars plutôt peace, qui n'ont jamais vraiment réalisé que leur musique pouvait un jour dépasser les rivages tumultueux de la Mer du Nord et accompagner autre chose que leurs fêtes nocturnes entre potes dans les forêts ou sur les plages, vont susciter une curiosité proportionnelle au soin qu'ils prendront à se dissimuler, se détacher des rouages écrasants de l'industrie musicale. Leur réputation ne cessera de grandir à mesure que le succès de Music Has The Right To Children s'étendra sereinement au-delà du seul territoire électronique et que les spéculations quant aux personnalités de Mike et Marcus et de leur vie pastorale iront bon train. Juste un havre de paix, un coin à l'abri "ln A Beautiful Place Out ln The Country".

Une équation musicale

Avec un sens appuyé de l'ironie, BOC sort ce maxi en 2000. En pleine parano millénariste, les voilà qui font réciter au vocoder des paroles de David Koresh, de la secte des Davidiens, et que le track "Amo Bishop Roden" est tiré du nom d'un des membres de cette même secte dont 86 membres se suicidèrent suite à l'assaut donné par le FBI en 1993 à Waco au Texas. Ils ne s'arrêteront pas en si bon chemin avec la sortie en 2002 de Geogaddi, où pour la première fois ils s'éloigneront de leur univers visuel pour explorer les relations cryptiques entre la nature et la science, l'inconscient et les mathématiques, la création et la géométrie, qu'ils emballent dans une vague iconographie religieuse. Le tracklisting s'obscurcit de titres comme "Music Is Math", "Alpha & Omega", "Gyroscope", et s'étire en un soupir muet jusqu'à une durée fatidique : 66 min 6 sec.

Logique ascensionnelle

Depuis leurs débuts, les Boards Of Canada ont tracé une perpendiculaire à notre monde réel sur laquelle ils se tiennent comme en apesanteur et qui est leur meilleur point de vue sur le monde, leur "Magic Window" qu'ils ferment sur eux-mêmes pour entamer une danse giratoire dont ils sont les seuls à connaitre les pas et qui les guide "toujours plus profondément à l'intérieur de (leur) son, tout contre l'ossature qui le soutient". Geogaddi, en explorant la face ténébreuse de la réminiscence, avait refroidi nombre de fans et de journalistes, c'est pourtant à ce jour leur chef-d'œuvre en tant que compositeurs, le disque où leur univers, en l'absence de lumière, s'est le plus anxieusement déployé dans les souterrains de la conscience. Si le titre "The Devil Is ln The Details" pouvait résumer la philosophie qui irriguait Geogaddi, alors "Constants Are Changinq" serait celui qui travaille en profondeur The Campfire Headphase, album plus engageant, moins torturé qui, en reprenant leurs ingrédients et les restituant sous une lumière tamisée, pourrait bien constituer pour ceux qui les découvrent une porte d'entrée idéale au monde des Boards. Pour les autres, après trois ans de longue attente, ils découvriront, pour peu qu'ils rentrent dans la temporalité immobile du disque, une autre facette du duo, plus directe, plus dépouillée, plus américaine.

Feu d’adieu

A vous seuls maintenant d'en juger, mais sachez que The Campfire Headphase ne se dévoilera pas d'emblée et qu'il étendra paisiblement sa toile dans votre esprit au fil des écoutes successives. Alors que la technologie façonne toujours plus notre quotidien, que le rythme de nos organismes s'accélère sans frein, que le monde ici-bas n'est qu'une immense vallée de larmes, Boards Of Canada revient à une forme d'ingénuité, ralentit la cadence jusqu'à figer le temps, ouvre une porte vers les nuages pour fuir les grises cités. Là où l'on peut se réchauffer simplement, entre amis, autour de ce feu de camp qu'ils nous invitent à allumer comme eux en cette soirée glacée lorsqu'ils se resserraient pour qu'il ne s'éteigne jamais. Nous ne saurons jamais ce qu'ils mangeaient lors de leurs petites réunions improvisées, mais ce qui était évident en les quittant, c'était cette chaleur et cette simplicité avec lesquelles ils nous avaient accueilli et cette flamme dans leurs yeux, nous assurant que l'histoire n'était pas près de prendre fin. Là, dans cet âtre brûlait doucement feu sacré de Boards Of Canada, au pied de ce totem qui nous scrutait mystérieusement. Sur sa fiche en épigraphe, cette parole trois fois millénaire de l'obscur Héraclite : "Qui se dérobera au feu qui ne se couche pas?"

This article needs to be translated. If you can provide a translation, please update this article!

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Splendid Isolation

title	Splendid Isolation
author	Neil Davenport
publication	Metro
date	2005/10/12
issue	12 Oct 2005
pages	p.23

"Splendid Isolation" was an interview by Neil Davenport originally published in the October 12 2005 edition of Metro freesheet newspaper p.23

Tune in to the other-worldly sound of Boards Of Canada

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 Scottish Highlands, brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin (they are both called Sandison but Marcus uses his middle name) firmly believe that separation from civilization is mandatory.

explains Marcus,

The ends fully justify the means. Since 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. 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.

says Mike,

Yet The Campfire Headphase isn't the sound of the duo standing thematically or musically still. continues Mike.

The American references are appropriate. As children, the brothers obsessed over American TV programmes such as The Six Million Dollar 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.

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. says Mike. Yet the guitars are only incidental - it's still the Boards' unmistakable brand of analogue psychedelia and it still sounds stretched and warped, magical and other-worldly. How do they do it? says Mike. '

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. says Mike firmly,

Somehow, you kind of believe him.

Brothers' gonna work it out...

Neil Davenport

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Around The Campfire

title	Around The Campfire
author	Paul Clarke
publication	DJ Mag
date	2005/10
issue	Volume 04 Number 01 (Oct.14 - Oct. 27)
pages	50-51

Around The Campfire was an interview by Paul Clarke originally published October 2005 in DJ Mag Volume 04 Number 01 (Oct.14 - Oct. 27) pp. 50-51

As Boards Of Canada release their new long-player, the plot thickens………..

Words: Paul Clarke

It’s easy to imagine Boards Of Canada as electronic music’s own equivalent of ‘Brigadoon’. Or it would be were not the Gene Kelly musical not insufferably twee and full of elaborate tap-dancing routines – neither of which applies to the spectral sound world so lovingly crafted by Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin.

But in other ways the comparisons between the story of a mysterious Scottish village and Boards Of Canada hold firm. Both, after all, only appear at sporadic intervals and seem curiously out of time, shrouded in the ambience of the Scottish highlands from which they materialise.

Although we have proof of Boards Of Canada’s existence in records like ‘Music Has The Right To Children’ and their latest long-player ‘The Campfire Headphase’ these have become like mythical artefacts in themselves, electronic enigmas which fans dissect with almost scholarly obsession – their aura only heightened by their creators’ self-imposed isolation.

Plus, on the rare occasions when they do break their silence, the mysteries only seem to thicken like the sea mist around the ‘artistic commune’ outside Edinburgh where the pair have spun their eerie instrumental fables for over a decade.

says Marcus. Mike elaborates.

Subliminal Messages

Of course such speculation is encouraged – whether intentionally or not – not just by the Boards’ suspicion of the press but by the many layers of meaning, almost arcane references and microscopic attention to detail woven into their records.

There are numerous internet message boards dedicated to interpreting the ‘subliminal’ messages fans claim to have heard in the dislocated children's voices and old TV samples which have become Boards Of Canada’s sound signature. Such as the allusions to the Branch Davidians on 2000’s ‘In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country’ EP.

explains Marcus, in reference to the ‘doomsday’ cult led by David Koresh. He died alongside around 80 others in a fire after federal authorities attempted to storm their Texas compound in 1993.

‘"The Devil Is In The Details"’ you might say – to use a track title from ‘Geogaddi’, Boards Of Canada’s 2002 album, which had an overall running time of 66 minutes and 6 seconds, as well as what some saw as a horned figure on the cover. Coincidence or conspiracy?

says Marcus.

Intrigue

‘The Campfire Headphase’ will undoubtedly spark such intrigue again. There are slight shifts in sound here – such as a greater use of guitars inspired by their love of country musicians like John Denver. But the overall darkly supernatural atmosphere is the same one that has engulfed all their records since their first Warp release ‘Music Has A Right To Children’ in 1998. And the development of their fragile beats and haunting melodies can be traced much further back than even their first official EP release ‘Hi Scores’ on Skam in 1996. It goes back to the days when the pair and various friends would create music for bonfire parties on deserted beaches. Emulating the sound of My Bloody Valentine, synth-pop artists like Devo and even psychedelic folk groups like The Incredible String Band on the old analogue equipment they still love today. Warp re-released their early ‘Twoism’ collection in 2002 but the Boards are still sitting on vast amounts of music which was originally distributed on a few hundred cassette tapes. Mike talks about the possibility of bringing them to light one day, but for now the closest anyone outside their inner sanctum is going to get is listening to ‘The Campfire Headphase.’

he explains.

Sensations of childhood

And – as with so many Boards Of Canada records – that journey takes us back into the past rather than the sterile future envisaged in so much electronica. Specifically to the sensations of childhood which have always been an overarching influence on their oeuvre. Their name is a tribute to the National Film Board of Canada who produced many of the public information films the pair watched as kids. And their music also has the same feelings of wonder and dread that comes from trying to make sense of the world at an early age. It’s made with childlike intuition rather than adult calculation, with sounds writhing under the surface like vague recollections of formative experiences. Such as Mike’s earliest memory of he says now.

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Cross Out the Inappropriate

title	Cross Out the Inappropriate
author	Kristoff Tilkin
publication	Humo
date	2005-10-18
issue	3398
pages	190-191

"Cross Out the Inappropriate" (original text in Dutch) by Kristoff Tilkin

• Humo 3398, 18 Oct 2005, pp. 190-191
• ISSN: 0771-8179

This article needs to be transcribed. If you can provide a transcription, please update this article!

BOARDS OF CANADA - cross out the inappropriate

'Today’s youth has no respect anymore for A) Music, B) Acne, and C) Yesterday’s youth'

With their new album Campfire, Boards of Canada – the Scottish electronic duo Marcus Eoin and Michael Sandison – bid farewell to the cult status they achieved after Music Has The Right To Children and foremost Geogaddi. On Campfire, we didn’t hear any layered, discomforting ambient littered with obscure references, but instead ten surprisingly straightforward sounding tracks full of weathered easy listening, and the melancholy of bruised Fisher Price-toys.

According to the legend, Eoin and Sandison are unworldly hermits living in a Scottish rural community, but the lads we drink cappuccino with right now in the incredibly hip student quarters of Glasgow are dead normal guys in their thirties who – just like us – grew up during the late seventies and early eighties. Read: too young for the first punk wave, drenched with dry new-wave melancholy, heavily brainwashed by trashy American televison series. If you’re still in doubt: Having watched all ‘The A-Team’ episodes creates a bond.

The fifth chord 

Stinking druids 

Note: Thanks to hGc for the translation.

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Above Board!

title	Above Board!
author	Gal Detourn
publication	Playlouder
date	2005/10/20
issue
pages

"Above Board!" is a 2005 interview by Gal Detourn. It originally appeared in Playlouder ltd.a.

Above Board!

Like Autechre, Warp's Boards of Canada have slowly built a reputation for quality and innovation within the electronica sphere, which, with their reluctance to become public personalities, has created an enigmatic persona. Hence, the minute details of their lives have not been documented. What we can tell you however, is that Marcus and Michael are brothers, they hail from Scotland, and their latest opus - 'The Campfire Headphase' - is one of the most beautiful, bittersweet slices of electronica you're likely to hear. Marcus and Michael have found an uncanny way of investing the most futuristic production techniques, with a warm glow of nostalgia. Here's how they see it...

interview by by Gal Detourn, October 2005.

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Vintage Psychedelia

title	Vintage Psychedelia
author	Riow Harada
publication	Bounce
date	2005/10/25
issue	270 (2005/11)
pages	28-29

"Vintage Psychedelia" was an interview (in Japanese) by Riow Harada originally published October 25 2005^[17] in Bounce magazine Number 270 (Nov 2005).

Vintage Psychedelia

いまいる地平よりも、ずっと遠い世界から届けられるような、はかなく、荘厳で、淡く、無邪気で、聴いたことはないのに懐かしい、ヴィンテージなサイケデリア。耳を澄ませば、ボーズ・オブ・カナダの蠢く音がする……

文/リョウ 原田

古いロード・ムーヴィーみたいに

スコットランドに暮らすマイク・サンディソンとマーカス・イオンによる音響創作ユニット、ボーズ・オブ・カナダ（以下BOC）はどうにも不思議な存在だ。デビュー当時はマイ・ブラディ・ヴァレンタインを引き合いに称賛を受けたが、彼らは決してロック・バンドではない。また、前作『Geogaddi』は〈エレクトロニカ〉というカテゴリーの決定盤としての評価も受けたものの、マイクは「僕らはラップトップ・ミュージックを作ったことがないし、そういった音楽をあまり聴かない」とまで話しているのだ。

　ともかく、新鮮で懐かしい宅録傑作を提供してきたBOC。今年に入ってからはベック“Broken Drum”の傑作リミックスを手掛けていたが、3年ぶりとなる新作『The Campfire Headphase』での彼らはそこから翻って、懐かしくも新鮮な音楽を提供している。そこにあるのは2人がストロークするギターの音色、ゆったりと振られるシェイカー、チューニングの緩んだスネアの軋みなどが散りばめられた、木造のサイケデリア。マイペースを貫く彼らはこう語る。

　 （マーカス）。

　

いわゆる〈エレクトロニカ〉という枠組みに収めるには、若手ラップトップ・アーティストと世代を隔てているBOCは、そもそも80年代から活動するヴェテラン。ゆえに今作では彼らのめざす〈ヴィンテージのロード・ムーヴィーみたいな音〉を実現するために、多様な音楽体験のひとつを取り出してみたということだろう。例えば“Dayvan Cowboy”での幾重にもフィードバックするギターにシューゲイザーの影を見い出す人もいるかもしれない。

別の次元から流れてくる音楽

　一方、音の骨格を支えるビートに関しては、初期作品で見せていたようなヒップホップ感覚もある。

（マイク）。

クラウト・ロック、シューゲイザー、ニュー・スクール以降のヒップホップ……『The Campfire Headphase』の音の隙間からはさまざまな背景（や世代観）を見い出すことができそうだが、一方でそうした文脈はあくまでも〈気配〉を感じさせる程度に止められている。サウンドの総体はいつものように、水彩絵の具で何層にも濃淡をつけた風景画の如く、シンプルでおぼろげだ。例えばアルバムの終局を飾る“Farewell Fire”ではパイプオルガンのような荘厳な響きを聴けるが、それはオルガンそのものの音ではない。

　（マイク）。

　

川のせせらぎや、ヴィンテージな質感のノイズ。その音の背景にある〈現実から隔離された感覚〉とは、最近女の子の父親になったというマイクの言葉を借りるなら、こういうことかもしれない。

　 （マイク）。

　 たいていの音楽は聴き尽くした──そう自負する方にこそ、この『The Campfire Headphase』を、ぜひヘッドフォンで聴いてもらいたい。目の前にあるものを不思議と思える、そんな感覚をBOCがきっと呼び覚ましてくれるだろうから。

note: translation done via ChatGPT-4o.

A vintage psychedelia that feels ephemeral, solemn, faint, innocent, and nostalgic, as if delivered from a world far beyond the horizon. Listen closely, and you’ll hear the throbbing sounds of Boards of Canada…

Written by Ryo Harada

Like an old road movie

Boards of Canada (hereafter BOC), a sound creation unit consisting of Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin living in Scotland, is a mysterious existence. At the time of their debut, they were praised in comparison to My Bloody Valentine, but they are not a rock band. Also, their previous work, Geogaddi, was acclaimed as a definitive album in the electronica category, but Mike said,

In any case, BOC, who have consistently provided fresh and nostalgic home-recorded masterpieces, have reversed their approach this year with their new work, The Campfire Headphase, their first in three years, offering music that is both nostalgic and fresh. It features guitar tones stroked by the two, gently swung shakers, creaking loose-tuned snare, and other elements scattered throughout, creating a wooden psychedelia. Sticking to their own pace, they explain:

To fit BOC into the so-called “electronica” framework would separate them from the younger laptop artists by a generation; they are veterans active since the 80s. Therefore, in this work, to achieve the “vintage road movie-like sound” they aimed for, they seem to have pulled out one of their diverse musical experiences. For example, some might find shadows of shoegaze in the multi-layered feedback guitars of "Dayvan Cowboy".

Music flowing from another dimension

Meanwhile, regarding the beats supporting the backbone of their sound, there is also a hip-hop sensibility reminiscent of their early works.

Krautrock, Shoegaze, post-new school hip-hop… The Campfire Headphase" seems to reveal various backgrounds (and generational views) through its sound gaps, but these contexts are kept to the level of a mere “presence.” The overall sound remains as usual: simple and obscure like a landscape painting with multiple layers of watercolor. For example, in "Farewell Fire", which closes the album, you can hear a solemn tone like that of a pipe organ, but it’s not the sound of an organ itself.

The babbling of a river, the vintage texture of noise. Borrowing the words of Mike, who recently became a father, the “sense of being isolated from reality” behind their sound might be like this:

To those who pride themselves on having listened to most music, I urge you to listen to The Campfire Headphase with headphones. BOC will surely awaken that sense of wonder at the things in front of you.

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Sweet and Sour Melodies Wander Around between Positive and Celebrative Sounds and Swaying Sadness

title	Sweet and Sour Melodies Wander Around between Positive and Celebrative Sounds and Swaying Sadness
author	Masaaki Hara
publication	Vibe-Net
date	2005
issue
pages

"Sweet and Sour Melodies Wander Around between Positive and Celebrative Sounds and Swaying Sadness" is a 2005 interview by Masaaki Hara. It originally appeared in Vibe-Net.

Sweet and Sour Melodies Wander Around between Positive and Celebrative Sounds and Swaying Sadness

Boards of Canada released their 3rd full album The Campfire Headphase. Containing a full of unchanged finest melancholy in this release, it is described by themselves as “a normal pop album that has been exposed under the sun for 20 years”. What’s the truth in it? I interviewed them about the background of the album including the production process.

interview by Masaaki Hara, October 2005.
(translated by Naoko Ross ^[18])

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Stirred Up The Ashes

title	Stirred Up The Ashes
author	Heiko Hoffmann
publication	Earplug
date	2005/10/26
issue	54
pages

"Stirred Up The Ashes" was an interview by Heiko Hoffmann originally published on the twice-monthly email magazine Earplug^[19] Issue 54^[20].

Groove magazine's Heiko Hoffmann speaks to Scottish electronic duo Boards of Canada, aka Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin, about how they stirred up the ashes of their own influence to create their new album, The Campfire Headphase.

interview by by Heiko Hoffmann, October 2005.

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Two for the No-Show

title	Two for the No-Show
author	Will Hodgkinson
publication	The Times
date	2005/10/28
issue
pages

"Two for the No-Show" by Will Hodgkinson, The Times, 28 Oct 2005.

Boards of Canada are so publicity shy they make Dylan look like Robbie. Will hodgkinson gets an exclusive, reclusive interview.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

"Instrumental music is evocative. As soon as you attach a face to it, you tie it down," adds Mike.

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?

"We aim to switch everthing off at six o'clock now," says Mike, who has been forced to change his working methods 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."

"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."

They are, by their own admission, almost impossible to work with. Their record label, Warp, 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."

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."

"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."

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.

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.

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."

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More Discreet than Most of Their Contemporaries

title	More Discreet than Most of Their Contemporaries
author	Jean-François Micard
publication	D-Side
date	November 2005
issue	31
pages	18-19

"More Discreet than Most of Their Contemporaries" was an interview (in French) by Jean-François Micard originally published November/December 2005 in D-Side magazine.

Note: Transcription by Apple's Live Text on a MacBook Pro

Plus discrets que la plupart de leurs contemporains, les deux Ecossais de Boards Of Canada enregistrent pourtant ensemble depuis près de vingt ans... Rien d'étonnant à cela puisqu'ils sont frères, une parenté qu'ils ont longtemps choisi de taire Marcus Sandison devenant Marcus Eoin, son second prénom et Mike gardant leur nom de famille), pour éviter d'attirer l'attention sur eux, pour laisser la musique parler d'elle-même. Une intention louable, chez ces chantres du silence, dont le quatrième véritable album (après une pléthore d'autoproductions). The Campfire Headphase toujours chez Warp, ne ressemble à aucun autre, ou plutôt à une magnifique relique rejetée par les vagues, usée, salie, mais à la mélancolie si présente qu'elle prend à la gorge. Vite, attrapons-les avant qu'ils ne s'effacent..

DISCOGRAPHIE
Catalog 3 (EP) - 1987
Acid Movies (EP) - 1989
Play by Numbers (EP) - 1994
Hooper Boy (EP) - 1994
Twoism - 1995
BoC Maxima - 1996
Old Tunes Vol. 1 (K7) - 1996
Old Tunes Vol. 2 (K7) - 1996
Hiscores (EP) - 1996
Music Has The Right To Children - 1998
Peel Session (EP) - 1999
In a Beautiful Place out in the Country (EP) - 2000
Geogaddi - 2002
The Campfire Headphase - 2005

CONTACT

www.boardsofcanada.com

Note: Translated by ChatGPT-4o

More discreet than most of their contemporaries, the two Scots from Boards Of Canada have been recording together for nearly twenty years... It's not surprising, since they are brothers, a kinship they chose to keep secret for a long time (Marcus Sandison becoming Marcus Eoin, his middle name, and Mike keeping their family name) to avoid drawing attention to themselves, letting the music speak for itself. A commendable intention from these advocates of silence, whose fourth true album (after a plethora of self-productions), The Campfire Headphase, still with Warp, is unlike any other. It is more like a magnificent relic washed up by the waves, worn, soiled, but with such present melancholy that it grabs you by the throat. Quickly, let's catch them before they fade away...

DISCOGRAPHY
Catalog 3 (EP) - 1987
Acid Movies (EP) - 1989
Play by Numbers (EP) - 1994
Hooper Boy (EP) - 1994
Twoism - 1995
BoC Maxima - 1996
Old Tunes Vol. 1 (K7) - 1996
Old Tunes Vol. 2 (K7) - 1996
Hiscores (EP) - 1996
Music Has The Right To Children - 1998
Peel Session (EP) - 1999
In a Beautiful Place out in the Country (EP) - 2000
Geogaddi - 2002
The Campfire Headphase - 2005

CONTACT

www.boardsofcanada.com

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It's our take on a pop record

title	It's our take on a pop record
author	Brian Murnin
publication	Clash Magazine
date	2005/11
issue	Volume 01 Issue 11
pages	p.66-67

"It's our take on a pop record" is a 2005 interview by Brian Murnin. It originally appeared in Clash Magazine.

It's our take on a pop record

For those new to their tale, it's difficult to imagine just how strange, how mysterious and inscrutable Boards of Canada were.

The vastly influential pairing seemed to emerge from the ether, with fans unsure of their real names, location or tastes. With the release of 'The Campfire Headphase' in 2005, though, the duo suddenly became willing to step outside of the shadows.

Granting a handful of interviews, Boards of Canada opened up about their method, their background and - tantalisingly - their future. Never before seen online, here's a classic Clash interview with two seminal voices in electronic music.

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Boards of Canada don’t give many interviews, the vast majority are by e-mail, and to the select few who do get to meet them, their studio, their homes and many key details of their lives and work are strictly out of bounds. In the gaps where the fiercely private band leave the silence, grow the myths that have made the enigma that is Boards of Canada.

In magazines and on forums, media and fans alike have speculated for years about who Boards of Canada really are. If you believe what’s written they’re two reportedly unapproachable and reclusive producers permanently locked in an isolated Scottish highland studio bunker, studying their meticulous musical science and obsessing nature whilst laying mathematical secrets and cult-like messages in their magical music. They are the victims of what they call “the flood of bullshit that fills in your silhouette.”

For those that don’t know them, here is a brief history. And while we’re at it, let’s dispel a few myths.

Known originally as Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin, Boards of Canada, it has recently transpired, are actually brothers. Both are members of the Sandison family, with Marcus initially carrying his middle name as a surname. They don’t see this slight deception as a big deal, as Marcus explains: “ We didn’t go out our way to conceal the fact we are brothers. If people don’t ask about it we don’t bring it up. When we started releasing records we just wanted to avoid comparisons with Orbital...” “ Or even the Osmonds or the Jacksons,” Mike laughs.

Mike and Marcus were born early in the 1970s to musical parents in a small coastal town just outside Inverness in Scotland. Between 1979 and 1980 they relocated to Canada to follow the construction work income that dictated their father’s movements, before relocating back to Scotland a few years later. For the last 20 years they have lived within half an hour’s drive to Edinburgh.

“We’re not trying to accurately pastiche the past, it’s about inventing a past that didn’t really happen.”

Yes, their studio is slightly rural and they dio value the isolation and creativity that being alone and close to nature brings. Mike explains why this is. “Working from a rural studio is probably an advantage because we can create a lot of ad noise and nobody complains and it’s a great place to switch off. When we walk out the doors we don’t see hundreds of pedestrians with the mental interference of their individual lives and fashions, instead there’s just a couple of horses. It’s imagine you’re wherever you want to be, and that helps to stay focussed on specific musical ideas that work outside current sounds and trends.”

Growing up with recording equipment and instruments littering their homes, naturally the boys experimented, and by the age of 10 started to record music. Using the two tape recorders they’d play sounds on one and record on the other across two feet of air before swapping tapes to repeat the process and learn to layer sound. Mike, the eldest by around 2 years, was first to go to high school and start experimenting with live drums and guitar in various bands. When Marcus started a particularly bad trash metal band they decided to join forces as they were both far more interested in synths and programming.

In the early 1990s, after leaving school and their respective bands behind,m their university years led to the creation of a collective of friends knows as Hexagon Sun. Musicians, graphic designers, photographers and artists would gather for woodland parties where music, chat and laughter would be enjoyed round a campfire in the outdoor air. These select gatherings exist to this day.

After years of limited, self-circulated tape and CD releases, in 1996 Boards of Canada grew the confidence to send their compositions to those they respected. Sean Booth from Autechre was the first to pick up on them and the hugely respected Skam records put out the first serious Boards of Canada releases, the ‘Hi Scores’ and ‘Aquarius’ EPs. Warp Records soon noticed the synergies in the sound of band and label and they had the power to take Boards of Canada to the next level so partnered Skam for the next stage. 1998’s resultant debut album, ‘Music Has The Right To Children’, redefined the electronica landscape.

This album is still to many, BoC’s masterpiece. It firmly established certain sounds as their signature and techniques as their trademarks. Samples of radio and film speech, sporadically narrating distant messages and interjecting with child-like vocal samples were placed alongside strings submerged under layers of atmospherics, creating a sound and feeling as nostalgic and warmly familiar as looking at a treasured Polaroid of a distant time past. Live instruments and samples were put through the wringer again and again in a reverse processing cycle learned over years and far removed from popular production techniques to achieve this feeling. Untreated sound was dirtied, dragged through a muddy mix of analogue effects, synthetic textures and distortion to warp the linear and blur the clean. Little vignettes, fragments of speech and sound, intended to catch a feeling or define an instant and recorded to last only a minute or so were everywhere in their music also. These smaller pieces make up some of Mike and Marcus’s favorite parts of the Boards of Canada jigsaw.

2002’s ‘Geogaddi’, their second long player, involved the creation of 400 such song fragments and 64 complete songs, with 23 selected, one of which was silence, as Boards of Canada tried not to let the new weight of expectation deviate them from their earlier, less scrutinised path. If anything, ‘Geogaddi’ was more stripped down than its predecessor; eerier and darker but still aged under the same smoky hue.

‘Geodaddi’ exercises similar basic principals to ‘MHTRTC’ but launched the suggestion of subliminal trickery in their music, through the use of mathematics like Fibonacci in song structure and the placement of hidden symbols and phrases woven into the tapestry of their songs. Boards of Canada have admitted to this to an extent, saying that what they’ve been watching, listening to, or learning about at any given time has appeared in some way in all of their music but in ‘Geogaddi’ the messages were a particular theme.

At this time they also stated that the next album was well on the way to being ready. But a three-year wait followed until the last month when ‘The Campfire Headphase’ finally appeared on Warp.

According to them it’s simply been another three-year treatment and aging process. Oak smoking boats and immersing guitar melodies under swathes of static recorded and reverberated over and over to create the perfect atmosphere. Mike explains, “Some of what we do takes much more than two or three listens before we realise we’re addicted to even a simple chord progression or melody. And part of the way we get our music to work is by living with our own tracks for a while before releasing them.” Their aim with this third album is to dominate our emotive headspace once again with an album sounding older than ever, more beautiful than ever and more strangely reminiscent of far-off places and past feelings.

In comparing the new album to their pervious work, Mike says, “This record is more visual than ‘Geodaddi’, which means much more abstract. It’s our take on a pop record, pop music that has been melted on a hot dashboard in the sun. The melodies are hopeful on the surface, with an undercurrent of sickness or giddiness.” Marcus adds, “I think more than ever we tried to get the music to simulate a visual event, for instance ‘Satellite Anthem Icarus’ has a kind if super-slow-motion swelling sound that’s reminiscent of slow-mo action shots from old oceanographical documentaries.”

As they made this album BoC said their aim was to take the playing of traditional instrument sounds far into unconventional places. Marcus says, “On some of the trcks we’d set up a straightforward backing, maybe a simple guitar riff, and we'd change what the original melody was doing, to give it a kind of uneasy undercurrent. We sneak synthetic melodies in on top, sometimes you’ll hear twisty things like reversed instruments join in, playing in the relative minor. We set things up one way and then try to make you hear the melody in a completely different way.

I ask Mike if they employ any particular or new techniques in creating these hopeful moods and textures with sick and giddy undertones. “We spent a lot of time destroying the sounds, throwing parts onto overloaded tape or amping them up and re-recording them back in through low-quality mics,” he says. “And we put a lot of work into incidental sounds and events that flit in and out of the music, things like multi-coloured glissandos or synthetic bird like sounds that tweet in one ear and out the other.”

Symbolism, however, is not such a strong part of this album. “We moved away from the burying hidden messages in the music because that was the theme on ‘Geodaddi’. But of course there are little elements of what has been influencing us lately hidden in there somewhere,” Mike intimates. “But the fun is finding them! This record and its influences are mostly about the music. We’ve tried to hint at the kind of guitar sounds you’d hear on an old Joni album or something from that era. The guitar-based music we listen to is usually from artists who have been totally entrenched in guitar song-writing from the word go, people like John Frusciante . We also took some rough ideas from low-budget 70’s western films. We’re really into Peckinpah’s movie.”

“It’s our take on a pop record, pop music that has been melted on a hot dashboard in the sun.”

On songs like the amazing ‘Chromakey Dreamcoat’, which wobbles like tape being slowed by hand over its beautiful string plucks or the start of ‘Peacock Tail’ through ‘Dayvan Cowboy’, the most uplifting section of the album, the use of guitars is more evident than ever. “It suited the sound we were going for on this record,” Marcus says. “They’re all fairly futuristic sounding tracks but they have a 70’s acoustic flavor. “ Mike adds. “We’d known for quite a while, since ‘Geodaddi’, that we wanted to make a guitar record next. In the end what we’ve actually made is really more of a weird crossbreed.”

