|publication=De:Bug

|issue=Online

"[[The Charms of the Sphinx]]" is a 2013 interview by Michael Döringer & Thaddeus Herrmann. It originally appeared online at De:Bug <ref>http://de-bug.de/musik/interview-boards-of-canada-the-charms-of-the-sphinx/</ref>. Published also in De:Bug Magazine No.174 Jul/Aug 2013, pg.06-15.

{{boc|'''Marcus''': Breakfast, hopefully.}}

{{boc|'''Mike''': It was more the latter. We’re always working on new material, all the time, and we had quite a singular vision for what this record should be. But back around 2006 we had taken some time out to concentrate on other projects for a while too, non-musical things. Later we built new expanded studio spaces, and so the process of wrapping up this record was interrupted from time to time.}}

{{boc|'''Marcus''': It’s about finding something beautiful in desolation, something draws us to the atmosphere of destroyed, abandoned places. It’s a bitter-sweet thing that we’ve always tried to achieve in our music. It seems too obvious to make music that is just purely dark, that just seems too easy and naïve. We always try very hard to create something that balances between dark and light. If you can achieve that ambiguity in music, it makes the listener do some work, emotionally. It allows you to put something subversive inside the music, that doesn’t necessarily just declare itself outright.}}

{{boc|'''Mike''': I think people are naturally attracted to dystopian imagery, especially post-human imagery, and it might be to do with a subconscious awareness that our day-to-day life is become more and more crowded and busy and unnatural.}}

{{boc|'''Marcus''': We didn’t consciously go back into early territory with this record, but I think we might have used instruments and tools on this record that are familiar from our very early material, especially with the synths and arpeggios and so on. What you get to hear on our releases is only a small fraction of what we write, because we tend to lock each album down to a theme and stick with that until it’s finished. We’re always writing and recording material that doesn’t end up on any records.}}

{{boc|'''Marcus''': For every album we usually settle on a deliberate restricted palette for the overall sound. It helps to keep the project tied together and consistent within itself. The moment we finished the last record, the idea for [[Tomorrow's Harvest]] was already forming. Like any musician, I think there’s always a hunger to surprise yourself or take some sort of 90-degree turn with each new project. I don’t think it’s necessarily a return to an older sound, although the synths and self-sampling on this record are more or less core things that we’ve always returned to over the past twenty years or so because they offer endless new possibilities in the sound.}}

{{boc|'''Mike''': The way we make tracks always changes between albums, but in the case of the new record it was changing from track to track. Towards the end of working on the record the material was sounding different from the earliest tracks, so it was challenging to contain everything under one album theme.}}

{{boc|'''Marcus''': I hope that it works to make the listener pause and consider where we are right now, where we’re going… I guess it’s essentially a political album, but we shouldn’t spell it all out, it’s important that the listener finds their own thing in there.}}

{{boc|'''Mike''': In the studio we still spend a huge amount of time destroying the sounds in our music, though on this record we wanted to use older electronic instruments in the kind of well-produced, precisely orchestrated ways that film composers did back in the late seventies and eighties.}}

{{boc|'''Marcus''': Actually we haven’t really been listening to much contemporary music recently although we do keep an ear to the ground for anything really special or weird that comes along. Mike tends to deliberately avoid listening to other artists’ music when he’s writing, and much of what I’ve liked over the past few years is just isolated tracks by underground artists, or film soundtracks.}}

{{boc|'''Mike''': If we’re talking about contemporary composers there are too many to mention really. I’d say maybe Reinhold Heil, Johnny Klimek. Also Mark Isham, Thomas Newman, Clint Mansell.}}

{{boc|'''Marcus''': Much of the energy for the album comes from written word, thinkers like James Howard Kunstler and Dmitry Orlov. These writers are like modern day prophets, and it’s a much more fertile source of inspiration than just listening to other people’s music.}}

{{boc|'''Mike''': There’s no specific intention to confine the album’s narrative to the US, but I suppose there is recognizable familiarity within certain imagery and places with existing survivalist culture, and with 70s and 80s cinema that we hoped to evoke.}}

{{boc|'''Marcus''': We were involved with the art direction and we helped devise some of the ideas but we had a really great team of people helping us to make it all happen. We really wanted to bring back a feeling of anticipation for new music that has largely been lost in recent years, mainly because of the internet. As with movies these days, everybody already knows absolutely everything that happens in a film before it even hits theatres. It kills the magic. So we were trying to figure out how to get younger listeners to experience some kind of buzz for the record in the way we used to as kids, which is really difficult to do these days because kids can have everything they want, almost at the press of a button.}}

{{boc|'''Mike''': Our listeners seem to be really cool, savvy types of people. They didn’t let us down.}}

{{boc|'''Mike''': We get indirect feedback from our record company, and other people around us, but we really try hard not to read things about our work because it can be quite a damaging thing. Even positive comments can give you a false sense of what’s good about your work, so it’s really better to try to ignore it.}}

{{boc|'''Marcus''': We’re primarily based in Scotland, where we have a great studio, though we have done some writing and recording whilst living overseas, in the past few years. Some of the core ideas on this album were put down in New Zealand.}}

{{boc|'''Marcus''': I wouldn’t really put any particular importance