Boards of Canada - Dayvan Cowboy

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‘The Campfire Headphase’ is Boards of Canada at their absolute best, reminiscent of the finest moments of their debut, soaked in nostalgia and poignance with sounds eroded for what feels like an eternity. “We like playing around with memory triggers in music, usually in the melody parts. We come up with little phrases or ornaments that are reminiscent of something. A large part of what it’s about is the quality of the sound itself, corroding the sound. We’re not trying to accurately pastiche the past, it's about inventing a past that didn’t really happen, like finding your own 8-track demo tape that has been lying in a box for years.” I ask them if they feel their music looks forward or back to which they reply, “We feel it does both.”

So how do they feel about the enigma that is created around their music? Marcus answers quickly, “I think it’s funny really. It was always going to happen. We do put a lot of details in there that you might not expect people to pick up on. But the listeners always get it. There are some occasions when it would probably be best to just kick back and feel the music instead if analysing it.” One particular perception they did like is fondly remembered by Mike: “I remember a nice comment someone made when they reasoned that we didn’t use a singer because no words could do the music any justice. I like that, because I’ve always felt that in music words are a really low-res way of conveying ideas. What I mean is, music is a much higher-resolution medium to convey feelings than words could ever be.”

interview by by Brian Murnin, Nov 2005.

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Boards of Canada's Seasons in the Sun

title	Boards of Canada's Seasons in the Sun
author	Kevin Hainey
publication	Exclaim!
date	2005/11
issue	November 2005
pages	15

Boards of Canada's Seasons in the Sun was an interview by Kevin Hainey originally published November 2005 in Exclaim! freesheet magazine (Nov 2005 issue).

There's something about Scottish duo Boards of Canada's dreamy, nostalgic electronic meditations that plants you into an idyllic setting of your imagination, perhaps located within your own distant memories. Their third and latest transportation device, The Campfire Headphase, is no exception.

says Mike Sandison.

Such reoccurring out-of-body experiences could have to do with the brothers Sandison (Marcus uses Eoin, his middle name, as a surname) being fascinated with the great outdoors, which is where they spend most of their time when they're not making music.

In fact, Mike and Marcus are known to throw a righteous outdoor party when the mood strikes. These parties have been dubbed Redmoon nights after an early one featured a blood-red full moon backdrop from the receptive cosmos.

says Marcus Eoin.

As close to a pop album as Boards of Canada have come, The Campfire Headphase lays aside the musical and numerical theories they played with on their last album, 2002's subliminal and abstract Geogaddi, in favour of further refining the tried and true sound of their legendary 1998 debut, Music Has the Right to Children.

says Mike.

Besides an increased attention to minute details, Headphase notably exhibits Boards of Canada's most prominent use of non-electronic instrumentation to date. says Marcus Eoin.

Mike Sandison has a description that best encapsulates the feel of this album:

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La Materia De La Que Están Hechos Los Sueños

title	La Materia De La Que Están Hechos Los Sueños
author	Javier Blánquez
publication	Go Mag
date	2005/11
issue	61
pages	32-36

"La Materia De La Que Están Hechos Los Sueños" was an interview (in Spanish) by Javier Blánquez originally published November 2005 in Go Magazine Number 61.

La Materia De La Que Están Hechos Los Sueños

Texto: Javier Blanquez

Fotografías: Peter Iain Campbell

No iremos ahora a descubrir por qué Boards Of Canada es un grupo esencial y un faro necesario para quienes escuchan música -podríamos añadir electrónica, pero sería un dato irrelevante, ellos están ya por encima de géneros. Durante siete años y tres discos, sus atmosferas de ensueño y sus melodías capaces de poner el brazo como la esencia de la escarpia han acompañado nuestras noches y nuestros días, y cada vez que un nuevo disco se retrasa notamos ese vacío de estomago propio del amor o el desamparo. Como les necesitamos, por fin han decidido darnos alimento y han publicado un tercer disco arenoso y austero, "The campfire headphase". Un nuevo misterio que nos Llevó hasta su mismísima Escocia para obtener respuestas.

In a Beautiful Place out in the City

"Creía que érais fantasmas, que no existíais de verdad". No es lo mejor que se le puede decir de entrada a dos personas cuyos discos son como el aire que hemos respirado toda la vida, pero así es como empieza esta conversación. No había otra forma. Sonríen, como diciendo 'pues aquí estamos'. Son normales, visten como cualquier otra persona, con un estilismo urban de ropas anchas y colores claros; llevan anillos en sus dedos, gel fijador de efecto mojado en el pelo, las barbas de dos días perfectamente estudiadas; no son monjes ni espectros. Son personas corrientes, con la diferencia de que graban para Warp y los demás no. ¿Dónde estamos? ¿Qué hacen Boards Of Canada aquí? Fuera llueve y el suelo brilla con el relente de las farolas en la caída de la noche. Dentro se está bien y suena una música horrible; es una cafetería de Edimburgo de sofás mullidos, y Michael Sandison, a la derecha, y Marcus Eoin, a la izquierda, se han manifestado en carne y hueso mientras beben té con leche y zumos naturales. cuenta Sandison para justificar un aislamiento casi ascético que les ha mantenido en una penumbra, en un semi-anonimato, durante más de una década. prosigue Eoin, Sí, los misteriosos Boards Of Canada ya no se esconden. Son de verdad y han decidido conceder una de esas muy raras entrevistas que dan cara a cara para explicar todo lo que haga falta sobre el misterio que parece rodear a su vida y su obra y, por supuesto, explicar los pormenores de "The campfire headphase" (Warp / PIAS, 05), su tercer disco en ocho años y un giro sutil a un discurso musical que si antes había basculado alrededor de la electrónica abstracta, el hip hop color sepia y las melodías de ensueño, ahora es más de lo mismo -e igualmente sublime en los momentos clave- pero con ese elemento folk telúrico y cubierto de hiedra que ya empezaba a adoptar preeminencia en los rincones más opacos del fascinante "Geogaddi" (Warp, 02). En efecto, si algo ha permanecido como elemento inalterable en la música de Boards Of Canada durante quince años -recuerden que Michael Sandison y Marcus Eoin llevan haciendo música desde comienzos de la década pasada, publicando cassettes en ediciones limitadísimas en su ahora inactivo sello Music70- es una psicodelia musgosa y en tonos verde turquesa, heredera del viejo folk inglés de principios de los setenta y barnizada con electrónica que busca sobre todo sonar antiguo, como un recuerdo de hace treinta años que aparece en el fondo de un baúl. sostiene Michael,

Quien haya escuchado, aunque sólo sea una vez y sin profundizar, a Boards Of Canada, sabrá perfectamente entender de lo que habla Michael Sandison. Toda la obra precedente a este "The campfire headphase" viene precedida por una búsqueda de un espacio concreto y delimitado; un espacio amplio el que suceden cosas, en el que corre el aire o entra el sol y donde el tiempo parece quedarse congelado, o estático, cubierto de polvo; es en esa reclusión cuando aparece la esencia de Boards Of Canada, las emociones, los recuerdos, la oscuridad o la penumbra, los fogonazos de deja vus que nunca sucedieron. Uno escucha a Boards Of Canada y se siente como ese niño que sube una escalera de madera, se sube al desván de la casa del abuelo y descubre, entre telarañas y carcoma, un tesoro de antaño en forma de libros, viejos discos de piedra y utensilios del hogar abandonados. Para saber si con su tercer álbum lo han vuelto a conseguir, sólo basta con acudir a dos piezas: "Peacock tail" y "Dayvan cowboy". Y entonces suspiras de alivio, porque la espera, una vez más, ha valido la pena.

Un Pasado Verde Turquesa

Además de llenar el espacio, la música de Boards Of Canada llena el tiempo. A su manera, los escoceses son como la cara inversa de Kraftwerk: si Ralf y Florian querían recrear un futuro a partir de máquinas, un futuro que nunca tendrían y que les daba pie a una mirada melancólica y aventurera, Boards Of Anada imaginan un pasado que nunca existió y que, por tanto, nunca les ha pertenecido. La supuesta nostalgia de una edad perdida que siempre ha sido un tema de discusión acerca de "Music has the right to children" (Warp, 98), por ejemplo, no es en absoluto real, sino imaginaria e idealizada. comenta Eoin con una sonrisa. Sandison va más lejos.

Boards Of Canada juegan con el tiempo. Sus temas los componen como quien cultiva viñedos y embotella vino: mimando su crecimiento, preocupándose por el sol y el buen aire, esperando al momento justo de envejecimiento para poder descargar todo el sabor. Ya desde el lejano "Twoism" (Music70, 95) y el magistral EP "Hl scores" (Skam, 96), un disco de Boards Of Canada parecía venir desde un pasado incierto y lejano; podía ser la edad media o los años ochenta, pero siempre era indistinguible y ancestral. "The campfire headphase" suena aún más viejo, según Sandison. Quienes han identificado a Boards Of Canada con un sonido pastoral y bucólico se dejan con esa definición la parte interesante del conjunto: la sombra, las voces espectrales, las atmósferas grises, la telaraña. reconoce Marcus.

Cada disco de Boards Of Canada es un color. "Hi scores" era azul marino, como aire fresco de la costa atlántica. "Music has the right to children" era verde turquesa, bello y rico, pero a la vez triste, y "Geogaddi" era un naranja atardecer, una mezcla entre calor y frío, como de tristeza por verse ir el sol mientras se contempla su belleza. "The campfire headphase" es entre amarillo y verde, como el trigo o como la arena. Dice Michael Sandison al respecto:

El nuevo disco, en efecto, suena acústico -con guitarras rasgueadas colocadas sobre samples de percusión real y ráfagas ambientales que son como aire caliente, tan electrónico como folk y dando lecciones incluso a Four Tet de cómo se innova y se maravilla en la folktrónica. Boards Of Canada asumen incluso una conexión con la Gran Bretaña mágica del folk de los setenta, con las referencias a vegetación y ligazones con el mito romántico. Una vez más, fuera del tiempo.

La Geometría del Emo

¿De dónde más viene la emoción que se palpa en cada segundo de Boards Of Canada? No es tan sólo una feliz entramado de melodías, ambientes y alusiones a la cara oculta del corazón. Debe haber algo más. Como padres de toda una generación de artistas electrónicos escoceses -Christ, Marcia Blaine School For Girls, Frog Pocket; los sellos Benbecula y Dalriada-, sería de imaginar que el país, el paisaje y el paisanaje tienen algo que ver. reconoce Sandison. prosigue Eoin,

Uno de los títulos más bellos de "Geogaddi" era el que decía music is math'. Un perfecto resumen de lo que son Boards Of Canada, una fusión de geometría y belleza, o belleza a partir de formas abstractas. Aseguran que hay una parte de ironía; sostienen que se resisten, según Eoin,

Esto último ya lo dijo Platón, y hace dos siglos ya lo defendía Beethoven; la idea del músico como médium. Pero, en cualquier caso, lo importante es que, venga de donde venga, la música existe y está al alcance de nuestros oídos. Es mejor no escrutar más de la cuenta, porque no hay respuestas, y la búsqueda de las mismas nos podrían volver locos. Nos podríamos convertir en un personaje de Lovecraft. Un disco de Boards Of Canada es un puzzle infinito de referencias, sensaciones y mensajes. A quienes no comprendieron la pasada referencia en estas páginas a "Music has the right to children" como una caca de perro -hay una cosa que se llama hipérbole y otra que se llama ironía, chicos-, habrá que decirlo en cristiano: Boards Of Canada es la materia de la que están hechos los sueños. Y maldito sea el que intente despertarnos.

Cuatro mitos sobre Boards of Canada

Texto Javier Blánquez

Los fans somos lo peor, pero a la vez hemos -han, mejor dicho- elevado a Boards Of Canada al estatus de culto gracias a una situación de poder que no muchos grupos consiguen garantizar a sus seguidores: la impotencia. Boards Of Canada es uno de esos pocos nombres de los que es imposible tenerlo todo -ni siquiera en formato MP3, para quienes rastrean rarezas en el pájaro o en la mula-, y mucho menos saberlo todo. No se puede porque no dejan. El misterio en el que siguen envueltos, especialmente su pasado y sus intenciones, ha dado pie a una serie de mitos, especulaciones y comportamientos excéntricos que Sandison y Eoin han aceptado aclarar por propia iniciativa. Ha llegado el momento. ¿Listos?

1 ¿Existe Realmente Todo el Material Previo a "Twoism"?

La discografía oficial de BoC no comienza con el "Hi scores Ep" en Skam, sino mucho antes. El listado de referencias de Music70 incluye un álbum previo incluso a "Music has the right to children" -"BoC maxima" (96), limitado a cincuenta copias en CD y algunas menos en cinta; la mayor parte del material fue regrabado y reciclado posteriormente para el debut en Warp- y una serie de EPs de los que nadie ha tenido nunca noticia y de cuya autenticidad -las filtraciones en la red siempre han sido incompletas, muchos temas extractados y robados de las cortinillas de la web oficial del dúo- nunca se ha podido dar plena garantía. ¿Ha existido alguna vez algo titulado "Closes volume 1", o "Hopper bay", o el tan sugerente "Acid memories"? asegura Sandison. continúa Eoin, Ahora, un consuelo para los fans: aparte de un EP para el 2006, el plan más ambicioso de Boards Of Canada para el futuro es editar una caja con una amplia selección del material comprendido entre 1987 y 1995. "Quizá lo hagamos con Warp". Por favor.

2 ¿Por qué no Tocan Nunca en Directo?

De Boards Of Canada se recuerdan sólo tres conciertos: uno en la fiesta del décimo aniversario de Warp, otro en Escocia en un paraje natural y un tercero en una antigua edición del festival All Tomorrow's Parties y bajo previa petición de los chicos de Autechre. Desde entonces, nada. Pero ese silencio escénico va a cambiar, como mínimo el año que viene. confirma Sandison, iQue vengan, que vengan!

3 ¿ Incluyen Boards of Canada Mensajes Satánicos en sus Temas??

Los hechos: "Geogaddi" dura exactamente 66 minutos y 6 segundos -el número de la bestia-, y uno de sus temas se titula "Devil's in the details". El tema "Amo Bishop Roden" alude a una de las víctimas de la carnicería de Waco, cuando la secta de los Davidianos dirigida por David Koresh cometió suicidio colectivo antes de la entrada por la fuerza del FBI en la granja en la que se concentraban; escuchando con atención algunos tracks aparecen voces que deben reproducirse al revés, o parecen psicofonías; "Sixtyten", en "Music has the right to childen", incluye una serie de números recitados por una voz de niño que algunos fans, como si estuvieran interpretando la cábala, han intuido que esconden algún significado o mensaje secreto, como si fueran los números de "Perdidos"-ya saben, 4 8 15 16 23 42. explica Michael Sandison. según Eoin.

4 ¿Están locos sus fans?

Los fans de Boards Of Canada hacen cosas que, por ejemplo, nunca haría un fan de The Sean And Cake o Rocío Jurado. Antes de la salida de "The campfire headphase", hasta tres versiones distintas circulaban por Soulseek, y las tres eran falsificaciones, discos de fans imitadores que, aprovechando la coyuntura y las mínimas informaciones facilitadas del disco -número de temas, títulos- colgaron su música en internet para suplantar a los auténticos Boards Of Canada. cuenta Marcus, También hay fans que se inventan críticas, como el responsable del blog Angryrobot, que publicó un comentario tema a tema del disco absolutamente inventado al que respondieron con sus posts otros fans que destaparon el pastel e incluso un impersonator de Marcus Eoin que le decía cara a cara a Angryrobot que su crítica era falsa. asegura Marcus. . Muchos fans de Boards Of Canada creen firmemente que existe un maxi del 2002 titulado "Lavender trapezoids", pero eso que circula por Soulseek es, en realidad, un EP del productor IDM inglés CiM. Y así hasta el infinito. Pero si en algo se demuestra que los fans más fans de Boards están mal de la azotea es en los precios que se pueden llegar a pagar por algunos de sus discos. Hace dos meses se puso a subasta en eBay un test pressing en vinilo azul y por una solacara de cuatro canciones de "Geogaddi". Lo subastó un tal 'amtiskaw', y lo compró un tal 'lenapiem' por 215 libras (unos 315 euros). dice Michael Sandison entre risas. Un tipo que, hace poco, y sin pestañear, se gastó 70 libras en el primer maxi de Jega y 120 en el primero de Bola, ambos editados por Skam, el sello en el que se dieron a conocer Boards Of Canada tras ser fichados por Autechre. Sí, hay fans que están muy mal o es que les sobra el dinero. O es que Boards Of Canada son tan grandes que no hay más remedio que enloquecer por ellos.

What Dreams Are Made Of

Text: Javier Blanquez

Photographs: Peter Iain Campbell

[English translation contributed by a reader of this site, who hopes that anyone who sees where it can be improved or corrected will go ahead and make the needed changes.]

We are not going to find out just now why Boards of Canada is an essential group and a luminary for those who listen to music - we could add "electronic", but it would be irrelevant; they are already above genres. For seven years and three records, their dreamlike atmospheres and their melodies able to grab you like the proverbial hook (? translation uncertain), have been the accompaniment to our nights and our days. And every time a new album is delayed we notice that void in the stomach, typical of love or abandonment. Since we need them, they have finally thrown us a scrap and have released a third album, sandy and austere: "The campfire headphase". A new mystery that has brought us to their very own Scotland in search of answers.

In a Beautiful Place out in the City

"I thought you were phantoms, that you didn't really exist". It's not the best thing I could have said on first meeting two people whose records are like the air that we have breathed all our lives, but it's how the conversation began. There was no other way. They smile, as if to say "well, here we are". They are normal, they look like anyone else, with an urban style, baggy clothes and bold colours; they wear rings on their fingers, wet-look hair gel, two days' growth of beard, perfectly sculpted. They are neither monks nor ghosts. They are ordinary people, with the difference that they record for Warp and others don't. Where are we? What are Boards of Canada doing here? Outside it's raining and the ground glimmers with the night dew of streetlights as darkness falls. It's nice inside and horrible music is playing; it's an Edinburgh cafeteria with springy sofas, and Michael Sandison, on the right, and Marcus Eoin, on the left, are here in the flesh while they drink tea with milk and organic juice.

says Sandison to justify an almost ascetic isolation that has kept them in the half-shadows, semi-anonymous, for more than a decade. Eoin goes on, Yes, the mysterious Boards of Canada are no longer hiding themselves away. They are real and they have decided to grant one of those very rare interviews that they give face-to-face to explain what they need to about the mystery that seems to surround their life and work and, of course, to explain the details of "The campfire headphase" (Warp / PIAS, 05), their third album in eight years and a subtle change of direction to a musical style that, if they had earlier pivoted around abstract electronica, sepia-toned hip-hop and dream melodies, is now more of the same - and equally sublime in its key moments - but with that element of earthy ivy-clad folk that had already come to the fore in the most opaque corners of the fascinating "Geogaddi" (Warp, 02). Indeed, if anything has been a constant in the music of Boards of Canada in the last fifteen years - remember that Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin have been making music from the start of the last decade, releasing cassettes in very limited editions on their now inactive Music70 label - it's a mossy and turquoise-hued psychedelia, legacy of the old English folk music from the early seventies and layered with electronics that always seek to sound old, like a keepsake that turns up after thirty years at the bottom of a trunk. continues Michael,

Anyone who has listened to Boards of Canada, even just once and without getting deeply into it, will understand perfectly what Michael Sandison is saying. All the work that came before "The campfire headphase" was preceded by a search for a specific marked-out space, a wide space in which things happen, air flows or the sun enters, and time seems to stay frozen, static, covered in dust: it is in this very seclusion that the essence of Boards of Canada appears: the feelings, the memories, the darkness and the shadows, flashes of deja vu for things that never happened. One listens to Boards of Canada and feels like the child who is climbing the wooden ladder, going up to the attic in his grandfather's house, and who finds, amid the cobwebs and the woodworm, a treasure-store of yesteryear in the form of books, old stone disks and abandoned household utensils. To find out if they have managed to achieve this again with their third album, it will suffice simply to check out their two tracks "Peacock tail" and "Dayvan cowboy". And then you let out a sigh of relief, because the wait has, yet again, been worth it.

A Turquoise Past

As well as filling space, the music of Boards of Canada fills time. In their own way, these Scots are like the flip-side of Kraftwerk: if Ralf and Florian would like to recreate a future using machines, a future that they would never have and which would give them a melancholy and adventurous look, Boards of Canada imagine a past that never existed and which, as a result, they have never lost. The supposed nostalgia for a lost age that has always been a topic of discussion with "Music has the right to children" (Warp, 98), for example, is not at all real, but is imaginary and idealised. says Eoin with a smile. Sandison goes further. Boards Of Canada play games with time. They compose their tracks like someone who cultivates a vineyard and who bottles wine: carefully nurturing their development, worrying about the sun and good weather, and waiting for the perfect moment of maturity so the full flavour can be brought out. Already from the distant "Twoism" (Music70, 95) and the masterly "Hi scores" (Skam, 96) a Boards of Canada record seems to come from a remote and uncertain past: it could be the Middle Ages or the Eighties, but it was always indistinguishable and ancestral. "The campfire headphase" sounds even older, according to Sandison. Those who label the sound of Boards Of Canada "pastoral and bucolic" leave out, in doing so, the interesting part of the whole: the shadows, the spectral voices, the grey atmospheres, the cobwebs. admits Marcus. Each Boards of Canada album is a colour. "Hi scores" was aquamarine, like the open air on the Atlantic shore. "Music has the right to children" was turquoise, rich and beautiful, but also sad, and "Geogaddi" was sunset orange, mingling heat and cold, like sadness at watching the sun go down while you contemplate its beauty. "The campfire headphase" is something between yellow and green, like wheat or sand. On this subject Michael Sandison says:

The new record indeed sounds acoustic - with strummed guitars layered over samples of real percussion and snatches of ambient sound that are like hot air, as much electronic as folk and giving even Four Tet lessons on how to innovate and to marvel at folktronica. Boards of Canada have even taken on a connection with the magical Great Britain of seventies folk music, with references to vegetation and links to romantic myth. Once again, outside of time.

The Geometry of Emo

Where does the emotion come from that can be felt in every second of Boards of Canada? It is not just a happy marriage of melody, ambience and allusions to the hidden side of the heart. There must be more to it. As parents to a whole generation of Scottish electronic artists - Christ., Marcia Blaine School For Girls, Frog Pocket, the Benbecula and Dalriada labels - I'd like to think that the country, the landscape, and the people in it have got something to do with it. acknowledges Sandison. adds Eoin,

One of the most beautiful tracks of "Geogaddi" was the one that says that 'music is math'. A perfect summary of what Boards of Canada are, a fusion of geometry and beauty, or beauty from abstract forms. They assure us that that there is a touch of irony; but, according to Eoin, they maintain that they resist believing that music is only that; it's a contradictory title, because music really is maths, as Pythagoras showed, but I believe that there is a fundamental question: do we invent music or are we channelling something that already exists? Because if music is just emotion then it can only come from within one, but if it is maths, then it exists in some place, it is a simple statistical combination, and what the artist is doing is transporting the music from one place to another. The contradiction is that we also believe that last point, that a Boards of Canada record already physically exists in some other place and that we have picked up a signal. We like to think that there are radio stations out there that are broadcasting infinite melodies into the ether. It's the big question: we will never know whether we invent music or recognise it.

Plato made that same point, and Beethoven defended it two centuries ago; the idea of the musician as a medium. But, in any case, what matters most is that, wherever it comes from, music exists and is available for us to hear. It's better not to look into the matter too deeply, because there are no answers, and searching for them could drive us mad. We could end up like one of Lovecraft's characters. A Boards of Canada album is an infinite puzzle of references, feeling and messages. To those people who didn't understand the earlier reference in these pages to "Music has the right to children" as a dog poop - guys, there's this thing called hyperbole, and there's another one called irony - but to put it quite simply: Boards of Canada is what dreams are made of. And damned be anyone who tries to wake us up.

Four myths about Boards of Canada

Text: Javier Blánquez

We fans are the worst, but at the same time we - or more properly they - have elevated Boards of Canada to cult status thanks to a situation of power that not many groups manage to confer upon their followers: that of powerlessness. Boards of Canada is one of the few names for which it is impossible to have all their work - not even in MP3 format, for which they trawl for rarities on "the bird" [i.e., Soulseek] or on "the mule" [?eMule, which had many Spanish users] - far less to become familiar with it all. You can't because they don't let you. The mystery in which they remain shrouded, especially as regards their past and their motives, has given rise to a series of myths, speculations and weird behaviours that Sandison and Eoin have voluntarily agreed to clear up. The time has come. Are you ready?

1 Does all of the material before "Twoism" really exist?

The official discography of BoC does not start with the "Hi Scores" EP on Skam, but much earlier. The list of references on Music70 includes an album even earlier than "Music has the right to children" - "Boc Maxima" (96), limited to 50 copies on CD and fewer copies on tape; most of the material was later re-recorded and recycled for their Warp debut - and a series of EPs that no one knows anything about and whose authenticity - the leaks on the Internet have always been incomplete, many tracks lifted or pilfered from behind the curtains of the duo's official website - it has never been possible to guarantee fully. Was there ever something titled "Closes volume 1", or "Hooper bay", or the so evocatively-titled "Acid Memories"? maintains Sandison. continues Eoin, Now, some consolation for the fans: aside from an EP for 2006, Boards of Canada's most ambitious plan for the future is to release a box set with a wide selection of material covering the period 1987 to 1995. "Maybe we will do it with Warp". Yes, please!

2 Why don't you ever play live?

Of Boards of Canada only three concerts can be remembered: one for Warp's 10th anniversary party, one in a natural setting in Scotland, and a third at an old edition of the All Tomorrow's Parties festival and at the request of the lads from Autechre. Since then, nothing. But this silence from the stage is going to change, at least this coming year. confirms Sandison, Yeah, go for it!

3 Do Boards of Canada include Satanic messages in their tracks?

The facts: "Geogaddi" is exactly 66 minutes 6 seconds long - the Number of the Beast - and one of its tracks is titled "The Devil Is In The Details". The track " Amo Bishop Roden" refers to one of the victims [translator's note: she was not in fact present - see link just given] in the carnage of Waco, when the Davidian sect led by David Koresh committed mass suicide before the FBI stormed the compound in which they were gathered. Listening carefully to some tracks reveals voices that should be played backwards, or which seem like psychophonies [ = recordings supposedly of the spirit world]; "Sixtyten", in "Music has the right to childen", includes a series of numbers recited by the voice of a child, which some fans, as though interpreting the Kaballah, have seen as having a hidden meaning or a secret message, as though they were the Numbers from the show "Lost" - you know, 4 8 15 16 23 42. explains Michael Sandison. according to Eoin.

4 Are your fans crazy?

Fans of Boards of Canada do things that, for example, a fan of The Sea and Cake or Rocío Jurado would never do. Before "The campfire headphase" was released, up to three different versions were circulating on Soulseek, and all three were fakes, put out by imitative fans who, taking advantage of the situation and the minimal information available about the release - the number of tracks, and the titles - uploaded their music to the Internet to pass themselves off as the real Boards of Canada. relates Marcus, There are also fans who make up reviews, like the one who runs the Angryrobot blog, who published a track-by-track rundown of the totally made-up record, to which others fans responded with their posts to lift the lid on the situation, and even a Marcus Eoin impersonator who told Angryrobot face to face that his review was a lie. insists Marcus. Many fans of Boards of Canada are firmly convinced that there was a Maxi single from 2002 called "Lavender trapezoids", but what is going around on Soulseek is in fact an EP by the English IDM producer CiM. And so on, ad infinitum. But if anything shows that the most extreme fans of Boards of Canada are out of their minds, it's the prices that they can bring themselves to pay for some of their records. Two months ago a single-sided blue-vinyl test pressing with four songs from "Geogaddi" was auctioned on eBay. It was listed there by a certain 'amtiskaw' and it was bought for £215 (about 315 Euros) by someone calling themselves 'lenapiem' . says Michael Sandison with laughter. The kind who, not so long ago, and without the slightest qualm, paid £70 for the first Maxi by Jega, and £120 for the first one by Bola, both released on Skam, the label on which Boards of Canada came to be known after being signed up by Autechre. Yes, some fans are horrible, or have wads of cash to spare. Or Boards of Canada are so great that you just can't help but be driven crazy by them.

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O Brothers Where Art Thou

title	O Brothers Where Art Thou
author	Heiko Hoffmann
publication	Groove
date	2005/11
issue	97 (Nov/Dec)
pages	20-24

O Brothers Where Art Thou was an interview (in German) by Heiko Hoffmann originally published November 2005 in Groove magazine Number 97 (November/December).

Über kaum eine Band, die so erfolgreich ist, ist so wenig bekannt, wie über Boards Of Canada. In einem seltenen Interview melden sich die beiden Schotten Mike Sandison und Marucs Eoin anlässlich ihres Albums The Campfire Headphase nach fast vier Jahren zurück und sprechen über ihre missverstandene letzte Platte, die Schwierigkeit, sich unter Erwartungsdruck weiterzuentwickeln und ihre Nostalgie-getränkte Electronica. Und überraschen gleich zu Beginn mit einem Outing.

Text: Heiko Hoffmann, Foto: Peter Iain Campbell

Mike Sandison guckt leicht irritiert. Er redet, aber scheint an etwas anderes zu denken. Er guckt Marcus Eoin an. Zögert. Dann bittet er, das Aufnahmegerät für einen Moment auszuschalten und fragt Marcus, ob es ok sei darüber zu sprechen. Das Interview läuft erst seit wenigen Minuten. Es ist das erste Gespräch das Boards Of Canada mit einem deutschen Journalisten führen, seit sie vor sieben Jahren ihr Debütalbum Music Has The Right To Children veröffentlicht haben. Und eigentlich läuft die Sache überraschend entspannt an. In der Cafeteria des Royal Museum in Edinburgh sitzen einem keine verstockten elektronischen Erdnuckel gegenüber wie man es befürchtet hatte – im Gegenteil. Mike Sandison und Marucs Eoin wirken sehr offen symphatisch und artikuliert. Doch dann wird man plötzlich gebeten, das Interview zu unterbrechen, nur weil man nochmal bei der Standardfrage nachhakt, wann sich die beiden überhaupt kennengelernt haben. Mike, der farblich passend zum hellblauen Kaputzenpulli nicht nur ein Basecap, sondern auch ein hellblaues Pflaster an der rechten Hand trägt, entschuldigt sich und erklärt:

Bisher hatten Mike und Marcus Sandison („Eoin“, der Nachname, den Marucs immer angeben hat, ist eigentlich sein zweiter Vorname) immer erzählt, sie hätten sich als Kinder angefreundet, weil ihr Eltern im gleichen Dorf an der Nordküste Schottlands wohnten. Nun also Brüder. Ihre Verwandtschaft haben sie bislang verborgen, so die beiden, weil sie zu Beginn ihrer Karriere Vergleiche zu dem Brüder-Duo Orbital vermeiden wollten. Und überhaupt hätte diese Information nur von dem eigentlich wichtigen abgelenkt: ihrer Musik. behauptet Mike, der mit 34 um zwei Jahre ältere der beiden Brüder.

Der ersten Überraschung folgt das Schulterzucken. Während Bands wie White Stripes oder Ween in der Vergangenheit vorspielten, Geschwister zu sein und damit gesteigerte Aufmerksamkeit auf sich zogen, ist es bei Boards Of Canada das Gegenteil. Doch die Überraschung hält sich in Grenzen, weil in der Öffentlichkeit die beiden Mitglieder stets nur als Einheit wahrgenommen wurden ohne als Individuen zu existieren. Da beide ausschließlich als Mitglieder von Boards Of Canada in Erscheinung treten und sie in ihrer Musik keine eindeutig unterscheidbaren Rollen ausüben (anders als das zum Beispiel bei anderen Geschwister-Bands wie den Sparks, Oasis oder gar den Jackson 5 der Fall ist), ist es kaum von Bedeutung in welchem Verhältnis die beiden zueinander stehen.

Beeinflusst von EBM- und Industrial-Gruppen wie Nitzer Ebb, Front 242 und Test Department, von Folk-Musikern wie der ebenfalls aus Schottland stammenden Incredible String Band oder Joni Mitchell, sowie den ätherisch klingenden Rock-Gruppen Cocteau Twins und My Bloody Valentine machen die Brüder Sandison seit 1989, in verschiedenen Line-Ups, als Boards Of Canada Musik. Namensgebend waren die öffentlich-rechtlichen Erziehungs- und Natur-TV-Filme des National Film Board Of Canada, die im Kindesalter einen bleibenden Eindruck auf die Beiden hinterließen.

Um die Sandisons herum entstand das lose Künstlerkollektiv Hexagon Sun, das neben Musik auch Filme machte und Vollmondparties in Burgruinen und Wäldern veranstaltete. 1996 verschickten sie Demotapes, die noch als Trio (das dritte Mitglied sollte unter dem Namen Christ Jahre später auf dem Edinburgher Label Benbecula Platten veröffentlichen) entstanden, an die Labels Warp, Rephlex und Skam. Das von Autechre betriebene Skam-Label meldete sich als einziges zurück und veröffentlichte in Kleinstauflage und zum Teil in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Funkstörung-Label Musik Aus Strom in Kleinstauflage eine Reihe von vielbeachteten Singles, sowie das Minialbum „Hi Scores“, das gerade zeitgleich mit dem Erscheinen des neuen Albums wieder aufgelegt wurde. Rückblickend erscheint diese Zeit als die einzige, in der man Boards Of Canada einer bestimmten Szene zurechnen konnte. Boards Of Canada spielten als Vorgruppe von Seefeel und Autechre, arbeiteten mit Funkstörungs Michael Fakesch zusammen und wurden schließlich konsequenter Weise doch noch bei Warp unter Vertrag genommen.

Music Has The Right To Children, das 1998 veröffentlichte Debütalbum, markierte mit seiner sorgfältig zusammengefügten Nostalgie-Electronica nicht nur einen Meilenstein der elektronischen Musik, sondern wurde selbst von Rockmagazinen wie dem englischen Mojo, zu einem der wichtigsten Alben der 90er erklärt. Für Warp bedeutete es zudem den größten Überraschungserfolg der Labelgeschichte: Aus den ursprünglich 5.000 hergestellten Platten wurden mittlerweile mehr als 200.000 verkaufte Alben – was Boards Of Canada vermutlich zur erfolgreichsten Gruppe macht, die weder Singles oder Videos veröffentlicht, noch auf Tour geht. In den Folgejahren konnte man ihre charakteristsiche Mischung aus Kinderstimmen-Samples, Mono-Synthesizern und HipHop-Beats nicht nur auf unzähligen Electronica-Produktionen wieder finden, sondern ihr Sound hatte auch Einfluss auf die Musik von Air oder Radioheads Kid A-Album.

Campfire Headphase

Bereits als vor dreieinhalb Jahren das letzte Album Geogaddi erschien, kündigten Boards Of Canada an, dass die Nachfolge-Platte schon halb fertig sei. Doch erst jetzt erscheint mit The Campfire Headphase das neue Album. Dreieinhalb Jahre sind auch für die meisten anderen Musiker eine überdurchschnittlich lange Zeit für eine neue Platte, aber bei Mike und Marcus Sandison wird dieser Umstand verstärkt durch ihren übrigen Mangel an Output. Sieht man von drei Remixen für Boom Bip, Clouddead und zuletzt Beck einmal ab, ist in der Zwischenzeit kein einziger neuer Ton von Boards Of Canada erschienen und auch auf Konzerte verzichteten sie in der Zwischenzeit. Wie sonst vielleicht nur bei Kraftwerk fragt man sich, was Boards Of Canada den ganzen Tag über so machen. erklärt Mike. Beide Brüder wohnen nun in der Nähe von Edinburgh auf alten Bauernhöfen. Marcus in East Lothian an der Ostküste Schottlands, Mike in den Boarders an der Grenze zu England. Etwas mehr als ein Jahr haben beide tatsächlich mit der Fertigstellung der neuen Platte verbracht haben. Bis Juni haben sie täglich 12 bis 15 Stunden in einem ihrer beiden Heimstudios gearbeitet.

The Campfire Headphase ist wieder eine unverkennbare Boards Of Canada-Platte, jedoch mit einigen wesentlichen Neuerungen: Auf den bislang typischen Einsatz von Vocal-Samples wird diesmal verzichtet und die Stücke klingen klarer, einfacher und auch optimistischer als zuletzt auf Geogaddi. Auffallend ist auch die Verwendung von Streichern, Schlagzeug und vor allem leicht verstimmt klingende Gitarren, die mitunter an My Bloody Valentines „Loveless“ erinnern. Exemplarisch für diese Neuausrichtung ist der Track „Dayvan Cowboy“, der vorab auf Bleep.com veröffentlicht wurde. Nach einem langen, atmosphärischen Intro, während dem nicht viel zu passieren scheint, steigert sich das Stück zu einem für Boards Of Canada-Verhältnisse wilden Track voll Percussion, Streichern und Tremolo-Gitarren, der DJ Shadow und Sigur Ros gleichermaßen begeistern dürfte.

Der Teufel im Detail

Boards Of Canada leben mit dem Widerspruch, dass sie einerseits ziemlich zurückgezogene und öffentlichkeitsscheue Künstler sind, denen sämtliche Aktivitäten, die über ihre Produktionen hinausgehen, suspekt erscheinen, aber andererseits sehr – vielleicht zu sehr – auf die Außenwahrnehmung ihrer Veröffentlichungen bedacht sind. Ein wichtiger Grund, warum sich Mike und Marcus Sandison jetzt öffnen, ist sicher Geogaddi und die unerwarteten Folgen.

Auf ihrem zweiten Album schufen Boards Of Canada 2002 eine düstere Traumwelt, auf der es nicht nur musikalisch viel zu entdecken gab. Die Platte ist voll von, zum Teil versteckten, Anspielungen auf mathematische Gleichungen, heidnische Kunst und Okkultismus. Schon wenn man die CD einlegt, zeigt der Player eine Gesamtlaufzeit von 66 Minuten und 6 Sekunden an. Auf dem Track „The Devil Is In The Details“ etwa ist eine verlangsamte Frauenstimme zu hören, die sich in Selbsthynose spricht, dazu erklingt, was zunächst nach Gesangsfetzen klingt, sich dann aber als ein verzweifelt schreiendes Kind herausstellt. Desweiteren befindet sich in dem Stück ein Riff, dem Fibonaccis Goldener Schnitt als Kompositionsgrundlage dient. Auf „You Could Feel The Sky“ ist nach zwei Minuten und 13 Sekunden, während eine Kirchenglocke erklingt, im Hintergrund eine Stimme zu hören. Spielt man sie rückwärts ab sagt sie: „A God With Horns… A God With Hooves“ – womit niemand anders als der Teufel gemeint sein kann. Und all das, nachdem bereits die zuvor veröffentlichte EP „A Beautiful Place In The Country“, die auf den ersten Blick ein idyllisches Landleben preist, sich als Platte über die Sekte der Branch Davidianer herausstellt, die 1993 im amerikanischen Waco in einem Blutbad unterging.

In Internetforen und Newsgroups entwickelten Fans ein zum Teil obsessives Interesse an der Platte. Immer neue – tatsächliche wie mutmaßliche – versteckte Details der Platte wurden entdeckt. Die Gerüchteküche brodelte. Fortan gelten Boards Of Canada bei nicht Wenigen als Okkultisten. Wer weiß, vielleicht führten sie gar ihre eigene satanistische Sekte in der Abgeschiedenheit der Hügel von Schottland?

Die Nostalgie Der Speichermedien

Alle drei Boards Of Canada-Alben zeichnen sich durch ihren sorgfältigen und mitunter besessenen Umgang mit ihrer Klangbeschaffenheit aus. Typisch ist dabei das künstliche Ältermachen der Stücke. Mit zahlreichen Effekten versuchen Mike und Marc Sandison ihren Tracks eine fiktive Geschichte zu geben und sie soundästhetisch nach Aufnahmen aus einer bestimmten Zeit klingen zu lassen. Auf ihrem Debüt-Album dienten als klangliches Vorbild etwa die Dokumentar- und animierten Kurzfilme des National Film Boards Of Canada, die Ende der 70er und Anfang regelmäßig Oscars gewannen und auch in Deutschland gesendet wurden. Nicht zuletzt durch diese Bearbeitung wirkt ihre Musik oft sentimental und ruft Erinnerungen hervor, die sich verflüchtigen noch bevor man sie konkret benennen kann. Das hat nichts mit Retro zu tun. Boards Of Canada machen Musik wie sie nur heute entstehen kann, aber versehen sie in der Nachbearbeitung mit einem Klang, der auf die Zeit ihrer Kindheit verweist. erklärt Mike Sandison. Boards Of Canada gehören zu einer Generation, die der Wandel von analogen zu digitalen Speichermedien wesentlich geprägt hat – von Super 8-Filmen über VHS zu DVD, von Schallplatten über Kassetten und CDs zu Mp3s– was zu einer Nostalgie für die analogen Artifakte ihrer Kindheit führt. Von vergilbten Polaroid-Familienbildern, die sie auf ihren Covern zeigen, bis zu Vinylknistern und leiernden Tonbändern.

Das Interview ist vorbei. Durch den verregneten schottischen Herbstnachmittag geht es noch ein paar Ecken weiter zu einer Pizzeria. Mike und Marcus Sandison plaudern über ihre Pläne nach dem Studiomarathon der letzten Monate. Gerade erst mussten sie aus Termingründen das Remixangebot einer „sehr bekannten Synthie-Pop-Gruppe, die bald ein neues Album herausbringt“ ablehnen. Jetzt freuen sie sich darauf, Zeit mit den Familien zu verbringen, auf Snowboarden, Venedigbesuche, und darauf sich endlich mal ein Album von Four Tet anzuhören. Oder vielleicht doch auf Tour gehen? Pläne für eine Vierer-Band mit dem Bassisten von Ian Brown und aufwändigen Videoprojektionen gibt es zumindest. Und ein Angebot auf Zusammenarbeit ihrer alten Helden Cocteau Twins. Und sogar Solopläne.

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C'est La Ouate Qu'ils Préfèrent

title	C'est La Ouate Qu'ils Préfèrent
author	Joseph Ghosn
publication	Les Inrockuptibles
date	2005/11
issue	520
pages	52-54

"C'est La Ouate Qu'ils Préfèrent" was an interview (in French) by Joseph Ghosn originally published November 2005 in Les Inrockuptibles magazine Number 520 pp.52-54

C'est La Ouate Qu'ils Préfèrent 

Encore peu d'albums pour ce duo mais déjà une influence écrasante sur la musique électronique. Eux puisent leur inspiration chez Brian Eno et Neil Young. Rencontre en Ecosse avec un groupe discret.

Par Joseph Ghosn

'"Qui est ce type qui a l'air très connu en France ... ? Michel Polnareff ?"' Voilà la question que posent d'emblée les Boards Of Ca¬nada, comme pour dire que, non, on ne va pas passer notre temps à parler de musique électronique. Michel Polnareff, donc, est bien la porte d'entrée inattendue dans l'univers de ce duo écossais qui, au cours des dix dernières années, s'est taillé une réputation avoisinant le mythe, débordant de légendes, de racontars et de ragots, dont la plupart sont nés dans les nombreux forums et webzines consacrés aux arcanes de l'electronica sur le Net. Dans ces officines virtuelles, Boards Of Canada est l'icône la plus vénérée : en une petite poignée de disques, le groupe a réussi à créer un son, à imposer une esthétique qui a été incroyablement pillée, copiée, piratée. Dans l'histoire récente de la pop, il n'y a pas de groupe qui soit aussi confidentiel et discret tout en étant aussi influent.

Dès sa sortie, en 1998, Music Has the Right to Children, le premier album du groupe, est considéré comme un disque essentiel, parent des excursions atmosphériques de Brian Eno, mais aussi du rock psychédélique millésimé années 60, du hip-hop des années 80, dont les rythmiques ralenties sont une des sources d'inspiration des Ecossais, et de la techno des années 90, qu'ils éloignent de l'abstraction, imposant d'élégantes narrations et circonvolutions entêtantes, hypnotiques et élégiaques.

Entre 1987 et 1996, plusieurs cassettes, désormais rarissimes, avaient déjà été éditées par le groupe : Acid Memories, Play by Numbers, A Few Old Tunes Vol.1 & et Vol.2, Boc Maxima ... Autant d'artefacts dont on ne trouve plus guère de traces, sinon sur des sites officieux, le groupe ayant retiré de son site officiel la liste exhaustive de ses œuvres pour ne pas attiser la convoitise des fans. Au total, toutes ces premières ébauches d'albums contiennent près de cent cinquante morceaux, dont la quintessence a servi de matière première pour l'élaboration de Music Has the Right to Children.

Entre cet album et son successeur Geogaddi, sorti en 2002 (tous deux vendus à plus de 200 000 exemplaires - une réussite commerciale impressionnante pour un groupe aussi secret et pour le label indépendant Warp), quatre ans se sont écoulés, à peine comblés par la sortie de In a Beautiful Place out in the Country, disque comportant quatre titres à la beauté pastorale inquiète. Quatre années de quasi-silence donc, durant lesquelles Boards Of Canada a gagné une réputation de reclus, amplifiée par le fait que les rares interviews accordées à la presse étaient obligatoirement données par courrier électronique.

rock electro rap • Rencontre en Ecosse avec Boards Of Canada

Trois ans plus tard, l'étonnement est donc à son comble lorsque les deux musiciens décident de recevoir à Edimbourg, comme s'ils prenaient enfin acte de l'impossibilité de leur isolement et de l'extension inattendue de l'influence de leur musique. Désormais, ils reçoivent des lettres de fans en permanence, de pays où leurs disques ne sont même pas vendus, et c'est peut-être ça qui les a décidés à sortir au grand jour, pour éviter sans doute qu'on parle à leur place et qu'ils ne deviennent des objets de fantasme plutôt que des musiciens, qu'on s'intéresse à leurs secrets plutôt qu'à leur production.

En arrivant à Edimbourg, belle pièce d'antiquité gothique, on s'attend à tout sauf à rencontrer des musiciens bavards, généreux de leur parole et de leur temps. Or, c'est précisément ce que sont Michael Sandison et Marcus Eoin : deux trentenaires attentifs et sensibles, qui ont vraiment grandi au Canada, où leurs parents sont partis travailler, et viennent de dévoiler qu'ils sont en fait frères.

explique Mike Sandison. Implicitement, le projet même de Boards Of Canada consiste donc en partie à saisir ces précieuses mélodies qui hantent le cerveau du musicien et à tenter de les restituer au sein de vignettes impeccablement troussées, délicatement émaillées.

Pourtant; malgré leur envie de parler, les deux Ecossais sont loin de tout révéler de leurs vies ou méthodes de travail, et ferment toujours la porte de leur domicile et de leur studio : ils en possèdent d'ailleurs chacun un - les deux derniers titres du nouvel album, si semblables et formant une suite logique, ont ainsi été réalisés séparément.

Leur voiture, par contre, n'est pas un terrain interdit : on y parcourt la ville à la recherche d'un endroit pour boire et parler au calme. Tout en faisant ainsi un petit tour d'Edimbourg, on y découvre que Mike et Marcus aiment écouter les Buzzcocks et Will Oldham. Plus tard, ils avoueront que les influences majeures de leur nouvel album n'ont rien d'électronique mais sont plutôt ancrées au début des années 70 : les albums de Joni Mitchell, James Taylor ou Neil Young sont ainsi les étonnantes figures tutélaires de leurs morceaux les plus récents.

Pour autant, le son du groupe ne s'est pas entièrement métamorphosé, ne s'est pas mué en une suite de comptines jazzy, de vignettes folk ou d'excursions rock. Au contraire, dès les premières notes, les marques de fabrique du groupe s'imposent immédiatement, créant un très ambivalent sentiment de familiarité, comme si l'on regardait de vieux films en super-B, qui font d'abord croire qu'on est là en terrain plus que connu, que ce n'est pas la peine d'avancer davantage.

L'erreur, bien sûr, serait de s'arrêter à ces impressions de déjà-vu. Car The Campfire Headphase va au-delà des autres albums de Boards Of Canada, au-delà de beaucoup d'autres albums sortis en 2005.

Effectivement, Boards Of Canada a ajouté à ses habituels filtres et structures électroniques des guitares et des percussions, qui donnent à l'ensemble un air d'architecture ancrée dans une terre aux fondations stables mais en même temps étrangement mouvantes. Il y a ainsi beaucoup de fragilité dans cette musique, qui semble toujours en équilibre entre le sommeil et l'éveil, forme un cocon aquatique qui plonge son auditeur dans un univers de rêverie vaguement mélancolique, mais toujours réconfortante.

The Campfire Headphase s'écoute ainsi comme si l'on regardait un croisement entre des films de Hou Hsiao-hsien et de Wes Anderson, faussement délétères et dont les atmosphères imprègnent durablement la rétine, les oreilles. Autant d'impressions et de sensations qui, imperceptiblement, modifient la manière dont on écoute la musique et affectent surtout la perception de la vie en train de se tisser, doucement, délicatement.

The Campfire Headphase (Warp/Pias).

It's The Wadding They Prefer

Few albums for this duo, but already an overwhelming influence on electronic music. They draw their inspiration from Brian Eno and Neil Young. Meeting in Scotland with a discreet group.

By Joseph Ghosn

That's the question Boards Of Canada immediately ask, as if to say that no, we're not going to spend our time talking about electronic music. So, Michel Polnareff is indeed the unexpected entry point into the universe of this Scottish duo which, over the past ten years, has built a reputation bordering on myth, overflowing with legends, rumors, and gossip, most of which originated in the many forums and webzines dedicated to the arcane electronica on the Internet. In these virtual workshops, Boards Of Canada is the most revered icon: with just a handful of records, the group has managed to create a sound, impose an aesthetic that has been incredibly plundered, copied, pirated. In recent pop history, there is no group as confidential and discreet while being so influential.

From its release in 1998, Music has the Right to Children, the group's first album, was considered an essential record, a kin of Brian Eno's atmospheric excursions, but also of the vintage 60s psychedelic rock, the 80s hip-hop whose slowed-down rhythms are one of the sources of inspiration for the Scots, and 90s techno, which they distance from abstraction, imposing elegant narratives and haunting, hypnotic, elegiac convolutions.

Between 1987 and 1996, several cassettes, now extremely rare, had already been released by the group: Acid Memories, Play by Numbers, A Few Old Tunes Vol.1 & Vol.2, Boc Maxima... All artifacts barely traceable except on unofficial sites, the group having removed the exhaustive list of their works from their official website to avoid stirring up fan covetousness. In total, all these early album drafts contain nearly one hundred and fifty tracks, the quintessence of which served as raw material for the development of Music has the Right to Children.

Between this album and its successor Geogaddi, released in 2002 (both sold over 200,000 copies - an impressive commercial success for such a secretive group and for the independent label Warp), four years passed, barely filled by the release of In a Beautiful Place out in the Country, a record featuring four tracks of uneasy pastoral beauty. Four years of near silence, during which Boards Of Canada earned a reputation as recluses, amplified by the fact that the rare interviews given to the press were necessarily conducted via email.

electro rock rap • Meeting in Scotland with Boards Of Canada

Three years later, the amazement is therefore at its peak when the two musicians decide to meet in Edinburgh, as if finally acknowledging the impossibility of their isolation and the unexpected extension of their music's influence. They now receive fan letters constantly, from countries where their records aren't even sold, and perhaps that's what prompted them to come out, to avoid being spoken for and becoming objects of fantasy rather than musicians, to focus interest on their secrets rather than their production.

Arriving in Edinburgh, a beautiful piece of Gothic antiquity, one expects anything but to meet talkative musicians, generous with their words and time. Yet, that's precisely what Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin are: two attentive and sensitive thirty-somethings who indeed grew up in Canada, where their parents went to work, and have just revealed they are actually brothers.

, explains Mike Sandison.

Implicitly, the very project of Boards Of Canada consists in part of capturing these precious melodies haunting the musician's brain and attempting to render them within impeccably crafted, delicately enameled vignettes.

However, despite their willingness to talk, the two Scots are far from revealing everything about their lives or work methods, always closing the door of their home and studio: each has one - the last two tracks of the new album, though similar and forming a logical sequence, were created separately.

Their car, on the other hand, is not off-limits: we roam the city looking for a place to drink and talk calmly. During this little tour of Edinburgh, we discover that Mike and Marcus love listening to the Buzzcocks and Will Oldham. Later, they will confess that the major influences on their new album are not electronic but rather rooted in the early 70s: albums by Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, or Neil Young are thus the surprising guiding figures of their most recent tracks.

Nevertheless, the group's sound hasn't entirely metamorphosed, hasn't turned into a series of jazzy lullabies, folk vignettes, or rock excursions. On the contrary, from the first notes, the group's trademarks immediately impose themselves, creating a very ambivalent feeling of familiarity, as if watching old super-8 films, making one initially believe they are in well-known territory, with no need to venture further.

The mistake, of course, would be to stop at these déjà-vu impressions. For The Campfire Headphase goes beyond other Boards Of Canada albums, beyond many other albums released in 2005.

Indeed, Boards Of Canada has added to their usual electronic filters and structures guitars and percussion, giving the whole a sense of architecture anchored in solid foundations but at the same time strangely shifting. There is thus a lot of fragility in this music, which always seems balanced between sleep and wakefulness, forming an aquatic cocoon that immerses the listener in a universe of vaguely melancholic but always comforting reverie.

The Campfire Headphase thus listens as if watching a cross between films by Hou Hsiao-hsien and Wes Anderson, deceptively deleterious and whose atmospheres linger on the retina and ears. So many impressions and sensations that imperceptibly change the way one listens to music and especially affect the perception of life being woven, gently, delicately.

The Campfire Headphase (Warp/Pias).

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Scotland's Greatest Mystery

title	Scotland's Greatest Mystery
author	Akiho Ishii
publication	Loud
date	2005/11
issue	131
pages	32-35

"Scotland's Greatest Mystery" was an interview (in Japanese) by Akiho Ishii originally published November 2005 in Loud Magazine Number 131 pp.32-35

Scotland's Greatest Mystery

Note: The original magazine was scanned to PDF. That PDF was sent to an online OCR tool to be converted to Japanese character text. The resulting text was translated on a basic level by Google Translate. That translation has been rewritten and interpreted into proper English by Toni Lanov.

From Scotland, two musicians, two artists. The group consists of Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin. Their seminal album, Music Has The Right To Children bought with it new horizons for electronic music. Their second LP, Geogaddi expanded these horizons further, and finally we have the newly released The Campfire Headphase - an Album which feels like it is the product of an eclectic catalogue of influence consisting of The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix on one side, and My Bloody Valentine on the other whilst still being deeply rooted in within their realm of electronic music.

The tone and sounds are introverted, calm, expansive and sometimes in direct contrast to previous releases. It feels as if we are constantly searching for an aural representation of the textures and feelings we experience daily, something that Boards of Canada deliver with subtlety and precision. In this interview I try to gain a better insight into the sounds they create and the minds of the artists who convey them.

"I believe that I can escape the daily routine of life by creating music that will invite me into an imaginary place, a place where one can think of the more creative and surreal elements of reality" - Marcus Eoin

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The Last Secret of Pop

title	The Last Secret of Pop
author	Koen Poolman
publication	OOR
date	2005/11
issue	10
pages

"The Last Secret of Pop" (original text in Dutch) by Koen Poolman. ISSN 0921-1616

Invloeden

Laptopmuzikanten hebben het maar makkelijk: 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 duidelijk de behoefte om belde wegen in te slaan,' bekent Mike. 'Iedere 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 klassiek 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, Autechre, My Bloody Valentine, Talk Talk, Stevie Wonder, Radiohead, Bibio, Fennesz, Alias, Boom Bip, cLOUDDEAD, Odd Nosdam, William Basinski'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 geïnspireerd hebben.' Waar ze beslist niet naar luisteren: folktronica, technopuristen en 'al die honderen Autechre-klonen zonder ideeën van zichzelf.'

door Koen Poolman

Laten we bij het eind beginnen: 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 Thom 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 verkochte cd's Aphex Twin en Nightmares On Wax de bestsellers in de experimentele Warp-catalogus -- talloze bands en producers hebben geïnspireerd.

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 zich 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 folky 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. 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 titels, artwork, samples, de lengte van de tracks, her aantal tracks, in talloze achterwaarts afgespeelde stemmen, zelfs in heuse audio palindromen: zinnetjes die voor- en achterwaarts afgespeeld identiek zijn. "The Devil Is In The Details" heette een van de nummers van Geogaddi. De cd telde 23 tracks (een mystiek getal voor occultisten), duurde 66 minuten en 6 seconden en was 666 Mb groot. Bijrollen: David Koresh, leider 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 woongemeenschap in de bossen van de Schotse Pentland Hills, onder Edinburgh, waar ze hun eigen studio hebben - kreeg 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. Een enigma.

Nu hebben ze dan eindelijk ingestemd met een face to face interview. Eén per land, twee uur lang. Ze hebben een hoop uit te leggen. Over hun nieuwe album The Campfire Headphase bijvoorbeeld, maar ook over de wilde verhalen die het mysterie Boards of Canada zijn gaan omgeven. Ze willen bewijzen dat ze 'ordinary blokes' zijn en geen 'magiërs die mensenoffers brengen op een bergtop.' De mythe heeft een loopje met ze genomen, beseft Mike. 'Als je zolang uit de media wegblijft, gaan de mensen vanzelf de gaten in je verhaal opvullen.' Mike is Michael Sandison, 34 jaar, vader van een dochtertje van één. Hij oogt vermoeid. Lijdt aan slapeloosheld en depressies. Draagt een zwarte een zwarte trui, spijkerboek en gympen. Baardje van een week. Onopvallend. Marcus Eoin (32) is knapper, sportiever ook. Hij blijkt een fervent 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. '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 nooit 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.'

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 begint te glinsteren, Met het licht reflecteert ook het beeld van een klassieke roadtrip door het oude Amerika, kriskras door de tijd. Titels als "Dayvan Cowboy, "'84 Pontiac Dream" en "Ataronchronon" (een oude indianenstam) verraden iets van de bedoeling. '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.

Twoism (1995, reissue 2002) In eigen beheer uitgebracht 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. Hi Scores (1996) Mini-lp voor Skam. De eerste zes nummers die normaal verkrijgbaar 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). 

Music Has The Right To Children (1998) Debuut voor Warp. Bij verschijnen nauwelijks opgemerkt, nu een klassieker bunnen de elektronische muziek en het vertrekpunt voor subgenres als indietronica en folktronica. De plaat met de kinderstemmetjes. Ze praten en tellen 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 eigenlijk 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.' 

In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country (2000) 'Come and live with us... in a religious community in a beautiful place out in the country.' Een uitnodiging 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 sektelid. Haar beeltenis prijkt 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. 

Geogaddi (2002) Inktzwarte plaat. Duister, sinister, bijna duivels. Maar toch ook weer heel melodieus en organisch. Barstensvol geheime boodschappen, verwijzingen, mathematische concepten en getallensymboliek.  "Music Is Math" vergondigen ze aan het begin. In "1969" duiken de Branch Davidians weer 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. "You Could Feel the Sky" hoor je ineens '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 nachtmerrie. 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 gedetailleerder wordt naarmate je er dieper ingaat.' 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. 

The Campfire Headphase (2005) 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. Gedroomde 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. 

Het is een droom, je ben écht die cowboy. Totdat de muziek ineens overgaat, zoals in "'84 Pontiac Dream". Je ontwaakt, je hoort stemmem om je heen, de regen komt met bakken uit de hemel, 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 voltrok 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.' "Sherbet Head", zo'n miniatuurtje waarvan Boards of Canada er meer heeft, en vaak hele mooie, verwoordt de psychedelische 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 tegenhanger; de good trip.

Geogaddi eindigde 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 iets 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. Mike vertelt: "Farewell Fire" is Marcus op keyboards, meer niet. Hij heeft het in één nachtelijke sessie gemaakt. Er zitten momenten in dat het hapert 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 elektronisch stuk, het klinkt heel menselijk, hartverscheurend. 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 zijn... en futuristisch [cynisch lachje]. 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.' Een synthlijn, licht Mike toe, wordt geschreven alsof 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 van compleet, maar zit barstensvol 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.'

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 helemaal 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. Het 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 opgenomen op het strand met de verrotste taperecorder die Marcus kon vinden. Hij heeft ook een digitale. Gebruikt ie zelden. De moldie van "Julie And Candy" (op Geogaddi) werd opgenomen met een paar fluiten en vervolgens eindeloos heen en weer gestuurd tussen de ingebouwde microfoons van twee tapedecks totdat er niets meer dan een luide, mistige galm, een soort misthoorn, overbleef. 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 synthetischer het klinkt, legt Marcus uit. Hun synthesizers zijn trouwens ook vintage: oude analoge modellen met knarsende en krakende geluiden.

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 herschrijven het, we negeren de loop die de geschiedenis heeft genomen. We gaan terug naar een bepaald moment in tijd en plaats en slaan dan een alternatieve 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?' De nineties, voor de goed orde, staan met hun schreeuwerige MTV-cultuur, hun ongebreidelde hedonisme en alsmaar verdergaande globalisatie voor alles wat fout is volgens het teruggetrokken levende duo. 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.'

Mike toont zich een groot bewonderaar van [wikipedia:Jeroen Bosch|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, spookachtige 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 er 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.' '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.' Marcus: 'Als je het moet uitleggen, is het geen kunst meer.'

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 circuleren de wildste theorieën en analyses over de inmiddels drie jaaroude plaat. Over David Koresh en zijn Branch Davidians, aan wie het nummer "1969" en 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').

Orbital? 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, Eoin. 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 Australië, 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 heb 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. Sindsdien zwegen ze. 

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. Al 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.' Op Geogaddi waren de 'dingetjes' ontsproten uit de donkerste krochten van hun ziel, op al hun andere platen kun je ze herleiden tot een 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 depressies,' bekent Mike, 'dan zoek ik altijd troost in mijn kinderjaren. Die weemoed is altijd aanwezig in onze muziek.' Eén ding wil hij nog over Geogaddi kwijt: 'Het was een project, It's its own thing. Een claustrofobische trip door een wereld vol paranoia en duisternis. Veel mensen verwarren de plaat met de mens. Wij zijn geen doemdenkers.' '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.'

'Nu, vier jaar later,' neemt Marcus 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 realiteit 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 iets hoopvols maken' 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 luchtbel 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.' Marcus: 'Zie het als een hulpmiddel. Een tijdmachine. Een privétijdmachine. Onze muziek werkt niet in de openbare ruimte, zij spreekt tot één luisteraar tegelijk. Het is muziek om in je eentje naar te luisteren. Om in weg te kruipen. We bieden je een veilige haven.' Mike: 'A place to go.' Dan realiseert Mike ineens iets: 'Nu ik er zo over nadenk, dit is iets wat wij als vanzelfsprekend 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 kledingwinkel 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.'

Terug naar de bossen 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 Eoin zijn broers. Eoin - speek uit: lan - is Marcus' tweede voornaam. Ze hebben het tien jaar lang geheimgehouden. Het doet 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.

Boards of Canada article, OOR, October 2005.

Influences

Laptop musicians have got it easy: They know exactly what they want and how to go and do it. Mike & Marcus drift to and fro between guitar and computer, acoustic and electronic, between old and new, folk and avant-garde. On their new lp The Campfire Headphase, they fuse melancholic guitars with chrome coloured beats and synths. "We clearly feel the need to go in both directions", confesses Mike. "Every day, our hearts are somewhere else." Their influences diverge from classical to hip-hop, and from the psychedelic folk of the 60's & 70's, to curious Native American rhythmic measures. They're both classically trained pianists and can play guitar. Out of the two, Mike is the better drummer, while Marcus's first instrument was playing bass in a band. During the two hours speaking to them, the following names were jotted: Julian Cope, Bob Dylan, The Pixies, Cocteau Twins, Phil Spector, Wim Wenders, H.R. Giger, The Polyphonic Spree, Sufjan Stephens, The Incredible String Band, Butterscotch Rum, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, John Denver, Joy Division, The New Scientist (magazine), Zabriskie Point, Hieronymus Bosch, Aphex Twin, Autechre, My Bloody Valentine, Talk Talk, Stevie Wonder, Radiohead, Bibio, Fennesz, Alias, Boom Bip, cLOUDDEAD, Odd Nasdam, William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops I-IV. "But", Mike adds at a certain moment, "I can give you a list of 40 names, and you still won't even have 1 percent of the people who have influenced us." What is certain is that they're not listening to 'folktronica', Techno purists and "all the hundreds of unoriginal Autechre clones who've got no ideas for themselves."

Interview

They've never talked with a Dutch journalist. In any case, they don't talk at all. Performed since their entry in 1998 an average of once every three years. Keeping that same tempo with their albums. They live and work, self-contained in the woods of the Scottish Pentland Hills. Boards of Canada: Music's last mystery. They've just added another chapter to their myth, The Campfire Headphase. Koen Poolman travelled to Scotland to meet his heroes...

By Koen Poolman

Let's begin at the end: The Radiohead question. Without Boards of Canada's Music Has The Right To Children [MHTRTC] (1998), Kid A (2000) would have sounded completely different, according to reports. Mike and Marcus hesitate - "I'd never dare say that", "as if they haven't made other fantastic albums", "maybe they'd been listening to Aphex and Autechre." No, that success they refuse to claim. That Thom Yorke is an admirer of their warm, brooding electronica is enough. They think that Kid A and Amnesiac are beautiful records. However, U2 also appear to be fans. That leaves them cold. They couldn't care less about fame. Fact is, MHTRTC and its follow-up Geogaddi - both sold more than 200,000 copies - after Aphex Twin and Nightmares On Wax, the best-sellers in Warp's experimental catalogue - countless bands and producers have been inspired.

It's that their records get better as time goes by. They belie the cliché of electronic music being cold, unemotional, mechanical, 80's science-fiction movie music for tomorrow's world. Here is a band who do their best to make their sound antique, rickety, damaged even, preferring memories of a carefree youth rather than dreaming of a life amongst robots. Guitars, flutes, aeolian harps, drums, percussion, analogue synths and portable tape-recorders chosen above the newest software. A continuous association of folky atmospheres which demands your attention and renounces perfection. Human music that is not inaccessible. No beating pulse, rather a lump in the throat. A slight falter. A tear.

And then: A shiver. You hear things you didn't notice at first. Voices, messages, hallucinations. Whoever dives into the psychedelic world of Boards of Canada, discovers traces of occultism, religious cults, spies, numerology, mathematical concepts... These are hidden in titles, artwork, samples, the length of tracks, the total number of tracks, in numerous backward-masked voices, even indeed in audio palindromes, sentences which played backwards or forwards that sound identical. "The Devil Is In The Details" is the name of one of the tracks from Geogaddi. The lp lists 23 tracks (an enigmatic number for occultists), is 66 minutes 6 seconds in duration and 666 megabytes in size. It co-stars David Koresh, leader of the Branch Davidians in Waco, and Pan, "the God with hooves", Pagan God of woods and meadows, responsible for striking sudden fear in lonely travellers. At first you don't see them and then all of a sudden they seem to be everywhere. The magic Boards of Canada - operating out of a remote commune in the heart of the Scottish Pentland Hills, just south of Edinburgh, where they have their own studio - take it slow on the dark periphery. In all these years refusing to step outside. They've done only a handful of interviews, over e-mail, and after their entry with Music Has The Right To Children, stood three times on the stage.

An enigma.

Now they've finally agreed to do a face-to-face interview. One per country, 2 hours long. They hope to clear something up, about their new lp The Campfire Headphase, for example, but also of the wild tales of the mysterious BoC given about them. They want it known that they are 'ordinary blokes', not "mages bringing sacrificial offerings to the mountaintop." The myth had a bit to do with themselves, realises Mike. "If you keep out of the media so long, people begin to fill in the gaps themselves."

Mike is Michael Sandison, 34 years old, father of a one year old daughter. Visibly tired. Suffers sleeplessness and depression. Wearing a black jumper, jeans and trainees. A week's growth. Inconspicuous. Marcus Eion (32) is smarter, sportier also. Neatly trimmed beard, gelled hair. Evidently a keen snow-boarder. The ring on his finger tells us he was married last year. His t-shirt flashing the names or weirdo rappers Boom Bip and Dose One. Mike talks smoothly and easily, Marcus is more circumspect, giving explanations to Mike's story.

"The greatest misunderstanding", says Mike where he left off, "is of our humour. Most people miss the irony. They take everything we say literally." Almost apologetic, he says they're just interested in old cultures, religious excesses, scientific problems, everything that deviates from the norm. We shouldn't be looking for more than that. And no, they are resolutely no 'failed techno band' that you see much of on IDM-nerd internet forums. They've never wanted to make 'Intelligent Dance Music', "actually we've never been interested in dance music, techno or whatever. The world exists in a far off place from us. Since kids, all we've ever wanted to do is to make as much a racket as possible with every instrument that fell in front of us. We're not technokids."

Enter The Campfire Headphase. Another unpolished gem, with intimate synths and beats, and for the first time, guitar loops, which, held up to the light look good and slowly begin to sparkle. The light also reflects the image of a classic road-trip through the old America, criss-crossing time. Titles such as "Dayvan Cowboy", "'84 Pontiac Dream" and "Ataronchronon" (an old Native tribe) betrays something of the intention.

"The basis", explains Mike, "is a fantasy, a mind trip. You're sitting in the woods, spaced out around the camp-fire. It's dark and you're alone. You shut your eyes and fantasise over 18th century America. You loose sense of time. Hours become days, weeks. Strange things happen, inexplicable things. Leaps in time, transformations, a bit surrealistic, something that you haven't experienced before. It's a dream, you're a genuine cowboy. Till the music merges and changes, such as in '84 Pontiac Dream. You wake up, you can hear voices behind you, the heavens come crashing down, and you're in Central Park, someone playing acoustic guitar in the distance, and God only knows how you got here."

Marcus: "Utter chaos, a world without logic, that sort of idea. Do you know the film Zabriskie Point (Antonioni, 1970)? If you ask me, this record's captured the same atmosphere. It's a crazy road movie. Everything that happens has no logic, you try to discover a line, to find an explanation, and yet at the end of the film, you still don't know exactly what happened." Mike: "The central question is: How many of these experiences are real? Have we found real places? How many were part of a hallucination? Someone who's had a psychedelic experience knows very well, that some things can't be literally described, it changes each moment."

"Sherbet Head", one of the often beautiful vignettes BoC are so fond of, perhaps best describes the psychedelic experience: A head full of sorbet. A bit dizzying. Slight tingles. If the pitch-black predecessor Geogaddi was a bad trip, The Campfire Headphase is its counterpart: The good trip.

Geogaddi ended with "Corsair", 'the light at the end of the tunnel'; at the end of the good trip awaits a downer. The last 3 tracks are deep, very deep. Marcus: "Therefore it hangs longer." Mike: "I can't make anything that's completely optimistic." Especially the closing "Farewell Fire", a pastoral organ drone, catches you in the throat. They won't tell me who it was written for, but it can only be for a departed beloved.

Mike relates: ""Farewell Fire" is Marcus on keyboards, nothing more. He made it one night during a session. There are faltering moments and it really sounds like someone who, because of grief, isn't in a good state to go on playing. That's something you could never reach with programming. Although it's an electronic piece, it sounds very human and heart rending. Just at the moment it stops, it's like a faltering breath, like a voice that's just fell silent." Marcus: "Many people who make electronic music insist that it has to be sterile and mechanical... and futuristic" (laughter). "That's very simple. All you have to do is turn on the equipment. The art is giving synthetic sounds emotion. As if it's a voice."

A synth-line, Mike lets known, is written just like a vocal phrase. A vocal phrase that's almost forged. "The best singers have a limited voice. A voice like Bob Dylan, so nasal, trembling, not altogether clear, far from complete, yet brimming with character. If you ask a session musician to sing you one of their songs, it's technically perfect but soulless, without life. That is precisely our principle: It must not be perfect. We include intentional mistakes and damaged sound in order to let the music breathe."

Whoever hears a BoC record for the first time is amazed by the 'singing' sound in the background, as if the cassette wasn't shut properly. That's precisely what's going on. The duo swear by the sound of old tape-recorders that don't play so well anymore, where the sound drops out now and again, or is off-level, goes to slow, or just a bit too fast. They find it gives their recordings a magical tinge. It takes them back to the time when they made cassettes themselves, to their lost youth. Their debut lp Twoism sounds like a mispress, as though it was off-center. "Slow The Bird Down" from their new album has this quality as well. The 'singing' guitar in "Chromokey Dreamcoat" was recorded on a beach with the most fucked-up tape-recorder Marcus could find. He's also got a digital one. Seldom uses it. The melody from "Julie and Candy" was recorded with a pair of flutes, continuously bounced between the built-in microphones of two tape recorders, until little more than a sound, a foggy reverberation, a kind of siren, survives.

Nearly everything you hear on one of their records, comes from a flute, a guitar, a piano, a percussion instrument, an aeolian harp, or some other exotic instrument, yet the sounds are so carefully treated that they are seldom recognisable. The more you play with a sound, the more synthetic it becomes, explains Mike. Their synths are also faithfully vintage: Old analogue models with crunchy and crackling sound.

Never call their work nostalgic; Marcus dislikes it. 'Retro' is such a word. It's too easy, he finds. "We refer to things from the past, something tragic or beautiful that's lost, we try to bring it back. But it doesn't stop there: We try to go further, to suppose what would happen if that time still existed. We don't imitate the past, we rewrite it, changing the course history has taken. We go back to a certain place and time and tread an alternative way back in. We'll say: Make it 1977 and then take it somewhere. How would the music have sounded now, if, back then, we had beat a different path? A sort of parallel world." Mike: "As if the 90's had never happened, or something. Where would the world, the music be, if we'd skipped time?"

The 90's, with it's loud MTV culture, its unbridled hedonism, and its furthering globalisation, stand for everything that's wrong for the retiring duo.

They sacredly believe in a 'sideways culture'. Marcus: "Most people take the world as it is, they don't ever ask how the world exists, as if they're all going through a tunnel. If you look at the current state of music and you consider its roots, then the way to go is automatically seen as the only way the music could have been put down. Nobody realises that it's that presumption that determines what they do, they just follow that path. Look at it like a corridor. Everyone stands in the middle, making eyes for the exit. They consider the situation and know: We must come to the end of the corridor. What we try to do, is put another corridor next to it, one that you can perhaps reach via a secret entrance."

Mike shows himself to be an admirer of Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516), the deeply religious painter whose work carries the style and themes of his day. In contrast to the serene work of his peers, Bosch's fantastic work is about angst, horror and adversity. "His work is full of strange, spooky elements." Mike explains, "elements that don't have any explanation. They were fantasies. His work was surrealistic before surrealism was invented. His paintings were the passage to another world. There are elements in his work that shouldn't be there, inconsistencies, which rightly, make the work so strong, so stirring." He makes a parallel with MHTRTC, where naive children’s voices clash with atonal sound, chrome coloured beats and dissonant melodies. "The children’s voices brings it out. They make a big impression, they don't seem at home in such cryptic music. You don't know why they're there, they just are. They suggest innocence, but also danger. You just don't know what it is. Yet it somehow grips you."

"If you should make paintings about what happens on one of our records," says Mike, and he apologises himself in advance for the pretentiousness in the next statement, "then it should be a completely surrealistic work. Nothing should make sense. Everything's made up. And it should be something you don't have to explain."

Marcus: "If you have to explain it, then it's not art."

Rig a record up with hidden messages about God and Satan and mortals who feel that they are an ambassador of both, you wind up with an altar. That's what Marcus calls the previous album Geogaddi, an altar. He says, a bit with scorn. On the internet circulate the wildest theories and analysis about the three year old record. About David Koresh and his Branch Davidians, who, on the track "1969" and the ep In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country are consecrated (correct). Over the use of 'the Golden Section' and other unusual number sequences such as the Fibonacci-series in musical arrangements and song structures (correct). About links with the work of Bertholt Brecht (nonsense). About samples taken from spy-agencies during the cold war (correct). About Satanism (nonsense). About audio palindromes ("with technique, anything is possible.") Over the album title having something to do with signifying the desertification of the planet (quiet). They leave that last one open. There must be something left to puzzle over.

All the 'little things', as Mike calls them, place the instrumental music in context, a thread through it, a concept if you like. "As long as you think of it as a concept, not as you would over the rules of a game of chess."

On Geogaddi stood 'little things' originating from the darkest caverns of their souls. On their other records, you can hear the desire for the simplicity of their youth. The leitmotiv in this story. Lost youth, the time when life was simple and you were just happy, that's what they are looking for. The warmth. Innocence. That feeling that every adolescent slowly loses. "If I'm depressed... and I've got a long history of depression", Mike lets on, "then I always look for comfort in my childhood years. That sadness is always present in our music."

One thing he wants to dispel about Geogaddi: "It was a project. It's its own thing. A claustrophobic trip through a world full of paranoia and darkness. Some people confuse the record with us. We're no doom merchants."

"Don't forget," he says just after, "we were in the studio when 9/11 happened. The last five months recording Geogaddi were spent in the aftermath of 9/11. It was an anxious time and it felt like we were going back to the cold war. Again, I was reminded of the anxiety I had felt as a child about the nuclear bomb. I think everyone from our generation knows that feeling very well. We couldn't get rid of it, it affected our mood. The tone got more oppressive. The atmosphere, the samples... It's got everything to do with it." "Besides", going further, "I was going through a difficult period. It was a fucked-up year."

"Now, four years later", Marcus takes over, "It seems the threat of 9/11 has become permanent. The world has been permanently changed, permanent danger. More chaos and darkness and paranoia. If you experience that day in day out, you have to ask yourself: How can we escape this? How can we forget about reality?" Mike: "Instead of going insane you can look for a way out." Accident or not, at the time Mike was listening a lot to the first lp from positivos The Polyphonic Spree. "I thought: I want to make something hopeful again."

And so, the idea for The Campfire Headphase was born: They wanted to go back to the time when making music was for them simply an escape. Back to Twoism, their debut lp, with its maddening singing sound. "Twoism is probably the least political record we've made. It's music to dream to. If your life's shit and you hate your job, you put on a record, the melodies move you, you can forget everything. That's what we've tried to recreate again. An air bubble in which you can rise and fly off. Away from everything. The new record's got no hidden agenda. The only thing it says is 'fuck all this stuff', switch off the news, fuck the job off, get out of the city and take the time to go back and think about happier times. Everybody has a year in their head, the best summer of their lives."

Marcus: "See it as a remedy. A time-machine. A private time-machine. Our work doesn't work in public places, it speaks at once to the listener. It's music to listen to on your own. Somewhere to creep off. We offer you a safe haven."

Mike: "A place to go."

Then Mike suddenly realises: "Now, if I think about it, this is something that we consider a matter of course, so much so that we can't imagine that there are other people who should want to achieve something different with their music. Yet many of the producers making urban, and now R&B, or whatever, they think precisely the opposite. What they almost say is: What we're doing, it must represent here and now, it mustn't deviate too much. It has to be suitable to be played in Gap. Music for me, is an escape from Gap. If I wander into a clothes shop, I swiftly think: fucking hell, somebody should do something about this, I've got to get away from here as fast as possible, back to my fantasy-world."

Back to the woods of the Pentland Hills. Back to his girlfriend and daughter. And back to his brother. Only after urging, they add: Mike Sandison and Marcus Eion are brothers. Eion - pronounced Ian - is Marcus's middle name. They've kept it secret for 10 years. They think it's not important. The story is the music, not the people. The myth fades, the music remains.

Nobody knows them, nobody's ever seen them perform, nobody has ever seen an advert or a video or TV performance by them (they don't exist), nobody knows precisely what they think, yet 200,000 solitary souls identify with their quiet sadness. Their longing has borne the most beautiful music of the last ten years. Just ask Thom Yorke.

appendix

Orbital?

The producers of Chime, Belfast and Halcyon + On + On were also brothers. On the dark stage they wore their characteristic miner's lamps to light up their samplers and sequencers. The first lp's were OK, find Mike and Marcus, but now, to go through life as the second Orbital... no. Therefore they kept silent when Warp signed their family band. For 10 years, Marcus hid himself behind his middle name, Eion. Mike: "On all their records is written: by Hartnoll & Hartnoll. We find it nerdy." They wanted to keep on living anonymously and to avoid stories over the 'musical family Sandison'. They've got two other brothers, also musicians. One of them lives in Australia, the other in London. Mike and Marcus live in a small commune in the woods of the Scottish Pentland Hills, just beneath Edinburgh. They were brought up in London and Calgary. There they saw nature documentaries by the National Film Board of Canada on TV. From there... For that matter, Mike is also threatening to fly off, his girlfriend had a job in a design bureau in Auckland, New Zealand, and would like to go back. Mike has doubts. BoC may have to become a broad-band band while jamming is so essential for their music. A tape recorder is always running in the studio. Yet for everything there is a solution, says Marcus positively. "I'm always saying: Don't let me hold you back, do it! We've done this for as long as I can remember (Mike since 1980, Marcus since 1986) and it's never been a reason for us not to reach our dreams. If I should think that there was something else that could make life happier, then I wouldn't be restrained by the music. That's why I've said to Mike: I don't want it to come between us. If that's really what you want, don't consider it the end, think of it as a new challenge." For the time being, enough challenges. They've got plans for projects of their own. They're in negotiations for a soundtrack to a big film. They've already begun a new lp (they have a contract for another three albums with Warp). Mike: "The next album shall come as a shock to everyone. Nobody will expect this from us." And there really are plans for some live performances with a band in the new year. But that rumour went around three years ago as well. They've kept silent since.

TWOISM (1995, REISSUE 2002)

Brought out themselves (200 copies). Eight tunes full of strange, dreamy ambience, somewhat deceptive electronica. It's as if the record plays off-center. Influences of Aphex and Autechre are clearly hearable. Via the latter, their lp ended up with the Skam label from Manchester. Seven years later, which in the meantime was fetching 500 Euro on ebay, was re-released, the only one of their privately managed lp's and cassettes so far. They've played with the idea of Boc Maxima (1996) having a decent release. Up to now, the closet with the Music 70 demos has remained hermetically sealed.

HI SCORES (1996)

Mini lp for Skam. The first six tunes normally available. Dreamy electronica, abstract Autechre-like beats and electro. Classics: "Everything You Do Is A Balloon", the melody from which came to Marcus in a dream, and "Turquoise Hexagon Sun" (also on MHTRTC).

MUSIC HAS THE RIGHT TO CHILDREN (1998)

Debut for Warp. Appeared scarcely without a remark, now seen as a classic in the world of electronica, and the starting point for sub-genres such as indietronica and folktronica. The record with the children’s voices. They talk and count on and off, backwards and forwards. Mellow beats, nostalgic synths, psychedelic and intimate, some folky moods, heavenly melodies. The most beautiful: "ROYGBIV" (2:28) and "Olson" (1:24), one of the typical BoC vignettes that fill in the gaps between the 'real' tunes and the real preferred enjoyment. Synthesizer music that you can hear at the end of a TV program, just as the titles disappear from the screen. Chill-out-hit: "Aquarius". Them: "A record for outdoors on a cold, sunny day."

IN A BEAUTIFUL PLACE OUT IN THE COUNTRY (2000)

"Come out and live with a religious community in a beautiful place out in the country." An invitation from David Koresh and his Branch Davidians sect in Waco. Next to the title track, "Amo Bishop Roden" also refers to the sect; it is the name of one of the members who perished. Her portrait is shown on the back of the record, Koresh's can also be seen inside. Classic: "Kid For Today". The whole ep (4 tracks, 24 minutes) is brilliant.

GEOGADDI (2002)

A pitch-black record. Dark, sinister, almost devilish. Yet very melodic and organic. Brimming with secret messages, references, mathematical concepts, gematria. "Music Is Math" announces the beginning. "1969" plunges right back into the Branch Davidians. The track's duration is 4:19. It was on April 19th 1993 that the slaughter in Waco took place. After each message hides an explanation, it seems. Anyone who plays the record backwards will be rewarded. In "You Could Feel The Sky" you suddenly hear 'a god with hooves'; in "A Is To B As B Is To C" they reveal a real audio palindrome: 'all you love we' becomes 'we love you all' and 'I've been gone about a week' stays exactly the same! Strange, disturbing record. "Gyroscope" came to Marcus in a nightmare and that is exactly what it is: An actual nightmare. Them: "A claustrophobic trip through a world full of darkness and paranoia, but at the end, a glimmer of hope." A journalist: "Music just like a spiral or a fractal, becoming more detailed according to the deeper you go in." It is the album that first yielded wide recognition for the Scots, and also in OOR, chosen as one of the best 10 releases of the year. Hit: "1969".

THE CAMPFIRE HEADPHASE (2005)

The new record. It doesn't disappoint. 'A genuine Boards of Canada lp', they think themselves, with elements of Twoism and including subtle guitar loops. Dreamt road-trip through the old America. A lot less darker than Geogaddi. Never have sounded so cheerful, as on "Peacock Tail", their 'Stevie Wonder' tune' (Marcus). Be careful of the last tunes: A heavy depression awaits.

by Koen Poolman, OOR.

translation: liverlipslightentertainment, n© 2006.

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Search For Seclusion

title	Search For Seclusion
author	Dan Rule
publication	The Age (Melbourne, Australia)
date	2005/11/11
issue
pages

Search For Seclusion is an interview by Dan Rule originally published in the November 11, 2005 edition of The Age (Melbourne Australia) freesheet newspaper.

Scottish electronic duo Boards of Canada have done their best to remain a mystery. Dan Rule investigates.

FOR a pair of artists who never release singles or music videos and rarely play live or speak to the press, it is all the more fascinating that Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin (aka Boards of Canada) have remained two of the most quietly revered, referenced and imitated contemporary musicians around.

Since the wondrously sprawling, downbeat electro-psych of their 1998 debut Music Has the Right to Children and its dark and abrasive 2002 follow-up Geogaddi, the Scottish pair have assumed mysterious, almost ethereal guises.

But, in a rare interview, arranged to discuss their long-awaited third album The Campfire Headphase, both Sandison, 34, and Eoin, 32, are willing to shed some light on their work.

says Sandison.

This sense of escapism has strong roots in their childhood. Following a two-year stay in Canada between 1979 and 1980, Sandison and Eoin - who, almost secretly, are brothers (Eoin has always used his middle name to avoid comparisons to electronic duo Orbital, also brothers) - began making their first crude recordings while still in primary school, using a dictation machine and a radio-cassette deck to multi-track instruments with snippets of TV and radio.

Of particular interest to the young brothers were the educational films produced by National Film Board of Canada.

says Eoin.

This imprint is present in The Campfire Headphase, which, replete with warbling, detuned guitars and sweeping, sun-faded melodics, evokes clouded, distant reminiscence; a sound far removed from the brooding complexity of Geogaddi.

After working together for so long, the brothers have an intuitive, almost telepathic creative relationship.

says Sandison.

The Campfire Headphase is out now through Warp/Inertia.

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We Are The (Folk) Robots

title	We Are The (Folk) Robots
author	Fabio Cagnetti
publication	LOSINGTODAY
date	2005/11
issue	08
pages	33-35

"We Are The (Folk) Robots" was an interview (In Italian) by Fabio Cagnetti originally published Nov. 2005 in LOSINGTODAY Magazine Issue 08. The English version of the interview appeared on losingtoday.com 2005-11-14.

This article needs to be transcribed. If you can provide a transcription, please update this article!

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20081025105615/http://www.losingtoday.com/features.php?review_id=490

interview by by Fabio Cagnetti, November 2005.

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Musica vs Algebra

title	Musica vs Algebra
author	Damir Ivic
publication	Trax (Italian)
date	2005/11
issue	05 (Nov./Dec.)
pages	34-37

"Musica vs Algebra" is an interview (in Italian) by Damir Ivic originally published Nov. 2005 in Trax (Italian) magazine No. 05 (Nov/Dec), pp.34-37.

Musica vs Algebra

Trax è volato in Scozia per incontare Marcus Eoin e Mike Sandison. Verrebbe da non crederci, perché sono anni che i Boards Of Canada sono ammantati da una fitta coltre di mistero... 

Non si fanno (quasi) mai intervistare se non via mail, riempiono i propri dischi di significati esoterici e di richiami all’algebra estrema (la successione numerica di Fibonacci, tanto per dirne solo una), creano grafiche strane, lanciano segnali tanto inquietanti quanto di difficile interpretazione, vivono isolati in campagna. Cose così. Uno si aspetterebbe di trovarsi di fronte due druidi scontrosi e magari incappucciati, gente con cui è difficile fare una chiacchierata serena e disimpegnata. E invece: macché. Marcus e Mike sono due persone di notevole simpatia (ah, e riportiamo per chi se lo fosse fatto sfuggire lo scoop raccolto su Pitchfork da Heiko Hoffmann: i due sono fratelli, anche se non lo hanno mai voluto dire perché avevano paura agli inizi della loro carriera di essere considerati degli “Orbital di serie B”; è ironico come al giorno d'oggi in pochi si ricordino dei fratelli Hartnoll, mentre i Boards sono assolutamente sulla cresta dell'onda. Il risultato finale sono state due ore di intervista svoltasi, massì, in una chiesa sconsacrata di Edinburgo: niente di esoterico e di satanico, semplicemente uno dei pub più sciccosi della città. Per trascrivere tutto quello che ci si è detti, tra un sorriso e un altro, ci sarebbero volute tipo una ventina di pagine di Trax; troppo, anche per i Boards Of Canada. Ecco qua quindi una buona selezione di quanto ci siamo detti, tra passato e presente (con tanto di precisa chiave di lettura per comprendere lo spirito del loro ultimo lavoro, “The Campfire Headphase”). Incominciando, ed era inevitabile, dalla domanda sul perché i due sono così sfuggenti coi media: forse che i giornalisti sono tutti delle bestie?!

This article needs to be translated. If you can provide a translation, please update this article!

Note: Based from Google translation

Music vs Algebra

Trax flew to Scotland to meet Marcus Eoin and Mike Sandison. One would not believe it, because for years the Boards Of Canada have been cloaked in a thick blanket of mystery ...

They are (almost) never interviewed except by e-mail, they fill their albums with esoteric meanings and references to extreme algebra (the Fibonacci number sequence, just to name one), they create strange graphics, they send out signals as disturbing as they are. difficult to interpret, they live isolated in the countryside. Things like that. One would expect to be faced with two surly and perhaps hooded Druids, people with whom it is difficult to have a serene and disengaged chat. And instead: not at all. Marcus and Mike are two people of considerable sympathy (ah, and we report for those who missed the scoop collected on Pitchfork by Heiko Hoffmann: the two are brothers, even if they never wanted to say it because they were afraid at the beginning of their career to be considered "Serie B Orbital"; it is ironic how nowadays few remember the Hartnoll brothers, while the Boards are absolutely on the crest of the wave. The final result was a two-hour interview held , yes, in a deconsecrated church in Edinburgh: nothing esoteric and satanic, simply one of the swankest pubs in the city. pages of Trax; too much, even for the Boards Of Canada. Here is a good selection of what we have said, between past and present (with a precise reading key to understand the spirit of their latest work, "The Campfire Headphase "). Starting, and it was inevitable, with the question of why the two are so elusive with the media: maybe that journalists are all beasts ?!

.   

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Special Long Long Interview

title	Special Long Long Interview
author	Heiko Hoffmann
publication	After Hours
date	2005/12
issue	22 (Autumn/Winter)
pages	17-25

"Special Long Long Interview" was an interview (in Japanese) by Heiko Hoffmann, Translated by Asami Shida, originally published December 2005 in After Hours magazine Number 22 (Autumn/Winter).

pg.22:

pg. 23:

Note: Translated by ChatGPT-4o

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The new work is like a bright-blue-green color

title	The new work is like a bright-blue-green color
author	Takuro Ueno
publication	Crossbeat
date	2005/12
issue	266
pages	120-123

The new work is like a bright-blue-green color was an interview (in Japanese) by Takuro Ueno originally published December 2005 in Crossbeat magazine Vol. 266 pp.120-123.

僕らにとっては質感がメロディと同じくらいに大切だ 一つ常に拘ってるのは目がくらむような感じ。これを出していきたいと思ってる めくるめくようなサウンドの質感というか、めまぐるしく変化していくような感じだね ただ、曲の曖味な記憶だけが残るんだ

自分で初めて買ったレコードはヒューマ ン・リーグの「トラヴェローグ」だという マーカス・イオインと、「地味なニュー・ ウェイヴがやりたかった」というマイク・ サンディソンが80年代中期から音楽活動を 開始。それが、ボーズ・オブ・カナダの歴 史の始まりでもある。スコットランドはエ ジンバラに拠点を置き、さまざまな変遷を 経て辿り着いた詩情溢れるエレクトロニッ ク・ミュージック。心地よいダウン・テン ポなビートに深く霧がかかったような幻想 的なサウンドスケーブで、繊細さと大胆さ の間を巧みに行き来する姿は、ここ数年の エレクトロニカ〜ポストロックの文脈で語 られてもおかしくないはず。 多彩なツールを操りながら、エモーショ ナルかつサイケデリックな音像を描き出す マーカス＆マイク。彼らの約3年ぶりとな る新作「ザ・キャンプファイヤー・ヘッド フェイズ」が届いた（通算3作目）。これ までのアルバムよりも柔らかなギターの音 色が活かされていて、非常にオーガニック な味わいなのが印象的。今まで同様、明確 なコンセプトは提示せず、ゆっくりと浮か んでは消えるメロディがさまざまな模様と なって一つのサウンドに溶け込んでいく。 今回はメール・インタビューにて、その 温かくもあり衰しくもある本作の核に迫っ てみることにした。 -今まで以上に丸みがあって、柔らかな 光を帯びた作品ですね。こういう方向性に 辿り着いたのは、あなたたちを取り巻く環 境の変化によるものなんですか？それと も、内面的な変化によるものなんですか？ マーカス「前作の『ジオガディ』を完成さ せた時、かなり曲が余ってることに気付い たんだ。それらの曲を早急に完成させて、 更に数曲書き足して、新しいアルバムをで きるだけ早く出すというのが当初の計画だ った。ところが、前からずっとスタジオを 別のところに移したいと思っていて、その 候補地を探してるうちに何ヵ月も無駄にし ちゃってね。で、やっと新しいスタジオに

落ち着いた頃には、だいぶ時が経っていて、 『ジオガディ』で余った曲に対する思いも 変わってしまっていた。自分たちの音楽的 な趣味は変わっていたし、結局、全てを自 紙に戻して一から作り直すことにしたよ。 というわけで、新作はちょうど、前作に対 するリアクションのようになった。つまり 「ジオガディ」が暗くて複雑だから、それ を掃すべく、新作は純粋にメロディやサ ウンドだけを追究したシンプルなものでい いんじゃないかと思ったんだ」 —1 #E "Into The Rainbow Vein" € いうタイトルにもリンクしますが、水面に 映った虹のように、サウンド全体が透明な 色彩を帯びているように感じられます。 マーカス「テーマを語るのにあまり神秘的 な表現を使うつもりはないんだけど、僕ら がを用いる場合はさまざまな意味を含ん でる。たとえば、映像で使われる“クロマ キー”（特定の色を背景に画像を撮影して おき、その他に別な画像を重ねることで合 成を行なうもの）だったりするし、あるい は共感覚の結果として見える色だったりす る。つまり、ある音を悪くと特定な色を連 想するという感覚だ。そもそも僕は、決ま った色が決まったサウンドや環境にマッチ すると思ってる。今回のアルバムに限って いえば、たぶん自分たちはニュートラルな 空間をめていたんだと思う。暗くもな く、ハッピーでもなく、何か褪せた青緑 色のようなもの。太陽の下に放置されてい た古い空き缶のような感じかな」 また、本作には心地の好い“ゆらぎ” があります。これがあるからこそ、それぞ れの曲が豊かな表情を湛えていると思うん ですけど、この心地よさを会得するには何 が不可欠だと考えますか？ マイク「今回は、今までと比べて曲にダイ ナミズムを出そうと意識したね。それか ら、サウンドの質感のせいでそういう風に 感じてもらえたのかもしれない。そもそも メロディというものは、楽器やスタイルを 通じて新しい解釈をどうとでも施せるけ ど、質感というものは、わりと動かしがた

いものだと思う。僕らにとっては質感がメ ロディと同じくらいに大切だ。じゃなけれ ば、着メロ専門の作曲家になってるさ。 で、一つ常に拘ってるのは日がくらむよう な感じ。これを出していきたいと思ってる。 めくるめくようなサウンドの質感というか、 めまぐるしく変化していくような感じだね。 音楽を夢見るのと似てるかな。ハッキリと しないし、説明もできない。ただ、曲の腹 味な記憶だけが残る。そういう感じを実際 のレコーディングで出せるよう頑張るのが 僕らには面白いんだ」 一本作にはさまざまな質感の音が混在し てますが、全体のサウンドを整えていく段 階で、あなたたちが最も注意していること は何でしょう？ マーカス「マイクはメロディに注目してる ようだけど、二人とも音楽のサウンドをど れだけ突き詰めていけるかということに取 り憑かれてるね。やっぱり音楽というもの は、単純に歌を演奏するだけのことじゃな いからさ。その曲のチューニングが微かに ズレていたり、音がこもっていたり、遠の いていたり、崩れていたりすると、全く遠 うレベルの情感がき起こる。自分たちに してみれば、まるで二次元の曲が三次に なるような感じだ。で、僕なんかは、音の 凸凹した表面が感じられるようなものが好 きだな。ちょうど油絵の表面をひび割れた レリーフが覆っているような、あの感じ。 ああいうのが音楽にあって欲しいんだよ」 -なるほど。僕はこのアルバムを聴いて いると何故か海を思い浮かべます。実際、 曲の中に波の音も収録されていますし。 マイク「最近、前よりもう少し海の近くに 移ったから、そういう音はとても簡単に捨 えるんだ。二人とも海の近くで育ったし、 今回のアルバムを通じて、海岸のようなだ だっ広い空間の感覚が再び訪れたと言って もいいんじゃないかな」 -アナログ・シンセ、テープ・エコー、 ギターなど、本作ではいろいろな楽器や機 材が使われていると思いますが、制作して いる時に頻繁に使ったツールは？

若い頃はカネがなくて思うように楽器や録音機材を買えないから ビール缶、プラスチック製の箱、学生鞄なんかを掻き集めてはスティックで叩いて そのリズムを安っぽいテープ・マシンに吹き込んだりしたよ 録音を重ねるたびにテープの音がどんどん歪んだけど、最高のサウンドだったんだ

マイク「今回はテープ・エコーをかなり使 ってるんだ。パッと聴いた限りでは気づか ないような箇所でも登場する。今は誰もが 簡単にエレクトロニック・ミュージックを 作れるようになったよね。ラップトップと 50ドルのソフトウェアさえあれば、何かし らの音楽を作れる。エレクトロニック・ミ ュージックって実はかなり昔からあるんだ。 今のエレクトロニック・ミュージシャンや ファンの多くは最近のものだと思いこんで るようだけどね。でも、何十年も前から存 在してるよ。 たとえば、スティーヴィー・ワンダーが 70年代にシンセサイザーで作ったポリフォ ニックでクロマチックな音楽。あれが大好 きでね。彼はコンピューターのシーケンス を使わずに、モノシンセでマルチ・トラッ キングしてた。そうやってオーガニックな サウンドを見事に編み出していたのさ。彼 のアルバム『シークレット・ライフ』を聴 いてみると、シンセサイザーで自由に奏で た素晴らしい曲がたっぷりと入ってる。そ こには量子化されていない、近年のエレク トロニック・ダンス・ミュージックとは遠 くかけ離れたものがある。僕らも自分たち の音楽をそれと同じように捉えてるね。確 かに作ってるのはエレクトロニック・ミュ ージックだけど、今の人たちの殆どが使っ てるような仕様や技術は用いてないよ」 あなたたちは10代の頃からさまざまな 楽器を独学で学び、カセット・テープにい ろんな音を録音していたとか。当時はどん な音を録っていたんです？ マーカス「若い頃はカネがなくて思うよう に楽器や録音機材を買えないから、身の回 りのもので工夫するしかないよね。だから、 マルチ・トラック・テープ・レコーディン ジもどきを、複数のステレオ・テープ・レ コーダーと安物のマイクを使ってやろうと してたんだ。ビール缶、プラスチック製の 箱、学生なんかを掻き集めてはドラム・ スティックで叩いて、そのリズムを安っぽ いテープ・マシンに吹き込んだりしたよ。 それをまた普通にスピーカーで生して

別の機械に録音しつつ、ピアノやら手拍子 やらアコースティック・ギターやらの音を 片っ端からオーヴァー・ダビングしていっ た。不協和音の実験みたいなものさ。何し ろ録音を重ねるたびにテーブの音がどんど ん歪んでボヤケてくるんだけど、最高のサ ウンドだったんだ。クリエイティヴな体験 だったな。とにかく、足せるものは何でも 足してた。テレビから面白いものが流れて くればテレビの音量を上げて、それをその まま録音してたね。そうやって録った曲は どれも強烈で、グチャグチャなニュー・ウ エイヴ・ジャムって感じだったよ」 へええ。ところで、あなたたちはエジ ンバラの山奥で暮らしてるんですよね。そ ういう環境で日々アートに没頭できる一。 そんな生活のいちばんのメリットは何です か？また、デメリットを感じる部分はあ りますか？ マーカス「いちばんのメリットは、自分の アートの居場所となる世俗的な現代文化か ら隔離された"バブル”を形成できること だ。日々、服飾店やカフェなんかで大音量 の音楽や派手な光景といった都会的な影響 下にさらされていたら、創造性が左右され て当たり前だと思う。それが悪いとは言わ ないよ。その人の音楽やアートのあり方に よるから。ただ僕らの場合、毎日そういう 環境に囲まれた状態で、ボーズ・オブ・カ ナダの世界に視覚的かつ聴覚的に集中する のは難しいね。だけどデメリットもある。 たまには外から適当な刺数を受けないと、 自分のアートに新たな面やアイディアが生 まれにくいんだ。て、そういう刺数は活気 のある環境にいた方が受けやすい。だから 時々、わざわざ部会の文化に身を投じる必 要があると思うんだ。あるいは、僕らがよ くやるように旅に出るのもいいね」 外の世界で起こっているムーヴメント とは距離を置いているあなたたちですが、 クラウデッド、ブーム・ビップ、ベックな ど、間隔は長いけど他人のリミックスは継 続的に行なってきてますね。 マイク「リミックスの仕事については、

ックリするくらい物りを持ってるよ。実際、 5回に1回くらしか引き受けてないしね。 ビッグなアーティストの仕事も断わった。 忙しかったというのもあるけど、大抵は自 分たちの世界とそのアーティストの世界と の間に接点を感じないからなんだ。 で、その中でもベックは数少ない離れが たいミュージシャンだ。一度、取っ掛かり を掴んで理解しちゃうと、彼が出すもの全 てが欲しくなる。最近のありきたりな音楽 が溢れる海の中で、ベックは未だに素晴ら しい音楽を作るかがり火となって、新作を 出すたびにみんなをアッと言わせてくれて るんだ。彼は人気があるし、MTVでもク リップがしょっちゅう流れるから、中には "裏切り者”呼ばわりする人もいるけど、 勘違いも甚だしいね。そもそもベック自身 が自分をポップ・アーティストとして捉え てるんだ。無理をしてクールでアンダーグ ラウンドなところに留まろうなんて思って ない。それって、自行がある証拠だよ。弱 さとは逆だ。世の中にいるクリエイティヴ なバンドがもっとそういうアプローチを取 るようになれば、ポップ・チャートも今よ り面白くなるんんじゃないかな」 では、最近お気に入りの音楽は？ マーカス「僕らは常に新しい音楽を見出す ようにしてるけど、最近のものも30年くら い前のような凄く古いものもまんべんなく 聴いてる。僕は、スフィアン・スティーヴ ンス、ビーチ・ボーイズ、ジョイ・ジッパ -、ダイクハウス、ジョン・フルシアンテ なんかをよく聴くね」 ーボーズ・オブ・カナダの作品は、旅を した時に味わうような特別な体験を提供し てくれると思うんですが、これからの人生、 あなたたちは音楽を通じてどんな旅をして いきたいと考えています？ マイク「僕は昔から音楽を超えて何かをし たいと思ってた。できれば世界中を旅し て、ワイルドな冒険をしたいね。特に、北 極に行くチャンスがあるといいんだけど。 レコード会社に掛け合って、あそこでビデ オを撮らせてもらおうかな（^_^）」

Note: OCR with MacBook Pro, Translation with ChatGPT-4o

For us, texture is as important as melody. One thing we always focus on is creating a dazzling feeling. We want to bring out a sound texture that feels kaleidoscopic, constantly changing. However, only a vague memory of the song remains.

Marcus Eoin, whose first record purchase was The Human League's Travelogue, and Mike Sandison, who said he wanted to make "unassuming new wave," started their musical activities in the mid-80s. This marks the beginning of the history of Boards of Canada. Based in Edinburgh, Scotland, they arrived at their emotionally rich electronic music through various transformations. With a dreamy soundscape that feels deeply shrouded in mist and a pleasant down-tempo beat, their work skillfully navigates between delicacy and boldness, fitting well within the context of recent electronica and post-rock. Marcus & Mike create an emotional and psychedelic sound using a variety of tools. Their new work, The Campfire Headphase, arrives after about three years (their third album overall). The soft guitar tones, more pronounced than in their previous albums, give it a distinctly organic feel. As usual, there is no clear concept presented, but melodies float up and dissolve into various patterns that meld into one cohesive sound.

In this email interview, we delved into the warm yet melancholic core of their new work.

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Magie versus Logik

title	Magie versus Logik
author	Hendrik Lakeberg
publication	Keys
date	2005/12
issue	12
pages	118-119

"Magie versus Logik" is an interview (in German) by Hendrik Lakeberg originally published Dec 2005 in Keys magazine No.12 pp.118-119.

This article needs to be translated. If you can provide a translation, please update this article!

Note: google translation

Magic Versus Logic

Boards of Canada have always been part of the first guard of the electronica scene and one of the cornerstones of the cult label Warp. On the new album, too, the main concern of the band is to translate faded memories full of romantic climaxes into musical vibrations. Through "The Campfire Headphase", the new Boards of Canada record, in contrast to the darkly fogged surrealism of its predecessor "Geogaddi", the illuminating wind of enlightenment blows. The tracks are structurally crystal clear, tricky beats for the most part history. There is hardly any echo of the DSP excesses in electronic music in recent years. The beats rumble precisely drawn out. The typical Bords of Canada surfaces float above it, like pastel colors ben that slowly run into each other, mix and gently curdle. Perhaps "Campfire Headphase" is the evening glow of electronica. Timelessly beautiful and precisely for that reason so contemporary. Almost like a classic teaching piece, an essence. And for the makers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin the logical consequence of their previous work. Of course, the new album is also interspersed with allusions, concepts, puzzles - the image that can be read from the music moves a different side ins Licht: The producers were never just concerned with leading down into opaque, mystical worlds, but rather with translating the strange, difficult-to-understand world into music. To give up puzzles that demand to be solved. Spreading an epic staging of fundamental conflicts: magic versus logic, spirituality versus reason. The shy Scottish producer team answered questions about the new album.

the interview was conducted by Hendrik Lakeberg / jb //

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Emotional Abuse

title	Emotional Abuse
author	Erin Hutton
publication	Remix
date	2005/12
issue	Vol 07 No 12
pages	pg26 pg28 pg30

"Emotional Abuse" was an interview by Erin Hutton in Remix magazine, Vol 07 No 12, 2005-12.

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Vi Sampler til Helvede og Tilbage

title	Vi Sampler til Helvede og Tilbage
author	Emil Kragh-Schwarz
publication	Soundvenue
date	2005/12
issue	04 (Winter)
pages	37

Vi Sampler til Helvede og Tilbage was an interview (in Danish) by Emil Kragh-Schwarz originally published December 2005 in Soundvenue magazine Number 04 (Winter) p.37.

Vi Sampler til Helvede og Tilbage

tekst Emil Kragh-Schwarz

link www.boardsofcanada.com

Sagt i alt beskedenhed, er vi faktisk lidt stolte. Den skotske electronica-duo Boards of Canda, der er aktuelle med albummet 'The Camfire Headphase', laver, deres status taget i betragtning, ganske få interviews, og ét af de få er blevet helliget Soundvenue. At de i den grad holder tankerne for sig selv er med til at fastnagle deres ry som én af electronica-scenens mest mystiske og sagnomspundne grupper. Et ry, der imidlertid også har andre grunde.

Helt tilbage fra før det fabelagtige debutalbum 'Music Has the Right to Children' udkom i 1998, har rygterne omkring skjulte, okkulte såvel som politiske budskaber i gruppens produktioner floreret lystigt blandt fans verden over. Jeg spørger d'herrer Michael Sandison og Marcus Eoin, om man så vil få noget ud af at spille 'The Campfire Headphase' baglæns? Eoin fortæller, at de altid har indlagt beskeder i musik, titler og artwork.

Samtidig pointerer han, at på netop 'The Campfire Headphase' er fokus fjernet fra de mørkere emner.

De mere eller mindre skjulte budskaber er imidlertid heller ikke hele årsagen til mystikken. I lang tid boede de to brødre Eoin og Sandison i et afsides liggende og for offentligheden hemmeligt kunstnerkollektiv. I det hele taget har isolation fra omverdenen og ikke mindst civilisationen været afholdt af de to skotter.

fortæller Sandison. På spørgsmålet om, hvor inspirationen til det nye album stammer fra, forklarer han videre:

Med de ord er det tid til at se på det vigtigste overhovedet. Det, der gør myterne mulige og interessante: Musikken. I løbet af deres karriere er udtrykket - med undtagelse af det forrige album 'Geogaddi' - ikke blevet ændret voldsomt meget, og den helt specielle 'Boards of Canada-lyd', der gør, at fans til enhver tid vil kunne spotte ét af duoens numre, hænger til stadighed ved.

fortæller Eoin.

På den måde kan man også med god ret påstå, at ambitionen om at lave musik, som eksisterer i sin egen stil og tidsboble, lykkes hver gang. Boards of Canadas produktion er nemlig kendetegnet ved på én gang at være både banal og unik. Formlen, med semiabstrakte beats og svævende, smukke ambient flader, var de i sin tid med til at grundlægge, men op til i dag er den blevet kopieret af andre i så rigt et omfang, at det alene ved hjælp af den, er blevet vanskeligt at skille sig ud. Ikke desto mindre er det nøjagtigt, hvad de med deres mystisk dragende skønhed gør. En del af forklaringen kan ligge i måden at arbejde med lydene på.

fortæller Sandison.

Denne specielle produktionsform gør alt genkendeligt og fremmed på samme tid, og måske er det netop der, at magien opstår. Måske ligger hemmeligheden netop i, at 'måske' er det nærmeste, man kan komme. Ægte magi kan ikke forklares.

Læs anmeldelse af 'The Campfire Headphase' på side 149.

To Hell and Back

Text by Emil Kragh-Schwarz

Link www.boardsofcanada.com

In all modesty, we are actually a bit proud. The Scottish electronica duo Boards of Canada, currently promoting their album The Campfire Headphase rarely give interviews, and one of the few has been dedicated to Soundvenue. Their reticence has cemented their reputation as one of the most mysterious and legendary groups in the electronica scene. However, this reputation also has other foundations.

Ever since the release of their fabulous debut album Music Has the Right to Children in 1998, rumors about hidden, occult, and political messages in the group's productions have flourished among fans worldwide. I ask the gentlemen Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin if one could get anything out of playing The Campfire Headphase backwards. Eoin explains that they have always embedded messages in their music, titles, and artwork.

At the same time, he points out that on The Campfire Headphase the focus has been removed from the darker themes.

However, the more or less hidden messages are not the sole cause of the mystery. For a long time, the two brothers Eoin and Sandison lived in a remote and secret artist collective. Isolation from the outside world and civilization has been highly valued by the two Scots.

Sandison says. When asked where the inspiration for the new album comes from, he explains further:

With those words, it is time to focus on the most important thing: the music. Throughout their career, the sound has not changed drastically, with the exception of the previous album Geogaddi and the unique Boards of Canada sound, which allows fans to instantly recognize one of the duo's tracks, remains intact.

Eoin says.

In this way, one can rightly claim that the ambition to create music that exists in its own style and time bubble succeeds every time. Boards of Canada's productions are characterized by being both banal and unique simultaneously. The formula, with semi-abstract beats and floating, beautiful ambient layers, was something they helped establish, but to this day, it has been copied so extensively by others that it alone makes it difficult to stand out. Nonetheless, their mysteriously captivating beauty achieves exactly that. Part of the explanation may lie in the way they work with sounds.

Sandison says.

This special production method makes everything recognizable and alien at the same time, and maybe that's exactly where the magic happens. Perhaps the secret lies in the fact that 'maybe' is the closest you can get. True magic cannot be explained.

Read the review of The Campfire Headphase on page 149.

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Peering Out from Behind the Curtain

title	Peering Out from Behind the Curtain
author	Steve Marchese
publication	RE:UP
date	2006/01
issue	Manual 09
pages	28-31

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

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 Sandison (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."

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."

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 articulate 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?

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."

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."

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."

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."

"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."

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."

"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.

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."

"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."

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."

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.

Boards of Canada on...

• Spirituality

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?

• Fan expectations

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.

• Living in Canada

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.

• Fatherhood

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.

• Stevie Wonder

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.

• Remixing Beck

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. Marcus: I actually told Warp six months earlier to don't call us about remixes unless it's Beck or God.

Note: Original scans of the magazine article were provided by Twoism user nlogax and updated by user Csch

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The Golden Apples Of The Sun

title	The Golden Apples Of The Sun
author	Kazumichi Sato/Hidetsugu Ito
publication	Cookie Scene
date	2006/01
issue	46
pages	18-21

"The Golden Apples Of The Sun" is a 2006 interview (in Japanese) by Kazumichi Sato/Hidetsugu Ito. It originally appeared in the Japanese music magazine Cookie Scene.

アルバムには、「Into The Rainbow Vein」「Peacock Tail」「Atraronchronon（=北米先住民であるイロコイ族の国の名前で「沼地の人々」という意）」「Tears From The Compound Eye」などといったタイトルの曲が入っています。こういった自然や生物をモテーフにしたサイケデリックなキーワードが、幻想的な電子音やギターの音と混じり合っているところは、まさに“ BOCの世界 "と感じます。だからこそ、車をモチーフとしているタイトルが意外に思えたのです。あなた達は、大自然やそれに従った無理のない生き方を愛しているのではないでしょうか？それでも、単なる「自然崇拝」「自然礼賛主義」には陥っていないように思えますが。

*Note: Translated using Google Translate and DeepL.

The Golden Apples Of The Sun

"Road movie soundtrack in a psychedelic fantasy world". Boards of Canada's new album, The Campfire Headphase, is a masterpiece that clearly sets out the stance of being truly psychedelic. What kind of illusion did they see in the shimmering flames of the campfire (which happens to be another animal collective unit name, Campfire Songs)?

Question creation, sentence / Kazumichi Sato
Question creation / Translated by Hidetsugu Ito / Itsuko Ishimura

---

Music of Struggle

title	Music of Struggle
author	Soichiro Tanaka
publication	Snoozer
date	2006/02
issue	54
pages	22-28

Music of Struggle was an interview (in Japanese) by Soichiro Tanaka originally published February 2006 in Snoozer magazine Number 54 pp.22-28

Note: Transcription by Apple's Live Text on a MacBook Pro

BOARDS OF

CANADA

by SOICHIRO TANAKA photography by PETER IAIN CAMPBELL

言葉は持たずとも、確固たる意志と理想を持った、闘争の音楽。
今、この時代に起こっている不条理や悲劇を受け入れることなく、
それを真っ向から拒否しようとするプロテスト・ミュージック。
それこそが誰あろう、ボーズ・オブ・カナダの正体だ。
前作から3年半ぶりの3rdアルバム『ザ・キャンプファイア。
ヘッドフェイズ」には、眩いユートピアのような世界が広がっている。
だが、その幻想的なサウンドの隙間には、この美しき世界は、
もはや失われてしまったという痛みの感覚が込められている。
つまり、この美しすぎる”失われた未来”を描き切ることこそが、
我々が暮らす忌まわしき世界に対する、彼らの異議申し立てなのだ

我
々は、ボーズ・オブ・カナダの音楽を、所
調エレクトロニクス・ミュージックという
狭いジャンルから解き放たねばならない。
同じく、彼らの音楽が、主張や思想や皮肉のないイン
ストウルメンタル・ミュージックだというイメージから
も解き放たねばならない。何故なら、ボーズ・オブ・カ
ナダの音楽は、確固たる理想を持った闘争の音楽であ
り、今ある現実には絶対に屈しないという抵抗の音楽
だからだ。

前作「ジオガティ」から3年半ぶりにリリースされた
ポーズのSrdアルバム「ザ・キャンプファイア・ヘッド
フェイス」は、おそらく今年リリースされたレコードの
中でも、群を抜いて美しいレコードだ。何時どんな場所
で思いても、辺り一帯を心地良いまどろみの中に誘い込
んでしまう、理想のユートピアに流れているような音楽
さざ波の音の向こう側から立ち上ってくるガット・ギタ
一の優しい音色、淡々としたプレイクビーツに乗せて、
幾重にも重なっていく虹色のテクスチャーーーここに
は、この心地良さの中に永遠に浸っていたいと思わせる
美と調和がある、誰もが、一度手にしたら決して手放
せなくなってしまうに違いない、本当に美しい作品だ。

だが、実のところ、このレコードはただ心地良いだけ
の作品ではない。ここには、かつてこの世界にも存在し
たに違いない美や調和が表現されていると同時に、今で
はその大半が失われてしまったという痛みの感覚が同居
している、深い悪しみのフィーリングが滲んでいる。ま
るでもうこの世にはいない家族と一緒に映っている幸福
な子供時代の写真を眺めている時のような、甘酸っぱ
い傷心がとても静かに広がっている。

幸福な記憶、そして、それがもはや過去にしか存在
しない失われたものであるがゆえの痛みーこのコント
ラストこそが、被らポーズ・オブ・カナダの主張に他な
らない、つまり、「何故、あの素らしい世界は消え失
せてしまったのか？」ということ。究極の美の世界を描
き出すボーズの音楽とは、ここ1世紀ほどの間に先進諸
国の政府が中心になって変えてしまった、世界の現状
を絶対に受け入れないという開手としてのノスタルジア
であり、異議申し立てとしてのメランコリアなのだ。

以下の対話は、もはや恒となったポーズの二人一
マイク・サンディソンとマーカス・イオンの兄弟コ

ンビとの書簡インタヴューだ。彼ら二人は、我々の用意
した質問に対し、どこまでも明明に語ってくれた。

interview with MIKE SANDISON'

AND MARCUS EOIN'

●自分自身にとって、これから先も、とても大切な宝物
のようなものになるだろう作品に出会えたことに、非常
に感熱しています。素晴らしい作品だと思います。
マイク・サンディソン（以下、マイク）「ありがと！」
マーカス・イオン（以下、マーカス）「ありがと！」

●以前、あなた達は、リリースされたことのない楽曲を
巨大なアーカイヴにして所有していて、自分達でもよく
聴いていると教えてくれました。本作は、この巨大なア
ーカイヴから引き出された、多肢に渡る時代に作られた
ものを集めたものなのでしょうか？
マイク「いや、ニュー・アルバムの曲は全部、2004年
から2005年の間に響かれてる。いつか、未発表トラッ
クをコンパイルしたレコードを作ると思うけどね。僕ら
が全部を見直す時間さえ出来ればね」

●もっとも新しいトラックはいつ頃、もっとも古いトラ ックはいつ頃から、あなた達が取り組んでいたものなの でしょう？ マーカス「一番新しいトラックは、2005年6月に取りか かったやつで、“スロウ・ディス・バード・ダウン”だな。 一番古いトラックは、“84ポンティアック・ドリーム” だと思う。あれは2003年初めに、デモのアイデアとし であったからね」

●これまでの2枚の作品と比べても、どのトラックも、 サウンドのレイヤー自体が非常に整理され、よりメロデ ィとテクスチャーが際立つ仕上がりになっていると感じ ました。この作品に収めた十数曲のトラックを選んだポ イントについて、教えて下さい。 マイク「僕らはこのレコードをロード・ムーヴィのサウ ンドトラックみたいに思い描いてたんだ。70年代後半に あった、北米の砂漠を渡っていく冒険を描いたような映 面だね。と同時に、精神的な旅でもある。僕らは、この ヴィジュアルなアイデアに通じる曲を選んでいった。だ からこそ、曲願も重要だった。いろんなアップ＆ダウン、 波乱のあるストーリーを話るわけだから」

今の状況を見てると、このカオスにインスパイアされた、暗くて、難しいものを作りたくなる時がある。
でも、一番のアプローチは、それに反発して、もっと新鮮で、ポジティヴなものを作ることなんだ。
だって、人々を日常的に恐怖に陥らせることは、世界中のメディアが十分いい仕事をやってるからね。
僕らの音楽にも、ダークな部分はあるけど、底に流れるメッセージは常に希望と自由なんだ

●では、本作は、これまでのどの作品よりも、“歌”を
感じさせる、という視点について、あなた達の感想を聞
かせて下さい。
マーカス「いいね。僕らはこのレコードを、より歌を感
じさせるレコードにしたかったから。『ジオガディ」は、
僕らのもっとも抽象的で、ダークなレコードだった。そ
して、今回は、ねじくれたポップ・アルバムみたいなの
を作るのがいいんじゃないか、って感じたんだ」

●これまでになく、ガット・ギターのアルペジオがフィ
ーチャーされることで、よりアコースティックなテイス
トが際立っています。ただ、こうしたギターの多用は、
あなた達の無意識下における、「もうIDMだとか、エレ
クトロニクス・バンドという風に呼ばれたくない」とい
う思いが働いていた部分はあると思いますか？
マーカス「マイクと僕はこれまでもずっとギターを使っ
て音楽をレコーディングしてきたんだよ。ボーズ・オ
ブ・カナダ以前も、二人とも、80年代には実験的な口
ック・バンドをやってた。初期のボーズ・オブ・カナダ
のレコードには、実際、ギターの音が入ってるんだけど、
すごく加工してあるから、誰もギターだとはわからない
んだよね。最近のエレクトロニック・ミュージックは、
他を見ないような狭いものになったせいで、停滞してる。
それも、今やその大半がラップトップの内側で、デジタ
ルに作られてるから。どうしてそうなったのかは理解出
来るんだ。90年代にエレクトロニック・ミュージックは
かり聴いて育ったミュージシャンだと、僕らとは違って、
アコースティックで、“リアル”なバンドへの情熱を持っ
てないからね。でも、僕は、この新作を、ボーズ・オ
ブ・カナダはエレクトロニック・ミュージックしかりリ
ースしないー－その考えを定着させるものにしたくなか
った。で、ギターにもう少し、聴いてすぐにわかる役割
を果たさせることにしたんだ」

●ボーズ・オブ・カナダの音楽は、往々にして、幸福な
過去の記憶と、それが失われてしまったがゆえの喪失感、
痛みといった風に、相反する感情を同時に喚起します。
ただ、こうした効果は、あなた達にとって意図的なもの
なのでしょうか？
マイク「うん、それは絶対に僕らが意図していることの
一つだね。僕にとっての世界最高の音楽は、何かしら悲
痛なエモーションを呼び起こすものなんだ。特にビター
スウィートな感情、ほんの少し麦失感や悲しみに彩られ
た幸福感っていうのかな。多分、それ自体は個人的な体
験から来てるんだろうけど、僕らは同時に、ヴィンテー
ジなスタイルをある種のバックボーンとして使ってる。
少なくとも、それに目配せしてるっていうのかな。僕ら
が子供だった頃の映画やTV、音楽からのインスピレーシ
ョンを取り入れると、そうした悲しげなメロディがバー
ソナルな文脈で印象をかき立てるからね」

●そうした相反するものが常に存在するという、中国の
場学のような思想は、あなた達の音楽の背後に存在する
のでしょうか？
マーカス「いい質問だな。確実に、それって僕らの音楽
に当てはまると思う。ボーズ・オブ・カナダは、ざわつ
いた都市生活から離れた、牧歌的な田園のライフスタイ
ルで知られてるし、それは僕らの音楽のサウンドにも表
れてるけど、同時に僕らは、都市のカルチャーで起きて
ることを完全に把握してるんだ。僕らは住んでる町と正
反対の環境からエレメントを選んで、取り上げて、それ
を自分達の音楽に入れてるんだと思う。例えば、僕らの
トラックにはよくヒップホップのビートがあって、それ
がきちんと作りこまれたオーブン・スペースなサウンド
と対立してる。だから、常にコントラストを生むトリッ
クが仕掛けられてるんだよね」

●ただ、これまでの2枚の作品一一特に、どこか不安や
禍々しいものがいているようなムードを漂わせていた
前作「ジオガディ」と比べると、とても穏やかな高揚感
のある作品に仕上がっています。こうした変化は、どう
いう意図によるものあったのでしょう？
マイク「「ジオガディ」を始めた時は、複雑でダークなレ
コードを作ろうとしてたんだ。で、あのアルバムの作業
の真っ最中、僕らがスタジオにいた時に、NYで9.11が
起きた。それでさらに深く、ダークなレコードを作るの
に沈み込んでいったんだよ。あの時代を反映するように
ね。で、今回のアルバムを始める時には、僕らは二人と
も、周りの世界が実際、9.11当時よりもさらに暗くて油
断のならないものになってるって感じてた。戦争やテロ
リズム、天災が次々に起きて。でも、僕らのリアクショ
ンとしては、それを反映するんじゃなくて、この時代の
対照となるような、逃避的なレコードを作ろうってこと
だった。もっとユートピア的な夢があって、世界の現況
とはまったく関係のないものをね」

●本作のアートワークにちりばめられた、休日の時間を
満喫しているような幸福な表情を浮かべた人々の写真は
どのようにして集められたものなのでしょう？
マーカス「いろんなイメージのミクスチャーなんだ。家
族や友人の写真もあるし、教材から取ってきたものもあ
るし、友達が作った映画のスチールもある。僕は、古い
写真の秘密めいたところが好きなんだよね。ちょっと暖
味で、いくら幸せそうな顔でも、同時に遠く離れた時代
を通じて見てるから、そこには謎めいた曖味なところが
ある。どこか“触れられない”感覚があるんだ」

●こうしたヴィジュアルの引用は、この作品のイメージ
をフォーカスするために用いられたのでしょうか？そ
れとも、むしろ作品全体のイメージを錯乱させることで、
より聴き手がイマジネーションを使うことを促したもの
なのでしょうか？
マイク「うん、絶対に明確なものじゃない。これはイノ
セントで幸せな昔の写真のコラージュなのか、それとも
もっと悪意のあるものなのか。つまり、なんとなく気味
が悪い、スレスレのところで遊んでみたかったんだ。僕
は常に、多くをリスナーの想像力に任せる方が好きなん
だよね。音楽やアートワークで物事をはっきり示してし
まったら、みんながそこに関わっていけなくなると思う。
過去の偉大な曲やアルバムの多くは、ある種の暖味さを
持つものだから」

●こうしたヴィジュアルの引用に、1%でも皮肉は込め
られていますか？
マーカス「どういう意味での”皮肉”かによるんじゃな
いかな。もし、それを“わかりたい”なら、僕らがバン
ドとしてやってること、全部のトーンにピンとこなきゃ
いけないと思う。ある視点から見ると、僕らがこのボー
ズ・オブ・カナダっていうプロジェクトでやってきたこ
とにはどれも、故意に超然としてるようなところがある
んだ。僕らは絶対に、文字通りだったり、無邪気に受け
止められるべきことはやってきてない。常に、ニヤッと
笑って受け止められるようなものなんだ。それは、僕ら
が甘くてハッピーに聞こえるトラックを作る時も同じ。
そこには必ず僕らがそうする理由があって、大抵は僕ら
が微妙で意外なものを投げ入れられる場として、甘いト
ラックが作られてるんだ。だから、変な風に全体がズレ
ていく。だから、うん、このアートワークさえ、額面通
りに受け止められるとは思ってないんだ。画像がぼやけ
て密めいてて、まるで大昔になくした写真みたいで。
もしかすると、20年間水の中に浸かってて、誰かがまた
見つけ出したのかもしれない。これは幸せな写真なのか、
それとも悲しい物語を秘めてるのか、果たしてこの人達
は今も生きてるのか？一ってことがわからないんだ」

●「もはや失われてしまった未来」、あるいは、「もはや
失われてしまった希望」というコンセプトは、ボーズ・
オブ・カナダの音楽、もしくは、本作に何かしら関係は
ありますか？
マーカス「“失われた未来”は、グッド・アイデアだと思
う。どの世代に も、未来がどうなるかについて独自の考
えがあるよね。未来は一体何をもたらすのか。で、一つ
の世代が消えると、未来に対する彼らのヴィジョンも消
えていって、違うものに取って代わられる。マイクと僕
は、70年代後半から80年代初期にあった、ビタースウ
イートで矛盾した未来観にすごく影響されたんだ。当時
のSF映画やSF小説には、未来は素晴らしく驚異的なも
のであると同時に、恐ろしい事態も招くだろうっていう
テーマがあった。その暗くて、パラノイド的な未来観は、
僕らが今日までずっと抱えてきたもので、それを自分自
身のアートや音楽にも注入するのが好きなんだ。君がこ
のレコードからそこを感じ取ったとしたら、次のアルバ
ムではさらに大きくなると思う」

政治はすべてに影響するんだよ。史上最高の音楽、もっとも重要な音楽のいくつかは、プロテストから
生まれてる。70年代のダブやレゲエ、80年代初期の都市部から生まれたニューウェイヴ、
90年代初期の反商業主義的なグランジ・シーン。実際、ポピュラー・ミュージックの起源そのものが
黒人奴隷なんだよ。最悪の状況を糧にした美しい音楽が、口から口へと伝えられていったんだから

●本作は、部分的にでも、失われたものに対するレクイ
エムのような意味合いは持っていますか？だとすれば、
何に対するレクイエムなのでしょうか？
マイク「うん、部分的にね。これはある一人の体験のサ
ウンドトラックみたいなものなんだけど、それは時間的
にも空間的にも、ずっと過去のものになってしまった体
験なんだ。僕としては、ほとんどが消失してしまった力
ルチャーへの哀悼として見てる。ポジティヴで自由な思
考があった、60～70年代北米のクリエイティヴなカル
チャーへの哀悼だね。それはさらに1世紀遡って、ネイ
ティヴ・アメリカンのカルチャーが同じく失われたこと
も再現してるんだ」

●本作のアートワークを含め、あなた達はどこか70年代
初頭から80年代にかけての時代にこだわりを持っている
ように思えます。こうした時代に、あなた達が惹かれる
理由を教えて下さい。
マーカス「僕らの中のいろんなものが形成された時代だ
ったんだ。音楽や映画に興味を持ち始めたのが、70年代
後半で。しばらくカナダに住んでた頃には、アートや音
楽にあの時代にしかない顕著なスタイルがあって、僕ら
はカナダからUKに戻ってきてもそれを忘れなかった。
時々、あの時代のサウンドやフィーリングを現しよう
としてみるんだ。まるで妖精を小瓶にまた捕まえようと
するみたいに。それって何がそんなに特別だったのかを
知り、似たものを再現しようとする作業なんだよね」

●今、振り返ってみて、前作「ジオガディ」がアートワ
ークも含め、夏や火のイメージ、あるいは、どこか宗教
的な儀式のようなものを感じさせるものだったのは、
時のあなた達が何を求めていたからなのでしょう？
マーカス「『ジオガディ！では、音楽と数学と自然界の
バターンをすべて同じレコードのテーマにすることを目
的にしてた。僕らは二人とも、人は自分自身に責任を持
つべきだって考えてるんだ。“神の業”として説明し
てしまわなくても、ライフやアート、自分が住んでる世
界を祝福出来るようになるべきだ、って。キリスト教芸
術では常に、音楽や芸術の偉大な作品は、それを作った
人間よりも大きな存在、偉大な神の創造物にすぎないと
されてきた。でも、僕らが暮らす世界の裏に潜むパター
ンや、宇宙を支配する数理に目を向けたら、美しさと料
学的説明の両方が見えてくるんだよ。「ジオガディ」は
僕らなりに、人は宗教だけでなく、もっと自由に何かを
無仰してもいいってことを言ってるんだ」

●これまでのポーズ・オブ・カナダの音楽には、サンプ
リングされた肉声を挟み込むことによって、音楽の向こ
う側に隠された様々な謎に対するヒントを提示してきま
した。ただ、本作には、そうしたサンプリングされた肉
声はほぼ見当たらず、謎めいた部分がこれまででもっと
も希薄になっています。この変化は、どういう意図によ
るものなのでしょうか？
マーカス「それは単に、もう「ジオガディ」で十分やっ
たからだと思う。今回は見せかけの引用やトリガーでい
っぱいのレコードを作ろうとしたんだ。うまくいったと
思う。このレコードからはいろんなものを引き出すこと
も出来るのに、やっぱり普通の音楽のふりもしてるから
ね。でも、僕らはそういったものだけで知られるように
はなりたくない。やり過ぎになっちゃうポイントがある
んだよ。例えば、インターネットでこのレコードの謎を
解こうと躍起になってる人達がいるって聞いたけど・・・・・・
僕らが意図してないようなものまでね。さっきも言った
けど、ほとんどの場合、僕らはそういうことをアイロニ
ーを込めてやってる。でも、みんなが真剣になり過ぎち
ゃうことが多いんだ。結局、僕らが声を使わなくなった
のは、この新作では音楽に焦点を当てて欲しいっていう
決断に過ぎないんだよ」

●今作のアートワークの基調になっている淡い水色が、
どこか1stアルバムのアートワークの色調と同系色にな
ったことは、この2枚の作品に何かしらの関連や繋がり
があることを示しているのでしょうか？
マイク「ある意味、そうだね。というのも僕らは、『ザ・
キャンプファイア・ヘッドフェイズ」を、三部作の第三
作として見てるから。ある意味、『ミュージック・ハズ・
ザ・ライト・トゥ・チルドレン』のフレッシュで開かれ
たオープン・スペースにまた戻ってきてるんだけど、何
かが変わってしまっていて、でも、もしかすると、あの
レコードよりさらに希望を込めてるのかもしれない。多
分、ここからまったく違うことをするために、道を空け
るみたいにして、これを自分の中から出さなきゃいけな
かったんだと思う」

●これまでの3枚のアルバムにおける感情的なイン＆ヤン
の比率は、それぞれ何%ずつだと思いますか？
マーカス「ははは（笑）。両方のバランスが取れてるとい
いな。それが僕の狙いの一つだから。説明しにくいんだ
けど、僕らはそのバランス、釣り合いをキープするため
に、音楽やアートにたくさんシュールな要素を入れてる。
一つに偏りすぎないためにね。僕らはエモーションとし
て、100％ある方向に向かってるような音楽は好きじゃ
ないんだ。僕らはむしろ常にそこで遊んでる。希望に満
ちたユーフォリックなメロディと、微かな暗さ、底にあ
る気味の悪さを慎重にブレンドしてるんだ」

●音楽には、大勢の人々と一緒に楽しむことでその真価
を発揮するものもあります。ただ、あなた達の音楽の場
合、独りきりで音に向き合うことで、その真価は発揮さ
れるように思います。実際、私自身がボーズ・オブ・カ
ナダの音楽を聴くのは、特に移動中、ヘッドフォンを使
ってです。そうすることで、いろんな過去の記憶や今ま
で経験したことのない未来に触れたような感覚を味わう
ことが出来ます。あなた達にとって、理想的な音楽との
接し方について教えて下さい。
マイク「僕らの音楽を聴く理想的な方法については、も
うすでに君が言ってくれたんじゃないかな。理由はよく
わからないけど、僕らの音楽は独りで体験するのがベス
トなんだ。もしかすると、僕らが、パブリックな文脈に
おいて使われることをあんまり念頭に置かずに書いてる
からかもしれない。自分達の音楽を、パーティ・ミュー
ジック、ダンス・ミュージック、人がそれに合わせてロ
ックする音楽としては考えてないんだ。むしろこれはリ
スナーが自分のパーソナルな思考を広げるためのサウン
ドトラックで、自分が今いる場所や時間から離れるため
のツールみたいなものなんだ」

●ボーズ・オブ・カナダの音楽は、往々にして、聴き手
の記憶を刺激すると考えています。ただ、あなた達自身
としては、自分達の音楽に、様々な過去への橋渡しとい
う機能を意識的に与えたことはありましたか？本作に
おいては、どうでしょう？
マーカス「それは常に、僕らが意図してやってることだ
ね。アルバムを作る時に、一番時間をかけてるところか
もしれない。僕らはたくさん曲を書いて、その中には奥
型的なボーズ・オブ・カナダのトラックとは根本的に違
うものもあるんだ。でも、リリースする作品に収録する
のは、どこか親しみのある、ノスタルジックな曲になっ
たりする。僕らはずっと、それを音楽の中に捕まえよう
と苦心してるんだよ。すべての人々に共通する記憶があ
って、あるサウンドや引用でそれを呼び起こせるんじゃ
ないか？そんな風にね」

●ボーズの音楽には、どこが古代からずっと鳴り続けて
いる音楽のある一部を掬い取ったようなイメージがあり
ます。これは、あなた達の中の、音楽そのもののあるべ
き姿に対する思想が反映されているのでしょうか？
マイク「面白い指摘だね。っていうのも、僕ら自身、音
楽を作る作業は、これまで存在しなかったものを発明す
るような単純なことじゃないんじゃないか、って話した
ことがあるんだ。すべての美しい音楽は、すでに天空の
どこかに存在してるっていう理論がある。偉大なミュー
ジシャンはラジオみたいなもので、その音楽に波長を合
わせて、録音出来る形に書き取ってるだけだって。ブラ
イアン・ウィルソンが"ゴッド・オンリー・ノウズを
思い付いた時について、似たようなことを言ってるのを
僕は聞いたし、デヴィッド・ボウイの似たコメントも読
んだことがある。もしかすると、僕らは、ただ天空のア
ンテナに波長が合ってるだけなのかもしれないね」

●では、我々が暮らしている現在の世界の政治的な不安
定さは、どの程度、ボーズ・オブ・カナダの音楽に影響
を及ぼしていますか？
マーカス「今の状況を見てると、僕はこのカオスにイン
スパイアされた、暗くて、難しいものを作りたくなる時
がある。でも、他の日には、一番のアプローチはそれに
反発して、もっと新鮮でポジティヴなものを作ることだ
って感じるんだ。だって、人々を恐怖に陥らせて、日常
的に続がらせておくことに関しては、世界中のメディア
が十分いい仕事をやってるからね。僕らがそれを後押し
する必要はどこにもない。僕らの音楽にも、ダークで、
シュールな部分はあるけど、底に流れるメッセージは常
に、希望と自由なんだよ」

●本作のディテールにおいて、その影響を特定出来る部
分はありますか？
マイク「スロウ・ディス・バード・ダウン”っていう曲
には、二重の意味があるんだ。一つは、まるでバイロッ
トが飛行機の向きを変えて、どこかに着陸しようとする
時に言いそうなフレーズだよね。「この鳥の速度を落とせ」
って。でも、同時に、それは僕らが知る世界に対するコ
メントでもある。なんていうか、「すべてがあまりにも速
すぎて、混乱しすぎてるから、みんな何が大切かをしっ
かり見極めて、それを守らなきゃいけない」みたいな。
よりシンプルで、ナイーヴな時代を懐かしんでるのは僕
一人じゃないと思う。誰もが水平線を見て、何かを待ち
わびたりしていなかった時代。あの曲を聴くと、僕はま
るで大きな黒い雲がついに晴れてきて、ささやかな希望
が顔を出してきたみたいに感じるんだ」

●ベックは、以前、「音楽は、政治や経済の外側に存在
するタイムレスなもの。自分自身の音楽がそういうこと
に影響されることは極めて少ない」と語っていました。
彼の発言に対する、あなた達の所感を数えて下さい。
マーカス「質成は出来ないんじゃないかな。勿論、音楽
には完璧に逃避的になれるパワーがあって、すべてがフ
アンタジーだと言えるかもしれない。でも、政治はすべ
てに影響するんだよ。これまでも常にそうだった。60年
代のサイケデリックなヒッピー・カルチャーだって、そ
こから生まれたポピュラー・ミュージックだって、みん
なよく知るように、当時の帝国主義的で非情な政治への
反発だったわけだしね。史上最高の音楽、もっとも重要
な音楽のいくつかはプロテストから生まれてる。70年代
のタブやレゲエ、80年代初期の都市部から生まれた二
ューウェイヴ・ミュージック、90年代初期の反商業主
義的なグランジ・シーン。実際、ポピュラー・ミュージ
ックの起源そのものが黒人奴隷なんだよ。最悪の状況を
湿にした美しい音楽が、口から口へと人々に伝えられて
いったんだから」

●これは、本作における“84ポンティアック・ドリーム”
や“ティアーズ・フロム・ザ・コンバウンド・アイ”と
いったタイトルからインスパイアされた質問です。スー
バー・ファーリー・アニマルズのグリフは、彼らの最新
作に収められた曲について、「政治的な絶望から、地球
外生物の立場になって、人類の行く末を眺めたような歯
を書いた」と語っていました。あなた達にとっても、人
間ではなく、他の生物や自然、もしくは、人工物の視点
から、作品を作るというアイデアは、あなた達の中にあ
りますか？
マイク「グリフの発言は興味深いな。時々、僕もそうや
って曲を響くから。インストゥルメンタル・バンドであ
ることには利点も欠点もあって、即座に伝わる声のメッ
セージがない代わりに、曲の裏側に変なテーマをしのば
せるチャンスにはずっと自由に恵まれてるんだよね。僕
はずっと、黙示録のアイデアに取り憑かれてた。僕らの
知る社会の終焉と、そこから生き延びる可能性に。それ
は僕らの好きな時代、70年代のSFですごく人気のあっ
たテーマで、当時のSFはほとんどが暗くて、アルマゲド
ンとか、人類のダークな未来を描いてたんだ。僕は時々、
自分はそうした時代と、さらにその先に流れるような音
楽を書いてるんじゃないかって想像することがある」

●同じくスーパー・ファーリー・アニマルズは、人類の
滅亡そのものは、宇宙全体や人類以外の生物にとっては
決して悲しむべきことではないというテーマを持った、
“イッツ・ノット・ジ・エンド・オブ・ザ・ワールドで
という曲をいたこともあります。そうした態度は、シ
ニカルなものだと思いますか？
マーカス「ははは（笑）。まあ、もしそういうこと（人類
の滅亡）が実際に起きたとても、僕らみんなそうなって
然だ、って言っていいんじゃないかな」

●皮肉やアイロニーは、ボーズ・オブ・カナダの音楽の
中に、どの程度、存在しますか？
マイク「君が思ってるより、ずっと多いよ」

●ボーズ・オブ・カナダの音楽は、様々な意味において
今もスポイルされ続けている我々の世代を象徴する、あ
るいは、代表している部分はあると思いますか？
マーカス「いや、むしろ僕らの音楽は、その世代にとっ
てのオルタナティヴだと思う。現代のジェネレーション
のためにあるカルチャーの大半は、思考するのをやめて
しまって、スイッチを切るためのものなんだ。僕らの音
楽は、つい最近まであった、よりシンプルな世界を覚え
ている世代に語りかけるものかもしれない。インターネ
ットや携帯電話、TVゲームなんかが出てくるすぐ前にあ
った世界。僕らの年齢の世代は、時代のかなり大きな変
化に立ち会ってるんだよ」

●だとすれば、特に、我々の世代のどんな感情的側面を、
主に表現しているのでしょう？
マーカス「僕らはもっと自由に考えること、自分自身の
アートを作り出したり、『何かに合わせなきゃ」とか「メ
インストリームの一部にならなきゃ」なんて感じずに行
勤を起こしたり出来るように、みんなをインスパイアし
ようとしてるんだと思う。ディーヴォの主張と同じさ。
僕らは“クールなのはもう沢山”なんだ。社会的にでも
いいし、アートにおいてでもいいし、地理的にでも政治
的にでもいい。とにかく自分自身の道を進むよう、人を
インスパイア出来たらいいと思ってる」

●あなたなら、我々の世代に、どんな名前をつけます
か？ マイク「多分、“アパセティック（無感情な）・ジェネ
ーション”だな」

●自分達の音楽が根差しているとあなた達自身が感じて
いる、ある時代のある特定の文化があれば教えて下さい。
マーカス「僕らは70年代から80年代初期にかけての北
米カルチャー、映画や音楽にすごくインスパイアされる。
あの時代のメディアには、ポジティヴなシンボリズムが
あるんだ。当時はそんなにわからなかった。冷戦やヴェ
トナム戦争みたいなものへの反発でもあったからね。で
も、今見るとクリアなのは、あれってまるで蛍光色の虹
みたいなシンボリズムなんだよ。すべてにそれが影響し
てるんだー一TVの教育番組やSF、音楽革命、オリンビ
ックのためのデザインみたいなグラフィック・アート、
サマー・キャンプ、ウィンター・スポーツ、『セサミ・ス
トリート」にさえ見つけることが出来る。うまく言えな
いんだけど、僕らにとっては、常にあれがエネルギーに
なるんだ」

●ある時期までのローリング・ストーンズは、「決して老
いさらばえることはない若さ」というファンタジーを聴
き手に与えてきました。ある時期までのマイケル・ジャ
クソンは、「決して大人にならないピュアネス」というフ
アンタジーをリスナーに与えてきました。もし仮にボー
ズ・オブ・カナダの音楽が、リスナーに与えるファンタ
ジーがあるとすれば、それは何だと思いますか？
マイク「多分、“鏡の向こう側みたいな場所のサウンド
トラック”かな。これを聴くと自分が知ってる世界の別
ヴァージョンへ飛び込めて、そこでは歴史が枝分かれし
て、すべてが変な方向に向かってるんだ」

Note: Translated by ChatGPT-4o

A music of struggle, possessing a firm will and ideals, even without words. Protest music that refuses to accept the absurdities and tragedies happening in this era. This is exactly what defines Boards of Canada. Their third album, The Campfire Headphase, released three and a half years after their previous work, unfolds a dazzling utopian world. However, within the gaps of its fantastical sound lies a sense of pain, acknowledging that this beautiful world has already been lost. In other words, capturing this excessively beautiful "lost future" is their protest against the abominable world we live in.

We must liberate Boards of Canada's music from the narrow genre of ambient electronic music. Similarly, we must free their music from the image of being instrumental music without any assertions, ideology, or irony. Because Boards of Canada's music is a music of struggle with solid ideals, a music of resistance that never succumbs to the current reality.

Boards' third album, The Campfire Headphase, released three and a half years after their previous work, Geogaddi, is probably the most beautiful record released this year. No matter when or where you listen to it, it invites you into a comfortable reverie, as if flowing through an ideal utopia. From the gentle sound of the acoustic guitar rising from beyond the sound of rippling waves, to the layered rainbow textures on top of steady breakbeats—there is a beauty and harmony that makes you want to immerse yourself in this comfort forever. It's a truly beautiful work that, once in your hands, you will never want to let go of.

But in truth, this record is not just about comfort. It expresses a beauty and harmony that once surely existed in this world, but also coexists with a sense of pain that most of it has now been lost. There is a deep feeling of melancholy. Like looking at a happy childhood photo with family who are no longer in this world, there is a sweet and sour sadness spreading very quietly.

Happy memories, and the pain of them being lost and existing only in the past—this contrast is precisely Boards of Canada's assertion. In other words, "Why has that wonderful world vanished?" Boards' music, which depicts the ultimate world of beauty, is a form of nostalgia as a protest, a melancholy as an objection to the current state of the world that has been changed mainly by the governments of advanced countries over the past century.

The following is a written interview with the two members of Boards of Canada, Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin, who spoke candidly about our prepared questions.

interview with MIKE SANDISON

AND MARCUS EOIN

"When you look at the current situation, there are times when you feel inspired to create something dark and difficult, inspired by the chaos. However, the best approach is to go against that and create something fresher and more positive. After all, the world's media is doing a good enough job of scaring people on a daily basis. Our music has dark parts, but the underlying message is always hope and freedom."

"Politics influences everything. Some of the greatest and most important music in history has been born from protest: 70s dub and reggae, the early 80s urban new wave, the early 90s anti-commercial grunge scene. In fact, the very origins of popular music stem from black slaves. Beautiful music nourished by the worst circumstances was passed down orally."

---

Death Under The Sun

title	Death Under The Sun
author	Phil Canning
publication	Play
date	2006/04
issue	Play
pages	50-52

"Death Under The Sun" is an interview (in Russian) by Phil Canning (Translated by Miloslav Chemodanov) originally published April 2006, in Play magazine No. 04 (83).

смерть Под солНцем

Текст Фил КЭННИНГ

Они не часто дают интервью, эти братья Сэндисон. Потому же, почему они отказываются использовать в своей музыке вокал. Они хотят, чтобы музыка была таинственной. Чтобы в ней оставалось волшебство. Они могут себе это позволить: недаром их альбом „Geogaddi" включен РLАY в пятерку лучших электронных пластинок XXI века. Но нет правил без исключений. Спустя пять месяцев с релиза их самого последнего альбома, „Тhе Campfire Hеаdрhаsе", шотландский дуэт вдохновенных электронных продюсеров ВОАRDS ОF СANADА вдруг соглашается приоткрыть завесу тайны над их работой.

Перевод Милослав ЧЕМОДАНОВ

Рецензию на альбом Воаrds Оf Сапаdа „Тhе Campfire Hеаdphasе" читайте в РLAY №21, 2005

This article needs to be translated. If you can provide a translation, please update this article!

ROUGH GOOGLE TRANSLATION:

Death Under The Sun

Text by Phil Canning

They don't give interviews often, those Sandison brothers. The same reason why they refuse to use vocals in their music. They want the music to be mysterious. To keep the magic in it. They can afford it: it's not for nothing that their album "Geogaddi" is included in the top five electronic records of the 21st century by PLAY. But there are no rules without exceptions. ВОАRDS OF CANADA suddenly agrees to lift the veil of secrecy over their work.

Translation by Miloslav Chemodanov

Review of the album Boards Of Canada "The Campfire Headphase" read in PLAY No. 21, 2005

---

The Essence Of Their Artistry

title	The Essence Of Their Artistry
author	Takanori Shiba
publication	rockin'on
date	2006/07
issue	7
pages	72-75

The Essence Of Their Artistry was an interview (in Japanese) by Takanori Shiba originally published July 2006 in rockin'on magazine issue 7 pp. 72-75.

Note: Transcription by Apple's Live Text on a MacBook Pro

BOARDS OF CANADA

音が空間に響いて空気を揺らすことで生じる、
魔法のようなものを閉じこめたいと思っている
エレクトロニカの極北から、サイケデリアの至宝へー。
唯一無比の音風景を生み出し続けるボーズ・オブ・カナダ、その真髄を解析する！
インタヴュー：柴那典通訳：長沢朋子

昨年10月にリリースされたBOCの『ザ・キ ャンプファイア・ヘッドフェイズ』は、とても 不思議な感触を持ったアルバムだった。何しろ、 半年経った今聴いても、初めて耳にした時の感 触から全く色褪せていないのである。いや・・・・・・ より正確に言うなら、最初に聴いた時に「すでに完璧に色褪せている」サウンドだったのだ。 彼ら曰く「普通のポップ・アルバムが太陽に20年間さらされたような感じ」。生楽器を多用し、それを丹念に加工してアナログなヴィンテージ 感を生み出し、それによって、微妙な揺らぎと柔らかなぬくもりに満ちたサウンドスケープを作り出す。だから、まるで「架空の過去」に誘い込まれるような、幻想的なサイケデリアに包まれる。こんな音の作り方をしているアーティストはほかにいるだろうか？エレクトロニカの界隈のアーティストとして捉えられることの多いBOCだけれど、最早その枠組みは完全に超えている。いわば、インストウルメンタル・ミュージックの一つの到達点となるアルバムだった、とさえ思う。 このたびリリースされたEP『トランス・カナダ・ハイウェイ』は、昨年からリリースが計画されていたもので、いわばアルバムの続編的な内容。アルバムでも屈指のポップネスを持っていた一曲"Dayvan Cowboy"と、『ジオガディ』以前の彼らを彷彿させるエレクトリックな新曲4曲を収録している。このEPを機に、アルバム『ザ・キャンプファイア～』、そして彼らの音楽の根核となっている感覚までを掘り下げて、メールで訊いてみた。 ●EP『トランス・カナダ・ハイウェイ』は、アルバム『ザ・キャンプファイア・ヘッドフェイズ』と地続きのテイストながら、新たなイメージの広がりを感じるEPですね。単なるシン

グル・カットのようなものとは違う意味合いを持つEPだと思うんですが、あなたにとってはどういうものを作れたという手応えがあります か？ マイク「去年、アルバムの仕上げに入った時点で、この後すぐにEPをリリースしようと決めたんだ。そのときも新曲を書き続けていたからね。それで、シングルをリリースする話が出たときに、それならシングルじゃなくてEPにして、新しい曲もいくつか聴いてもらえるようにしようと、こちらから提案したんだ。このEPでは、アルバムで繰り広げた旅の続きという雰囲気を出したかった。アルバムに入っていた曲で幕を開けて、徐々にもっと冷ややかなモードへと移っていく、という。だから、『トランス・カナダ・ハイウェイ』というタイトルは、あのアルバムの『車での長旅』というテーマと地続きでつながっているんだ。本物のトランス・カナダ・ハイウェイ（カナダ横断道路）はたしか世界でいちばん長い道のはずだから、冒険を進めていく道としてはぴったりじゃないのかな」 ●EPの新曲はアルバムよりエレクトロニックな作りになっていると思うんですが、アルバム以降こうしたモードに変化してきた理由は？ マーカス「レコードを作るときはいつも、何かしら一貫したテーマ、あるいはフレイヴァーのようなものを持たせようとしている。今回の場合は、それが素朴な味わいのギターや、メジャーコードを多用したコード進行だった。僕たちの場合、レコードによって発想の根本そのものが変わっていくことはあまりなくて、そのときに感じている気分を、的確に表現するレコードを作ろうとしているからね」 ●では、4つの新曲はどのようなものにインスパイアされてできたのでしょう？ マイク「たぶん、あのときは『ザ・キャンプフ

アイア〜』の後で、あそこまで濃密だったり、重層的だったりしないものが作りたいというだけだったと思う。あのアルバムの曲はすごく込み入ったものばかりだったからね。それに比べると、今度のEPに入れた新曲は、どれも僕たちのごく初期の作品に近いものになっている。 あのアルバムよりミニマルだし、空間のあるサウンドと言えるんじゃないのかな」 ●では、アルバムからの曲で"Dayvan Cowboy"を選んだのは何故？この曲が突出しているポイントはどこにあるんでしょうか？ マーカス「僕たちが今までリリースした中でも、もっともポップ・ソング的な構造を持つ曲だね。 かなりパンチのあるポップ・トラックという意味で、僕たちの今までの作品でも突出した存在なんだ。特に、後半の劇的な展開で、曲がどんどん盛りあがっていくところがね。アルバムができあがったときは、『この曲をシングルにするべきだ』って、ずいぶん言われたよ。普段の僕たちだと、わかりやすいコード進行がある曲はすごく少ない。けれど、この曲は特別で、完成したとき、WARPはこの曲をとても気に入って、これはぜひシングルにすべきだと言ってきたんだ。それで僕たちも「しかたないな、別にいいよ』 と返事をしたんだけど」 ●"Dayvan Cowboy"では初のPVも作成しましたよね。もともとBOCの音楽の成り立ち自体が映像と非常に関連があるものだったので、これが初のPVというのも意外な気がしたんですけれども。 マイク「あのビデオは自分たちで作ったんじゃないんだ。大予算で最新のヴィジュアルを作るノウハウを僕たちよりずっとよく知ってる友達がいて、その人がやってくれたんだよ。でも、向こうからあの曲のビデオを作りたいという話が来たとき、僕たちは『いいよ、ただし、何も

かもが本当にミニマルで、DIYで、安くないとだめだからね！』と言ったんだ。僕たちはずっと前から、自分たちで映像も作ってきて、その一部をライヴやイベントで使ってきたけれど、特定の曲に合わせたビデオは一度も作ったことがなかった。そのいちばんの理由は、ビデオを作ると、音楽から何かが損なわれてしまうと思っていたからなんだ。インストウルメンタル・ミュージックには独特の魔法みたいなものがあって、それはヴィジュアルがつくとだめになってしまう。だから、ビデオを作ることにはずっと反対だったんだ。でも、今回に限って言えば、サウンドそのものがすでに"ポップ"なわけだから、ビデオを作ったからって特に何かが失われることもないと踏んだんだ」 マーカス「僕たちは70年代の映画やドキュメンタリーをこよなく愛しているのだけれど、このビデオを作ってくれた友達も、同じくらいそういうものが好きなんだ。たとえば、70年代のサ 1フィンを追ったドキュメンタリー、『crystalVoyager』とかね。実際、何年か前には、ああいうスタイルでミュージック・ビデオを作れたら最高だろうね、という話をしたこともあった。 それで去年、アルバム用に"Dayvan Cowboy"を完成させたとき、これが僕たちなりの『サーフィン賛歌』だという手応えがはっきりあったので、前のアイディアが再浮上してきたわけなんだよ」 ●前のタイミングで取材できなかったんで、アルバム『ザ・キャンプファイア〜』についても訊きたいんですけれども。このアルバムは生楽器を多用して、まさに古い映画のような質感を持つサウンドで占められていましたよね。『ミュージック・ハズ・ザ・ライト・トゥ・チルドレン』とも『ジオガディ」とも違う方向性だったと思うのですが、まずそういうアプローチを

とる必要性はどこに感じていたんでしょう？ マイク「最初の2枚で表現したサウンドは、僕たちの取り組んできたことの一面にすぎないし、実際、『ミュージック～』をリリースする前まではずっと、ギターやアコースティックな楽器を使った音楽をたくさん書いていたんだ。あのアルバムと、それに続く『ジオガディ』は、僕たちの作品としては初めて世界規模でリスナーの耳に触れたものだったので、ボーズ・オブ・カナダといえばこの2枚のようなエレクトロニック・サウンドで、これ以外の要素はないと早合点されてしまったんだと思う。でも、僕たちに言わせれば、これはあくまでひとつの側面にすぎないんだ」 ●『ジオガディ』以降のBOCにはエレクトロニカ／ラップトップ・ミュージックの代表格のようなイメージができたと思うんですが、そういう括りを窮屈に感じていた面はありました？ マイク「何とも言えないな。あるシーンの代表格、と言われるのは、それがどんなシーンであれ、非常に光栄でもあるけれど、そこに落とし穴がある、とも言えるからね。ただ、ラップトップ・シーンの代表格、という呼び名にはまったく納得できない。僕たちは音楽を作るのに、ラップトップはまったく使っていないからね。それには無理があるよ。僕たちのレコードに入っているサウンドは、何らかのかたちで実際の楽器を使って演奏して、僕たち自身がマイクで収録したものが大部分なんだ。最終的にサンプラ 1に収められるとしても、その前に一度、その音が空間に響いて空気を揺らすことで生じる、何か魔法のようなものを閉じこめたいと思っている。だから、僕たちのレコードの中でいちばん人工的な音でも、込み入った手法を駆使して、僕たち二人が完全に人力で作りあげたものなんだ」 ●実際、『ザ・キャンプファイア〜』でのサウ ンド、特にギターの音には60年代のクラシックなロックや90年代のシューゲイザー・バンドを感じさせるような、ざらついた乾いた感じがあると思います。そういう色褪せたヴィンテージ感のあるものをやろうと思った動機は？イマジネーションの源泉になったものはあります？ マイク「実はこのアルバムは、タイトル通り、キャンプファイアの場面を想像しながら作ったんだ。何人かの友達と一緒に、たき火を囲んでいるというイメージだね。僕たちは最近、昔のレコードをたくさん聴いていたんだ。アーティストの名前で言うと、ドノヴァンやジョニ・ミッチェル、ゴールデン・アバター、ジョン・ケイル、キャプテン・ビーフハートとか。だから、あのアルバムでは、展開されるメロディは僕たち独特のものだけれど、サウンドや音の感触は、今名前を挙げたようなアーティストによる昔の名作の雰囲気もにおわせているんだよ」 ●では、振り返ってみてあのアルバムで成し遂げたことは何がいちばん大きいと思いますか？ マイク「たぶん、このアルバムは今後、独特のフレイヴァーを持った作品としてとらえられることになるだろうね。まるで夏のような前向きなムードがあって、そこが僕たちのほかの作品とは大きく違う。僕たちは、アルバムを作るごとに、前とは違った新鮮な気分を表現したいと思っている。これから先、さらに何枚かアルバムを作ってからこのアルバムを振り返ったときに、誰もいない海岸に座ってぼんやりと記憶を思い返しているときに聴きたくなるようなアルバムになっていたらいいんだけれど」 ●では、BOCの音楽全般についても訊こうと思うんですが。BOCの音楽には、どのアルバムや作品をとってみても、一般的なロックやポップス、またテクノやエレクトロニカとも構造の違う独特のサイケデリアがありますよね。こ ういうサウンドを生み出せているのは、二人のどんな資質によるものなんでしょう？ マイク「僕たちは、はっきりとした構成を持つポップ・ソングと、抽象的で明確な構成のない実験的な音楽の間の、微妙な境界線を歩いている。だから僕たちの曲には、ヴァースやコーラスがあって、メロディにもフックがある、ふつうのポップ・ソング的なものもあるけれど、そうしたものでも、どこか落ち着かない、あるいはこういう曲にはふさわしくないように思える要素を、意識的に織り込んでいる。2つの曲を同時にかけてみたら、違う要素がうまく衝突して、どっちの曲とも違う、よりよい音楽ができるような感じだね。それ以外の部分は、僕たちの音楽は、えんえんと鳴り続ける単調な音や、何が何だかわからない、不思議な環境音で満たされている。ありきたりの音楽を、断片化して、ゆがんだやり方で再現するという、そこがとても好きだね。僕たちがめざしているのは、わかりやすい、今までのポップ・ソングと何も変わらないものをテーマとしながら、それを文字通り壊したりひねったりしてみて、ふつうのポッ 予想外のものにしてくことなんだ」 ●自分たちの発想がほかのロック・バンドやエレクトロニック・アーティストと違うと思う面はどんなものがありますか？ マイク「何とも答えにくい質問だね。自分が頭の中で考えていることしか、僕にはわからないから。僕たち二人は、今のロックやエレクトロニック、あるいはポップ・ミュージックの世界で、自分たちの音楽が一角を占めているとは思っていないんだ。曲を書いているときは、自分たちのいる、閉じた世界の外をいつも想像している。まるで、僕たちの作っている作品が、ほかの人が今聴いているものとは違う世界から来 ているような感覚だね」 ●また、特筆すべきはメロディやハーモニーの美しさでもあると思います。リスナーはそれぞれそのメロディから切なさや幻想性や寂しさや心地よさを受け取っていると思うのですが、あなたが音楽を作るときにそれらの感情を込めている、という感覚はある？ マイク「もちろん。それが、BOCをやっているそもそもの目的だからね。シンプルな音の連なりを奏でるだけで、聴いた人が何かとても深いことを悟ったり、ひどく悲しい気分になったりする、そこに僕はたまらなく心惹かれる。そこにはものすごい力があって、錬金術みたいだとさえ思うよ」 ●では、あなたが音楽以外で「美しい」と思うものは？それを音楽のかたちで表現してきたという感覚はあります？ マイク「音楽の中にある"悲しさ、はとても美しい。そして、楽しく聞こえるけれど、その根底にはかすかな悲しさが流れているような、そういうメロディを作り出せたら、それは本当の不柄の傑作と言えるだろうね。僕がいつも、悪戦苦闘しながらめざしてるのも、そこなんだ」 ●では、最後の質問。もし「これができたらB 0Cを止めてもいい！」と思えるような最終目標があったら、教えてください。 マイク「そこが問題なんだよ。ギリシャ神話のタンタロスの話（※果物の木や泉がそばにあるのに、手を伸ばすと両方とも遠ざかってしまう罰を受けた残忍な王の話）と一緒で。いつの日か僕たちは完璧な音楽を作り出すんじゃないか、という感覚はある。今まで聴いたどんな音楽よりも美しくて、胸を締め付けるような、そういう曲を。でもひょっとすると、そこにたどり着こうと努力をしているうちに、一生を終えてしまう運命なんじゃないかという気もするんだ」

Note: Translation by ChatGPT-o4

BOARDS OF CANADA

From the farthest reaches of electronica to the treasures of psychedelia—aiming to capture something magical, born from sound resonating in space and vibrating the air. Boards of Canada continue to create a unique sonic landscape like no other. Here, we delve into the essence of their artistry!

Interview by: Takanori Shiba
Translation by: Tomoko Nagasawa

Released last October, Boards of Canada's The Campfire Headphase was an album with a truly unique feel. Even six months later, listening to it still evokes the same vivid impression as the first time. Or, to put it more accurately, the sound was 'already perfectly faded' right from the first listen.

As they described it, it's like 'a regular pop album that's been left out in the sun for twenty years.' They make extensive use of live instruments, carefully processed to create an analog vintage feel, which produces a subtle shimmer and soft warmth within the soundscape. This wraps listeners in a fantastical psychedelia that feels like being drawn into an 'imaginary past.' Are there any other artists creating sounds in this way? While Boards of Canada are often categorized as electronica, they have completely transcended that boundary. One could even say this album marks a milestone in instrumental music.

Their latest release, the Trans Canada Highway EP, was planned for release since last year and can be seen as a kind of sequel to the album. It includes "Dayvan Cowboy", one of the album's most accessible tracks, along with four new electric tracks reminiscent of their work before Geogaddi. Through this EP, we took the opportunity to explore The Campfire Headphase album and the core of their musical sensibility through a written interview.

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The Color Purple

title	The Color Purple
author	Steve Beckett
publication	Self-Titled Mag
date	2009-09-04
issue
pages

The Color Purple: From Aphex Twin to Autechre, Chris Cunningham to Boards of Canada, Steve Beckett Gives Us a Guide to Warp’s 20 Year is a 2009 interview with surviving Warp Records co-founder Steve Beckett published on self-titled magazine's website on 4 September 2009. In the article, Beckett comments on the label's artists, including a section on Boards of Canada.

Unlike with Aphex [Twin], I’m in constant contact with them. They’re just absolute perfectionists—they won’t let anything slip through the net that they aren’t 100-percent comfortable with. They’ll literally have 150 to 200 tracks and try to narrow it all down to the best 18 for an album, or something like that. They’ll throw away two or three albums to get to one.

Most people look at them as electronic artists, but they can also sit down and strum acoustic guitars, or play the piano, next to each other and sing harmonies. They’ve just got amazing musical knowledge and skills that comes through the music. They’re definitely closer to [a new record], but their concept of time is different than most people.

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Tomorrow's Harvest era

We've Become a Lot More Nihilstic over the Years

title	We've Become a Lot More Nihilistic over the Years
author	Louis Pattison
publication	The Guardian
date	2013-06-07
issue	Online
pages

"We've Become a Lot More Nihilistic over the Years" is a 2013 interview by Louis Pattison. It originally appeared online at The Guardian.

Few groups of recent times have been quite so mythologised as Boards Of Canada. Whether it's down to their veiled musical references to numerology and occultism, or their impressively low public profile – few interviews, even fewer live shows – but you could say that these two brothers have become something of a cult themselves, with an online fanbase that picks over everything Boards with forensic vigour.

Hailing from rural Scotland, Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin started making music together as children, influenced by sci-fi cinema and the documentaries of the National Film Board of Canada. Their music – which first properly crystallised on their debut album, 1998's Music Has The Right To Children – is a spectral, nostalgic electronica into which is encoded a wealth of half-submerged samples and subliminal messages, from robotic voices and the sound of children at play to references to the Branch Davidian cult that perished at Waco, Texas.

The new album Tomorrow's Harvest was announced back in April in a manner designed to stoke their mystique – a 12-inch record that popped up in the racks of the New York record shop Other Music, blank but for a shimmering melody and a robotic voice intoning a string of numbers: a cipher for the fans to crack. The record itself, their first in eight years, strikes a darker note than 2005's sun-dappled The Campfire Headphase, its pulsing synthesisers and woozy drones implying a creeping, radioactive menace.

Having agreed to a rare interview with the Guardian, the duo insist that it is conducted via email and they are not altogether keen to unpick the themes of Tomorrow's Harvest. "I think it would kind of neuter it if we completely spell it out," writes Sandison. But their answers provide plenty for Boards of Canada cult members to pore over in the months to come ...

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Brothers Who Make Electronica by Hand

title	Brothers Who Make Electronica by Hand
author	Jon Pareles
publication	The NY Times
date	2013-06-11
issue	Online
pages

"Brothers Who Make Electronica by Hand" is a 2013 interview by Jon Pareles. It originally appeared online in The NY Times. ^[21]

Boards of Canada thrive on making themselves scarce. A duo of brothers from rural Scotland, Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin, the group has been releasing electronic music since the mid-1990s — music that eludes most standard pop notions of electronica and has built a fiercely dedicated following among fellow musicians and producers.

It’s usually amorphous, not crisp; it doesn’t aim for the dance floor. Bits of melody or rhythm, or stray human voices, surface, only to dissolve into disorienting ambiences; even brief tracks are eventful. They work on their own time frame; the new Boards of Canada album, “Tomorrow's Harvest” (Warp), is their first release since 2006, and it’s rich in moody suspense, with even fewer bucolic moments than past releases.

The brothers stay largely private; they have not performed since 2001. The following exchange — their only United States interview for this album — took place via e-mail, and has been slightly edited.

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The Charms of the Sphinx

title	The Charms of the Sphinx
author	Michael Döringer & Thaddeus Herrmann
publication	De:Bug
date	2013-06-17
issue	Online
pages

"The Charms of the Sphinx" is a 2013 interview by Michael Döringer & Thaddeus Herrmann. It originally appeared online at De:Bug ^[22]. Published also in De:Bug Magazine No.174 Jul/Aug 2013, pg.06-15.

Exclusive interview in all of its unabridged glory (English)

Board of Canada are masters of the big guessing game: What is all this dark beauty about? In an exclusive interview with the Berlin based monthly magazine DE:BUG, Marcus and Mike Sandison shed some light on how their new album “Tomorrow's Harvest” came about, how they explain their influence and how they see the world they live in. But they leave us with many more questions: Is there a really mystery or just the allurement of a Sphinx without a secret?

The following interview will appear in an edited, translated version in DE:BUG 174, July/August 2013, hitting the newsstands in Germany, Austria and Switzerland on June 28th.

Interview: Michael Döringer & Thaddeus Herrmann

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L'Assenza Di Domani

title	L'Assenza Di Domani
author	Damir Ivic
publication	Il Mucchio
date	July 1st, 2013
issue	Jul + Aug 2013
pages

"L'Assenza Di Domani" is a 2013 interview in Italian by Damir Ivic. It originally appeared in Il Mucchio magazine Jul + Aug 2013.

Da un lato è bello il mistero. Un mistero fatto di assenze, di interviste rarissime ed esibizioni live ancora più rare. Dall’altro, qualche anno fa, ci era capitato di passare quasi un intero pomeriggio con Marcus e Mike Sandison, scoprendo due persone cordiali e gradevolissime. Stavolta l’unico modo per raggiungerli è la mail. Ma traspaiono lo stesso attitudini, idee, modi di fare e di ragionare; e una linearità di pensiero che veramente si fa beffe delle inutili complicazioni o delle fastidiose superficialità di tutto ciò che è (troppo) contemporaneo. Si parla molto e soprattutto del loro ultimo lavoro appena uscito, Tomorrow's Harvest, perché gli spunti decisamente non mancano.

On one hand, mystery is fascinating. A mystery made of absences, rare interviews and even rarer live performances. On the other hand, a few years ago, we happened to spend almost an entire afternoon with Marcus and Mike Sandison, discovering two friendly and very pleasant guys. This time, however, the only possible way to reach them was by e-mail, but the same attitudes, ideas, ways of doing and thinking shine through, together with a linearity of thought that mocks of unnecessary complications and annoying superficialities of anything that is (too) contemporary. There is a lot of talk around the band, especially about their latest album, "Tomorrow's Harvest", which surely doesn't lack in sparks and ideas.

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Les Champs de la Machine

title	Les Champs de la Machine
author	Sylvain Collin
publication	Magic RPM
date	July 3rd, 2013
issue	174
pages

"Les Champs de la Machine" is a 2013 interview in French by Sylvain Collin. It originally appeared in Magic RPM.

Boards Of Canada

Dossier coordonné par Jean-François Le Puil

Article et Interview Sylvain Collin

Photographies Iain Campbell

Les Moissons du Ciel

La nostalgie comme arme de destruction massive : Boards Of Canada est allé chercher dans le passé un moyen (imaginaire) d’anéantir l’idéologie du progrès technologique que l’on nous vend au quotidien. La fratrie est revenue du voyage avec Tomorrow's Harvest, véritable petit chef-d’oeuvre de la musique électronique. Élaboré pendant plusieurs années, cet album exhorte l’auditeur à fantasmer une fin du monde différente : une apocalypse ironique et onirique. Un dialogue fantastique et jubilatoire entre George Orwell et George A. Romero mis en son avec une précision et une minutie exemplaires.

P28 Les Moissons du Ciel Boards Of Canada à la lumière du jour d'après.

P34 LA GALAXIE S’ANIME Dès collègues de tous bords incitent le duo à s’ouvrir.

P37 LA MUSIQUE DES RÊVES Clap clap de fin en compagnie de Michel Gondry

Marcus Eoin et Mike Sandison auront beau le nier, ils sont très soucieux de la manière dont le public perçoit leur musique. Il n'y a absolument rien de méprisable à cela, bien au contraire. S'il avait pu, Stanley Kubrick aurait repeint lui-même les salles de cinéma qu'il n’estimait pas assez obscures pour projeter ses films. Pour Boards Of Canada, c'est un peu la même chose. Bon, d'accord, ils ne viendront pas régler eux-mêmes l’équaliseur de votre chaîne hi-fi ou changer la disposition de vos enceintes audiophiles, mais ils prennent soin de tous les détails, de l'enregistrement jusqu'à la promotion. Ainsi, c'est seulement lors de la sortie du LP précédent, The Campfire Headphase (2005), que le duo révèle du bout des lèvres être en réalité une fratrie. Pourquoi cacher un élément biographique a priori anodin ? Principalement pour éviter les comparaisons avec Paul et Phil Hartnoll d’Orbital, rétorquent-ils à l'époque. Curieux. Sans doute ont-ils aussi voulu échapper à toute une série de questions intimidantes sur leur enfance, leur famille, etc. À ce titre, il est particulièrement édifiant de relire les papiers écrits aux débuts des Beach Boys, de The Jesus And Mary Chain ou d'Oasis. En revanche, ce n'est pas difficile à imaginer, mais les Sandison s'entendent beaucoup mieux que les frères Wilson, Reid ou Gallagher. Gamins, ils jouent déjà de la musique ensemble. Vers dix ou douze ans, ils bricolent sur un magnétophone multi-pistes. Plus tard, Marcus monte un groupe de métal au lycée. Mike ne goûte pas autant ce genre de musique, mais les deux frangins continuent de composer conjointement à l'aide de leurs synthés. Le début des années 90 est le prologue de l'aventure de Boards Of Canada. Un cadre sonore se dessine lentement et des compositions prennent forme. Beaucoup de musique s'accumule sur les bandes. Assez pour sortir quelques disques, mais Mike et Marcus ne sont pas assez bons. Du moins, c'est leur avis, car pour avoir entendu quelques-uns de leurs vieux morceaux, des cassettes qu'ils distribuaient à leurs amis jusqu'à Boc Maxima (1996), cette première mouture de Music Has the Right to Children (1998), ils n'avaient pas grand chose à envier aux cadors de l’IDM de l'époque : Aphex Twin, The Orb, The Future Sound Of London, Autechre et Orbital, donc. Depuis sa première publication, Boards Of Canada prend le temps de dégrossir, de polir, de peaufiner et de fignoler jusqu'à parvenir au disque précis qu'il a en tête. Mike confie même être capable de dépenser du temps et de l'argent pour récupérer du matériel audio qui ne servira que pour une toute petite seconde de musique. Voilà probablement pourquoi Tomorrow's Harvest mit sept longues années à aboutir.

ZOMBIE

Dans les musiques électroniques, les dates de péremption des disques se révèlent parfois courtes : les jours peuvent valoir des semaines et les années des siècles. Boards Of Canada est assurément une denrée musicale non périssable. Si le temps ne semble pas avoir de prise sur leur musique, ça n'est pas uniquement parce que les deux frangins sont fanatiques d'équipements vintage. Certes, les vieilles machines confèrent une certaine patine à leur son, mais la situation géographique de leur résidence et de leur studio y contribue tout autant. C'est sûr, dans la campagne écossaise où sont reclus les deux compositeurs, le temps passe moins vite. Beaucoup moins vite. Si vivre ainsi isolés leur permet de développer un imaginaire différent, cela peut être aussi le chemin le plus direct vers le ressentiment antisocial et la paranoïa. Comment trouver le juste équilibre ? "Ah ah, mais nous ne sommes quand même pas des ermites !", nous précise Mike Sandison par email, une façon de communiquer privilégiée par le groupe à l'heure de promouvoir Tomorrow's Harvest dans le monde.

Vous avez dit rétrograde ? Les cités modernes émettent donc des ondes négatives qui nuisent à la créativité. Pour surenchérir, comme il l’avouait récemment (par mail) au Guardian en faisant référence au livre You Are Not A Gadget (2010) de l’essayiste américain Jaron Lanier, Mike considère que "la technologie contemporaine nous donne souvent l’illusion du pouvoir alors qu’en réalité elle ne cesse de nous retirer notre liberté et homogénéise le comportement des utilisateurs." Ce constat morose mais finalement pertinent sur la société a tendance à se propager depuis quelque temps. Il rappelle la vison des films d’anticipation post-atomique des années 70 - Soylent Green (1973), Logan’s Run (1976), Silent Running (1972), Phase IV (1974), etc. - et des séries B paranoïaques du début des années 80 (notamment les films de zombie italiens). Assez peu perspicaces voire franchement fantaisistes sur le plan de la prospective, ces films sont beaucoup plus intéressants sur ce qu’ils révèlent de nos angoisses sociales ou écologiques et de nos phobies collectives. Derrière l’apparence d’un cliché Instagram, la pochette de Tomorrow's Harvest est au diapason : la silhouette des immeubles de San Francisco brise la ligne d’un horizon désolé et disparaît comme phagocytée par une lueur incandescente. On contemple alors une cité agonisante, puis un mirage ; la rémanence d’un futur utopique oublié... Une fois le disque posé sur la platine, cette atmosphère est presque palpable. Mike en rajoute une couche, toujours auprès du Guardian:

Voilà pour le décor. Certes, en fonction de ses expériences cinématographiques, de ses lectures ou du rapport que chacun entretient avec la musique de Boards Of Canada, l’album n’évoquera probablement pas les mêmes images. Le canevas dramatique élaboré ici par le duo écossais est d’une précision telle que les collages aléatoires et abstraits de films Super 8 qui font office de vidéos promotionnelles ne sont pas aussi pertinents. Non, même si on y retrouve une certaine douceur sonore familière, Tomorrow's Harvest n’est vraiment pas un album d’electro ambient progressive ou un kaléidoscope sonore acidulé. Il a été conçu comme une bande originale de film et se doit d’être écouté ainsi. Malheureusement, aujourd’hui, plus personne n’est capable de tourner le long-métrage idoine et c’est sans doute aussi pour cela que la nostalgie opère dès les premières notes. Les frères Sandison reconnaissent d’ailleurs volontiers avoir beaucoup étudié les compositeurs des séries B des années 70 et 80 : Mark Isham, Fabio Frizzi (compositeur de Zombi 2 en 1979, fausse suite italienne des films de George A. Romero), Stefano Mainetti (Zombi 3, 1988), Wendy Carlos (The Shining en 1980, Tron en 1982) ou encore John Harrison. Ce demier semble trouver une place particulière dans leur panthéon. Le motif sonore décliné sur White Cyclosa, un extrait de Tomorrow's Harvest, ressemble ainsi étrangement à l’introduction que Harrison joue sur The Dead Suite, un extrait de la BOF de Day Of The Dead (1985), le film de George A. Romero. Certes, la tonalité générale de Tomorrow's Harvest n’est pas aussi oppressante et nihiliste qu’un film de morts-vivants. Les atmosphères sont plus nuancées et les sentiments qui s’en dégagent plus variés mais pas moins intenses. C’est en tout cas l’un des hommages les plus sincères et émouvants rendus par la musique électronique au cinéma de genre. Laissons maintenant Marcus et Mike étayer la belle affaire à leur manière.

NAZE

LA GALAXIE S’ANIME

Tenant son rang depuis quinze ans face aux autres artistes du label Warp, Boards Of Canada est apprécié et chéri par les amateurs de rock, pop, metal ou hip hop. Si la musique de Mike Sandison et Marcus Eoin envoûte, c'est souvent leur approche radicale de la production qui fascine leurs homologues musiciens. Certains d'entres eux ont tenu à leur poser une question ou deux. Un exercice contre nature pour le duo autarcique qui a tout de même joué le jeu sans mal.

COORDINATION JEAN-FRANÇOIS LE PUIL TRADUCTION SYLVAIN COLLIN

YONI WOLF

(WHY?)

GHOST BOX RECORDS

(BELBURY POLY, THE FOCUS GROUP, ETC.)

BENOIT PIOULARD

PARSLEY SOUND

(EX-SLUM)

BIBIO

JACQUES GREENE

BENOIT PIOULARD

NEIL KRUG

(RÉALISATEUR DES VIDÉOS DE “Tomorrow's Harvest")

BENOIT PIOULARD

ANDREW HUNG

(FUCK BUTTONS)

BOOM BIP

JUSTIN BROADRICK

(JESU, GODFLESH)

BOOM BIP

JON HOPKINS

LA MUSIQUE DES REVES

MICHEL GONDRY

Cinéaste d’origine versaillaise pas forcément prophète en son pays, Michel Gondry, batteur en son temps du groupe Oui Oui, connait la musique. Auteur de clips pour Björk, Daft Punk ou The White Stripes, il a utilisé trois titres de Boards Of Canada dans la bande originale de The We And The I (2012). Le cinéaste explique pourquoi les disques de Mike Sandison et Marcus Eoin l’inspirent autant dans son travail.

POLICE

NB. En attendant de découvrir Is The Man Who Is Ta!! Happy?, son documentaire animé sur (et avec) le linguiste et philosophe américain Noam Chomsky, les films de Michel Gondry sont disponibles en DVD tout comme une sélection de ses vidéo-clips, The Work Of Director Michel Gondry (2003).

Boards Of Canada

File compiled by Jean-François Le Puil

Article and Interview Sylvain Collin

Photographs Iain Campbell

HARVEST FROM HEAVEN

Nostalgia as a weapon of mass destruction: Boards Of Canada look into the past via an (imaginary) means in order to destroy the ideology of technological progress that we are sold on a daily basis. The brothers are back from their travels with Tomorrow's Harvest, true little masterpiece of electronic music. Developed over several years, this album urges the listener to fantasize a quite different conclusion to the end of the world: an ironic and dreamlike apocalypse. A fantastic and exhilarating dialogue between George Orwell and George A. Romero played with exemplary accuracy and thoroughness.

P28 HARVEST FROM HEAVEN Boards Of Canada in the light of The Day After Tomorrow.

P34 THE GALAXY COMES TO LIFE Co-musicians from all walks of life encourage the duo to open up.

P37 THE MUSIC OF DREAMS Cut! Thats’s a rap! with Michel Gondry

Marcus Eoin and Mike Sandison will try to deny it, but they are very concerned about how the public perceives their music. There is absolutely nothing contemptible in that, quite the contrary. If he could have, Stanley Kubrick himself would have painted the theaters where his films were playing if he felt that they weren’t dark enough. For Boards Of Canada, it's a bit the same. Well, okay, they won’t come and set the equalizer on your stereo for you or change the layout of your audiophile speakers, but they will take care of all the details; from recording to promotion. So it’s only with the release of the LP, The Campfire Headphase (2005), that the duo reveal that they are actually brothers. Why hide such a bland biographical fact? Mainly to avoid comparisons with Paul and Phil Hartnoll of Orbital, they argued at the time. Curious. No doubt they also wanted to avoid a series of questions about their childhood, family, etc. As such, it is particularly instructive to read the articles written at the time about the Beach Boys, The Jesus And Mary Chain and Oasis. However, it’s not so hard to imagine that the Sandisons get along a lot better than the brothers Wilson, Reid or Gallagher. As kids, they already played music together. When they were ten or twelve years old, they tinkered with multi-track VHS. Later, Marcus joined a metal band in secondary school. But that wasn’t Mike’s style, even then, the two brothers continued to fiddle with their synths together. The early 90s is the prologue to the story of Boards Of Canada. A musical framework slowly takes shape and compositions are born. The tracks they made during that period would be enough to fill a few albums, but Mike and Marcus just weren’t good enough, at least, that was their opinion. Having heard some of their old songs; cassettes they distributed to their friends up until the release of Boc Maxima (1996); the first version of Music Has the Right to Children (1998), it’s clear they had what it takes to make the heavyweights of the IDM era (Aphex Twin, The Orb, The Future Sound Of London, Orbital and Autechre) green with envy. Ever since their first release, Boards Of Canada took time out to trim down, polish, refine and tweak to achieve the style they had in mind. Mike once said he could easily spend time and money to recover the right audio material just for a few seconds of music. This is probably why, Tomorrow's Harvest took seven long years to reap.

ZOMBIE

In electronic music, the expiry dates can be short: the days can be worth a few weeks, the years a century. Boards Of Canada’s is the sort that doesn’t ever seem to go out of date. If it seems that time has no hold over their music, it could be that the two brothers are fond of vintage equipment. Certainly, their old equipment give a certain patina to their sound, but their choice of abode and studio location must play a part, too. Of course, in the Scottish countryside where the reclusive composers live time passes slower. Much slower. If living in such isolation allow them to develop a different world, it’s also a direct route to feelings of resentment and antisocial paranoia. How to find the right balance? "Aha, but we’re not really hermits", Mike makes clear, email being the preferred means of communication favored by the group at the time of promotion of Tomorrow's Harvest in the world.

“Retro” you can say that again! So then, urban modernity creates negative vibes that affect creativity. On top of that, as he confessed recently by email to the Guardian, in reference to the book You Are Not A Gadget (2010) by the American author Jaron Lanier, Mike believes that “modern technology often gives an illusion of empowerment while in reality it's increasingly all about removal of liberty, and homogenising the user base." This morose yet relevant observation of society has been growing for some time. It recalls the post-apocalyptic films of the 70s - Soylent Green (1973), Logan's Run (1976), Silent Running (1972), Phase IV (1974), etc. - paranoid low budget series of the early '80s (Italian zombie films notably). A fairly uninsightful and downright fanciful forecast, these films are much more interesting in that they reveal our social and ecological anxieties; our collective phobias. Despite the appearance of a clichéd Instagram, the cover of Tomorrow's Harvest just… fits: the San Francisco skyline breaks the line of a desolate horizon and disappears as if engulfed by an incandescent glow. We look upon a city as if in agony, then as a mirage, the persistent memory of a forgotten utopian future ... When the needle hits the vinyl, the atmosphere is almost palpable. Mike lays it on thick in the Guardian interview again "We've become a lot more nihilistic over the years. In a way we're really celebrating an idea of collapse (the track Collapse is in the middle of the album) rather than resisting it. It's probably quite a bleak album, depending on your perspective. It's not post-apocalyptic so much as it is about an inevitable stage that lies in front of us." So much for setting the scene. Certainly, based on one’s personal film experience, or the rapport that each of us has with the music of Boards Of Canada, the album probably won’t evoke the same images. The precise dramatic outline drafted here by the Scottish duo, show that the random and abstract Super8 collages that once served as promotional videos are now an irrelevance. Even if we find a few smooth, familiar sounds, Tomorrow's Harvest is not really an album of progressive ambient electro or an acidic sound kaleidoscope. It was conceived as a soundtrack and must be taken as such. Unfortunately, today, no one is around to make the ideal film for it and this is probably also why nostalgia operates from the very first notes. The Sandison brothers also tip their hats to low budget series composers from the 70s and 80s : Mark Isham, Fabio Frizzi (the composer for Zombi 2 in 1979, a fake Italian Romero sequel), Stefano Mainetti (Zombie 3, 1988) Wendy Carlos (The Shining in 1980, Tron 1982) or John Harrison. The latter seems to find a special place in their repertoire. The sinking feeling of White Cyclosa (track 3 of Tomorrow's Harvest) strangely resembles the introduction that Harrison plays for The Dead Suite, from the soundtrack of Romero’s Day Of The Dead (1985), whilst not being as oppressive and nihilistic as a zombie film. The atmospheres are more subtly layered and the emotions that emerge more diverse, but no less intense. This is certainly one of the more sincere and moving tributes given to this genre of cinema from the electronic music genre. Now let’s allow Marcus and Mike show off their wares in their own way.

LAME

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Talk To The Hand, Chokri

title	Talk To The Hand, Chokri
author	Kristoff Tilkin
publication	Humo
date	2013-06-16
issue
pages

"Talk To The Hand, Chokri" is a July, 2013 interview in Dutch by Kristoff Tilkin. It originally appeared in Humo.

This article needs to be transcribed. If you can provide a transcription, please update this article!

A train of images rages through 'Tomorrow's Harvest, the first record by Boards Of Canada in eight years. Once again it's a delightful grainy small film where bright white sunlight shines over blocks of houses in decay. The wind rattles doors and windows, with whirling red dust all around. But the shadows tend to enlarge with every song and ominous clouds loom at the horizon. Good poetry doesn't require a manual but for the sake of learning and entertainment we listen to the verses of Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin.

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Well, maybe not really: eight years ago we were invited to talk about their previous record 'The Campfire Headphase' with a good cappuccino, this time we had to take pleasure with an interview through email. Strange, because in 2005 they claimed to be fed up with being portrayed as alienated weirdos. "The main reason why we are talking with you right here is to set the record straight. Boards Of Canada are two very regular guys who happen to make enthralling music, not paranoid hermits or heroes of abnegation who cut off all ties with civilization". Maybe they changed their minds, or maybe being mysterious is just much more fun?

In The Guardian, Sandison admits that fatherhood has made him conscious of the fragility of existence, and that it has changed his view on the world very radically. "We've become a lot more nihilistic over the years. In a way we're really celebrating an idea of collapse rather than resisting it. It's probably quite a bleak album, depending on your perspective."

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Band of Brothers

title	Band of Brothers
author	Gijsbert Kamer
publication	Volkskrant.nl
date	2013-07-17
issue	Online
pages

"Band of Brothers" is a 2013 interview in Dutch by Gijsbert Kamer. It originally appeared online at Volkskrant.

Het electroduo Boards Of Canada maakt al meer dan vijftien jaar muziek en doet dat minstens zo goed als Daft Punk. Toch weten we na al die jaren nauwelijks iets van de twee. V brengt daar verandering in.

Geheimzinnig is het woord dat je het eerst te binnen schiet als je aan Boards Of Canada denkt. Alles aan de band is vaag en niets is wat het lijkt. Zeker is alleen dat Boards Of Canada de mooiste elektronische muziek maakt die er bestaat, en dat al meer dan vijftien jaar. Hun in 1998 op het invloedrijke Warp-label verschenen albumdebuut Music Has The Right To Children zette de toon voor een met lange tussenpozen verschenen reeks van tot nu toe vier albums en een tweetal EP's. Het in juni verschenen Tomorrow's Harvest is opnieuw van een ongekende schoonheid, die zich net als op de vorige albums langzaam prijsgeeft, maar dan ook voorgoed verslavend werkt.

Veel is er eigenlijk niet veranderd. Boards Of Canada maakt nog altijd instrumentale muziek. Vervaardigd met analoge synthesizers en zelf opgenomen samples van akoestische instrumenten en stemmen. De stukken muziek zijn soms abstract, dan weer zeer melodieus en bezwerend en altijd gelaagd. Alle platen roepen gevoelens van nostalgie op, alsof je door een doos met oude Polaroidfoto's vlooit.

De muziek klinkt nogal eens alsof je een oud kapotgedraaid cassettebandje opzet en er geluiden te horen zijn die veroorzaakt zijn door slijtage, wat een aparte sfeer geeft. De muziek is soms sinister, dan weer dreigend maar op een vreemde manier altijd warm en troostrijk.

Maar waar komt het allemaal vandaan? Wie zijn Boards Of Canada eigenlijk en waarom weten we na al die jaren nauwelijks iets van ze?

Zeker is dat Boards Of Canada wordt gevormd door twee broers, Marcus en Michael Sandison. Maar het duurde zelfs even voordat hun familieband werd onthuld. Bang om met het uit twee broers bestaande danceduo Orbital te worden vergeleken, veinsden Marcus en Michael dat ze vrienden waren. Michael gebruikte de familienaam Sandison en Marcus noemde zich naar zijn tweede roepnaam Eoin.

De broers groeiden op in Schotland en woonden meer dan dertig jaar geleden, toen ze een jaar of 10 waren, een jaar in Canada. Interviews geven ze zelden, het enige wat ze bij het verschijnen van hun nieuwe plaat toestonden, was per land een emailinterview beantwoorden.

De Volkskrant leverde de lijst met vragen vlak na de release van Tomorrow's Harvest, begin juni, in. Een release die ook met grote geheimzinnigheid gepaard ging. Acht jaar na het voorlaatste album The Campfire Headphase en zeven jaar na de EP Trans Canada Highway dook er tijdens Record Store Day in de New Yorkse winkel Other Music ineens een plaat op van Boards Of Canada met daarop niet veel meer dan een elektronisch uitgesproken reeks cijfers, die zouden een code bevatten die uitsluitsel moest geven over de release van een heel nieuw Boards Of Canada-album.

Die plaat werd al even geheimzinnig gepresenteerd in een gesloten, desolaat ogend vakantiepark in de Californische Mojavewoestijn. Een plek die past bij de hoesfotografie die de schimmige contouren van San Francisco laat zien.

Tomorrow's Harvest is opnieuw een prachtig album, dat lijkt opgezet als een soundtrack bij een niet erg vrolijke film. De plaat kent een aantal wonderschone momenten, zoals in New Seeds waarin het synthesizerthema na vier minuten wordt onderbroken en er een kippenvelmoment ontstaat als er een ander thema wordt ingezet. Alsof er een oester openbreekt en er een parel begint te blinken.

Net als de vorige platen is ook Tomorrow's Harvest het resultaat van het laag over laag aanbrengen van opgenomen en gesampelde geluiden afkomstig uit een enorm arsenaal aan akoestische instrumenten en analoge synthesizers, opgeslagen in hun eigen Schotse studio.

Meer dan drie weken duurde het voordat Michael en Marcus Sandison schriftelijk antwoord gaven. Soms heel uitgebreid, soms heel kort. 'That's completely nuts' was het antwoord op de vraag wat ze ervan vonden dat de Record Store Dayplaat op eBay voor $5.700 is verhandeld.

Hier een enigszins ingekorte weergave van de correspondentie.

Mysterieuze plaat

De plaat Tomorrow's Harvest verscheen begin juni met grote geheimzinnigheid. Tijdens Record Store Day in de New Yorkse winkel Other Music dook er ineens een album op van Boards Of Canada met daarop niet veel meer dan een elektronisch uitgesproken reeks cijfers, die zouden een code bevatten die uitsluitsel moest geven over de release van een heel nieuw Boards Of Canada-album. Het album verscheen acht jaar na het voorlaatste album The Campfire Headphase en zeven jaar na de EP Trans Canada Highway.

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Why Boards of Canada’s Music Has the Right to Children Is the Greatest Psychedelic Album of the ’90s

title	Why Boards of Canada’s Music Has the Right to Children Is the Greatest Psychedelic Album of the ’90s
author	Simon Reynolds
publication	Pitchfork
date	April 03 2018
issue
pages

"Why Boards of Canada’s Music Has the Right to Children Is the Greatest Psychedelic Album of the ’90s" is an interview by Simon Reynolds originally published online April 03 2018 on the Pitchfork website.^[23]

Once upon a time there was a London vintage clothing boutique that lured customers inside with the slogan, “Don’t follow fashion, buy something that’s already out-of-date!” Some musicians opt for a similar strategy: Avoiding the timely, they aim to achieve the timeless.

That’s what Boards of Canada were going for when they recorded Music Has the Right to Children in the late 1990s. At that time, the reigning aesthetic in electronic music was crisply digital, frenetically hyper-rhythmic, and futuristic. But the Scottish duo quietly and firmly abstained from these norms and conventions. Michael Sandison and his differently-surnamed brother Marcus Eoin came up with something completely different: a hazy sound of smeared synth-tones and analog-decayed production, carried by patient, sleepwalking beats, and aching with nostalgia.

says Sandison today. This time-out-of-joint quality is all the more fitting because Music Has the Right is about the uncanniness of memory, the way we are each haunted by ghosts from a private image-bank as well as from the collective unconscious of shared public culture. It’s not so much that this persistence of the past inside the present is the subject of the record as that it’s the substance out of which Boards of Canada weave their music, its spectral warp-and-weft.

In the late ’90s, looking back was the last thing on the collective mind of electronic dance music. From drum ’n’ bass to trance, from gabba to minimal techno, the music promised the sound of tomorrow, today. Each scene saw itself as a vanguard—dancing to these beats, you were in some sense already in the future. Drawing heavily from cyberpunk fiction, dystopian movies, and scientific terminology, the track titles, the artist names, the sampled soundbites, and the record designs relied almost uniformly on futuristic imagery. Which could get pretty corny and kitschy at times—just consider of the garish hyper-real colors and baroquely biomorphic shapes in the Future Sound of London’s artwork of the era.

True, there was a countercurrent at work in a corner of IDM, what you could call idyllictronica: the spangly music-box chimes and ice-cream truck melodies of Mouse on Mars, certain Aphex Twin tracks, and a few others, evocative of childhood innocence and halcyon memories. BoC had something in common with this tendency but, crucially, they bent it to the sinister—as with the front cover of Music Has the Right, a faded photograph of a family of seven on vacation, their faces eerily bleached into featureless blanks.

The album came out in April 1998, a joint release by scene-leading Warp Records and the rising second-wave IDM label Skam. Although Music Has the Right has the feeling of a debut, a bold entrance statement, Sandison and Eoin—aged 27 and 26 when the album was released—had already accumulated a fairly substantial, if low-profile, discography across the previous three years, including an album and a barely released cassette on their own imprint, Music70, and the Hi Scores EP for Skam. Although BoC’s early sound sat fairly unobtrusively amid the Autechre-indebted crunchy beats and pensive melodies of the Skam roster, there were glimmers of a distinctive identity discernible to the sharp-eared: a certain elegiac, autumnal quality to the synth-tones.

While BoC were honing their sound, the IDM community was scrambling to catch up with the rhythmic innovations of jungle, which had come as an ambush out of the lumpen left-field. The dominant sound was a controlled paroxysm of percussion, with micro-edited breakbeats densely layered and texturized with digital signal processing. Practically all the big names in IDM were chopping breaks and assembling complex architectures of contorted polyrhythm: Aphex Twin with his Richard D. James Album and the AFX EP Hangable Auto Bulb, Luke Vibert in both his Plug and Wagon Christ identities, µ-Ziq with Lunatic Harness, and Squarepusher with a ballistic barrage of releases that included Hard Normal Daddy and Big Loada in 1997 alone. People nicknamed this style “drill and bass,” but “droll and bass” would have fit even better: The mood was antic and whimsical, with artists like Aphex favoring daft samples and an almost slapstick, cartoon-crazy feel.

Boards of Canada stood aside from all this pell-mell puerility. Where jungle and its not-so-early adopters in IDM’s first division were reversing conventional musical priorities by turning the drums and the bass into the focal foreground, BoC reversed that reversal and restated the primacy of melody and mood. In early interviews, Sandison and Eoin stressed their disinterest in going along with the jungle program, which they regarded as a fashion trend. For them, rhythms were “just a vehicle for carrying strange and beautiful melodies.” And that was the first thing that struck you listening to Music Has the Right to Children—how songs like “Roygbiv” featured gorgeously elongated melody lines stretching over many bars, whereas most electronic music of the era tended to involve concise melody-riffs and brief, flickering vamps.

says Sandison today.

It’s not that there aren’t some imposing beats on Music Has the Right. In fact, there’s a surprising amount of hip-hop in the mix, a sort of sedated boom-bap feel at times. Featuring scratching and a looped break, “An Eagle in Your Mind” is like a GIF of faded footage of old skool B-boy crew West Street Mob spinning on their backs and knees to their 1983 track “Break Dance-Electric Boogie.” Other tracks, like “Rue the Whirl,” with its clattery drum rolls, similarly conjure a bygone Bronx, but relocated incongruously to rural Scotland. Overall, though, the beats on BoC tracks create a dreamy sensation of suspension from time rather than a surge forward through it.

The other thing that separated Music Has the Right from contemporaneous releases by apparent peers like Autechre and Two Lone Swordsmen was the record’s overall sound design, which broke with the clean, clear, clinical aura of the era. Instead, BoC used a mixture of analog and digital techniques to give their music a wavering, mottled quality redolent of formats like film, vinyl, and magnetic tape that are susceptible to decay and distortion with the passage of time. Listening to tracks like “Wildlife Analysis” or “The Color of the Fire,” you can’t help but think of yellowing photographs in the family album, blotchy and washed-out Super-8 films, or the drop-out addled sound of favorite cassettes left too long on the car dashboard.

In interviews around Music Has the Right, BoC talked about how they barely listened to—or even liked—contemporary electronic music, citing instead such seemingly unlikely synth forebears as Devo and Tomita, and gushing about the acoustic lushness of Joni Mitchell. The brothers talked of applying “a process of corruption” to their melodies, the vocals they sampled, and pretty much every texture in their music.

says Eoin now.

The origins of the BoC sound go back as far as 1981, when the brothers engaged in rudimentary experiments with tape-editing. “We used to chop up shortwave radio recordings on an ancient portable recorder and make tunes out of them by punching-in and layering tracks in a crude way,” they told the Scottish electronic music website EHX in early 1998, in what appears to be BoC’s very first interview.

These schoolboy stabs at musique concrète suggest a proximity with the UK’s industrial scene, the tape collages and ambient dronescapes spun by Nurse With Wound and Zoviet France from the early ’80s onwards. But by the early ’90s, BoC were closer to a proper band, with guitar, bass, live drums, and the occasional vocal. They weren’t the sort of band that rocked out on stage, though, but nearer to what they described as “experimental atmospheric rock” outfits such as Cocteau Twins and My Bloody Valentine, dedicated to exploring guitar textures and the studio’s sound-painting possibilities. Like Kevin Shields on Loveless, BoC experimented with sampling their own guitars. A shoegaze inheritance lingers right through to Music Has the Right tracks like “Smokes Quantity,” a gaseous quality that recalls MBV at their most indistinct and tonally warped.

Where most of the first wave of British IDM artists started out making banging techno and shrieking acid for the hardcore ravefloor, BoC’s trajectory was more like Seefeel, a guitar band that passed through post-rock into abstract electronica, or Ultramarine, which evolved out of the second-wave industrial outfit A Primary Industry. recalls Eoin. In the interviews around Music Has the Right, the brothers candidly indicated that making people move was not a priority: “If you can dance to one of our tracks, well and good, but it’s not what we’re aiming at.”

BoC were making music for the head and the heart, then, not the body. But rather than IDM, their true bearings came from psychedelia. From their earliest EPs through to their most recent release, 2013’s Tomorrow’s Harvest, their work is shot through with psychedelia’s abiding obsessions: nature, childhood, higher (or simply other) states of consciousness, and the allure of a tribal mode of communal living. Like Donovan’s and the Incredible String Band’s attempts at living communally in remote and unspoiled regions of Scotland and Wales during the late ’60s, BoC made their music amid the glens and cairns of the Pentland Hills outside Edinburgh, as part of a collective of artistic and spiritual kinsfolk. Around the time of recording Music Has the Right, they lived right beside a wildlife sanctuary.

The group’s name came from the National Film Board of Canada, whose nature documentaries and educational animations they remembered from school days. The brothers found inspiration not just in the subject matter of these programs but in their “grainy and wobbly” look, and from the music: electronic under-scores and themes largely made by the Quebecois composer Alain Clavier. Some of the shorter electronic interludes and codas on Music Has the Right could almost be direct sonic grafts from the synthesizer audio logo that starts each National Film Board of Canada documentary.

When I was 9 years old, back in the early ’70s, my ambition in life was to be a naturalist: Canada seemed like paradise, a barely populated expanse of forest and prairie teeming with unique wildlife and birds. To my child-mind, wholly uninterested in urban thrills and temptations, it seemed like you could never get—forgive me—bored of Canada. As youngsters, Sandison and Eoin were lucky enough to live in the prairie province of Alberta for a few years, when their parents worked in the construction industry there. “My memory of Calgary is a picture of boxy 1970s office blocks dumped in the middle of nowhere against a permanent sunset,” Sandison told NME in 2002. The family photo on the front of Music Has the Right was actually taken at Banff Springs, a picturesque vista in Alberta’s stretch of the Rocky Mountains.

The album contains a profusion of allusions to Nature, and some actual sounds taken from the great outdoors. There are bird cries, sometimes sourced indirectly from records (the seagulls on “Happy Cycling” come from Vangelis’ La Fête Sauvage) and sometimes documented by the brothers. While making “Rue the Whirl,” the window to the studio got left open unintentionally; during the playback of a prototype version, Sandison and Eoin realized the birdsong enhanced the music, and it was incorporated into the final track. “An Eagle in Your Mind” features no actual eagles, alas, but instead there is a voice-over from an otter documentary, using terms like “holts” and “spraints” that would have thrilled the 9-year-old me. “Chinook,” a non-album B-side of this era, takes its name from a wind that wafts through the Pacific Northwest and into the Canadian Prairies.

Another hippie-era obsession detectable on Music Has the Right is what Canadians now call the First Nations: Native American tribal peoples like the Blackfoot. “Kaini Industries” borrows its title from a company set up to create employment for inhabitants of Alberta’s Blood Reserve, while “Pete Standing Alone” shares its name with a young Blackfoot who appears in National Film Board of Canada documentaries like Circle of the Sun. From late-’60s types like Jim Morrison, through goths like Southern Death Cult, to rave-era anarcho-mystics like Spiral Tribe, Native American folkways have had a romantic allure, representing a pre-capitalist way of life at once more grounded and more spiritual in its non-exploitative co-existence with the natural world. BoC themselves have often struck an anti-urban and neo-tribal note in their interviews, talking of how their idea of a good night out is not going clubbing in the pumping heart of the city, but convening a gathering of a few dozen friends “somewhere in the hills” around “a huge bonfire.”

But the biggest psychedelia-flashback element to Music Has the Right is its cult of childhood. A high proportion of the pre-teen voices that litter the album come from “Sesame Street”: “The Color of the Fire” features a little kid adorably sounding out the phrase “I love you,” while “Aquarius” is laced with glorious giggles and the refrain “Yeah, that’s right!”’ from a pair of children. Framing the whole album, there’s that mysterious title itself. On the one hand, “music has the right to children” seems to propose an ideal listener or listening state for this music: impressionable, receptive, open to the in-rush of experience. That interpretation is strengthened by the duo’s own description of the title as “a statement of our intention to affect the audience using sound.”

But Music Has the Right to Children could also be taken differently: not so much about listeners coming “under the influence,” and more about BoC as a generative force, inspiring other musicians. And BoC have indeed been genre-ative, creating a style of music in their own image. For better or worse, they’ve spawned a legion of sound-alikes within the IDM field (such as Tycho, to name just one). And they’ve scattered their sonic seed far and wide beyond strictly electronic confines, audible in groups as far apart as Black Moth Super Rainbow and Radiohead (Thom Yorke referenced BoC frequently during the Kid A/Amnesiac era).

Although BoC’s use of filtering and phasing effects occasionally sounds like an actual acid-rock flashback, for the most part they are in the business of reinventing psychedelia: misusing technology to simulate or stimulate hallucinatory or “non-sane” states of mind. Speaking about “Nlogax,” a track on their 1996 EP Hi Scores, Sandison and Eoin have described its effects as “like your brain is starting to malfunction in the middle of the tune.” They’ve talked about aiming to induce a sort of wide-asleep trance state: “It’s like when you glaze over when you’re listening to something, but you’re still there at the same time.”

Glazed and diffused is pretty much how I felt when I first fell deep for, and deep into, Music Has the Right. The album had bypassed me initially: as a jungle fanatic, my metabolism was wired to the frantic futurism of breakbeat science. But something drew me back several months later—perhaps testimonials from others, or a gathering sense of its reputation. And that time around, Music Has the Right took over my life for a good while. The wistful ripples of milky synth in “Roygbiv” felt like a twinkle in time, a cinematic dissolve into my private past. Like fast-moving clouds casting shadows against a hillside, the melody-loop of “Rue the Whirl” shuddered with a sense of the sublime, the awful unknowable majesty of the world.

Like many others, I found that Music Has the Right had an extraordinary power to trigger memories. Partly this was a side effect of the wavering off-pitch synths, redolent of the music on TV programs from my ’70s childhood. But in a far more profound, fundamental, and deeply mysterious way, BoC seemed to be tapping into those deepest recesses of personal memory. Blending intimacy and otherness, the music put you back in touch with parts of yourself you’d lost. That was their gift to the listener.

Reaching for some kind of parallel or precursor, I could only think of David Byrne and Brian Eno’s 1981 album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, with its use of speech snippets as one-shot singularities (as opposed to the looped vocal samples that tend to figure in dance music and hip-hop). But where Bush of Ghosts, with its Arabic singers and Born Again preachers, worked through an exoticism of geography and cultural distance, Music Has the Right involved an exoticism of time. The memories it triggered for me were actually rather mundane: I pictured municipal spaces like parks and recreation grounds, classrooms and school science labs, back gardens or rainy afternoons indoors watching kids’ TV. They carried no particular emotional charge, but they were numinous with significance, akin to the way dream images can linger long into your waking hours, without ever revealing anything as legible as a meaning. Music Has the Right, in fact, was like a dream you could turn on at will.

As much as Boards of Canada harked back to Bush of Ghosts, they also harked forward to Ghost Box, the British label whose ectoplasmic sound and elegiac sensibility has come to define the 21st-century genre known as hauntology. Perhaps “memoradelia,” an alternate genre tag briefly floated by the critic Patrick McNally, is a better umbrella term for the audio traits and cultural preoccupations that BoC share with Ghost Box artists like the Focus Group and the Advisory Circle.

Among the many common concerns, a nostalgic fascination for television stands out as the major connection. During the ’70s especially, children’s TV programming in the UK featured a peculiar preponderance of ghost stories, tales of the uncanny, and apocalyptic scenarios (like “The Changes,” in which the populace rises up and destroys all technology). In between this creepy fare, young eyes were regularly assaulted by Public Information Films, a genre of short British programs made for TV broadcast and ostensibly designed to educate and advise, but which often seemed to be scripted and directed by child-hating sadists whose true goal was to increase nightmares and bed-wetting. Featuring the macabre voice-over tones of actor Donald Pleasence, “The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water,” for instance, warned of the dangers of ponds and lakes, while “Apaches” showed in grisly detail what might befall a bunch of kids messing about in a farmyard.

The unsettling content of all this vintage kids-oriented TV seeped into the brains of Sandison and Eoin at a vulnerable age. But what seems to have lingered even more insidiously in the memory of BoC, and the hauntologists that came after them, is the music. For many Brit kids, the sound effects and incidental motifs made for these programs by outfits like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop were their first exposure to abstract electronic sounds. Speaking in 1998, Sandison claimed that these theme tunes and soundtracks were “a stronger influence than modern music, or any other music that we listened to back then. Like it or not, they’re the tunes that keep going around in our heads.”

Another hauntology theme that Boards of Canada anticipated is the notion of the lost future. Again, this tends to be identified most with the ’70s and that decade’s queasy ambivalence about runaway technological change: On the one hand, there was still a lingering post-World War II optimism abroad, but it was increasingly contaminated with paranoid anxiety about ecological catastrophe and the rise of a surveillance state.

By the early ’90s, when BoC were finding their identity,

Another ’70s-in-vibe obsession of the brothers is what they call “strange sciences,” that zone where the boundary between reason and superstition gets muddy: bodies of renegade knowledge and “independent research” such as  parapsychology, Erich Von Däniken’s best-selling books about “ancient astronauts,” New Age with its beliefs and techniques concerning healing vibrations and energy-flows, and many other forms of quasi-scientific magic and mysticism. “I do actually believe that there are powers in music that are almost supernatural,” Eoin once argued. “I think you actually manipulate people with music, and that is definitely what we are trying to do.”

Part of that manipulation of the listener goes beyond the sound itself and involves the framing of the music. BoC’s work is intricately brocaded with arcane references and encrypted allusions. They have cultivated cultishness. For a measure of their success, just check a BoC fan site, where you’ll find a feast of annotations and speculations: competing attempts to decode the meaning of titles, to locate the sources of samples, to decipher the half-buried fragments of speech.

“There is a story behind every title we use,” the brothers revealed in their first interview. It’s as if they were setting out the terms for future engagement with their work. Yet, as Sandison admitted in a later interview, most of those carefully placed meanings remained elusive and impenetrable. “If we were to explain all the tracks and their meanings... I think it would ruin them for a lot of people. It’s more like viewing something through the bottom of a murky glass, and that’s the beauty of it.”

For Boards of Canada, this deliberately hermetic aesthetic is designed to induct the listener into a deeper mode of engagement, and to conjure a sense that something more is going on than just sound for sound’s sake. Sandison says now.

With Music Has the Right, BoC did build their own world, set apart from the wider currents of late-’90s electronica. After such an achievement, it would be unreasonable to expect the brothers to unfurl a wholly new sound and vision on each subsequent album. As their discography unfolded over the ensuing 20 years, Sandison and Eoin first intensified their approach with In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country and Geogaddi, then inflected it with the shoegaze-tinged The Campfire Headphase, and finally simply reiterated it with Tomorrow’s Harvest. But then the idea of Boards of Canada “progressing” or “evolving” goes against their very essence. Their intent with Music Has the Right to Children was to create a haunted haven outside the onward flow of Time. Why wouldn’t they want to live there forever?

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1. ↑ http://de-bug.de/mag/boards-of-canada/
2. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/19991109112959/www.ednet.co.uk/~ehx/inter/boc1.htm
3. ↑ http://web.archive.org/web/20010305221908/http://www.forcefield.org/boc.html
4. ↑ https://www.deepl.com/
5. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/19990221024531/http://www.virgin.fr/virgin/html/megactu/interview/boards.html
6. ↑ https://www.twoism.org/forum/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=5038
7. ↑ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XAizLmKun4yF6oBVUhIrewYN-ZiY_9ORckmT-hF93Ho/edit#gid=0&range=D99
8. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20080514123923/http://blogs.lesinrocks.com:80/j-ghosn/index.php?2008/02/02/56-digital-fck-2-boards-of-canada
9. ↑ http://www.twoism.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3551
10. ↑ https://www.twoism.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=302224#p302224
11. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20020328062626/http://www.oor.nl/OorNL/custom/Boards.htm
12. ↑ https://bocpages.org/wiki/Play_Twice_Before_Listening
13. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20051102115340/http://pitchforkmedia.com/interviews/b/boards-of-canada-05/
14. ↑ http://de-bug.de/mag/boards-of-canada/
15. ↑ http://de-bug.de/share/debug96.pdf
16. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20051025001714/http://www.journaux.fr:80/revue.php?id=84112
17. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20070203181730/http://bounce.com:80/interview/article.php/2234/
18. ↑ https://www.twoism.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=61512
19. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20030801083515/http://www.earplug.cc:80/
20. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20060813154238/http://www.earplug.cc:80/mailer/issue54/feature/index.html
21. ↑ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/arts/music/tomorrows-harvest-by-boards-of-canada.html
22. ↑ http://de-bug.de/musik/interview-boards-of-canada-the-charms-of-the-sphinx/
23. ↑ https://pitchfork.com/features/article/why-boards-of-canadas-music-has-the-right-to-children-is-the-greatest-psychedelic-album-of-the-90s/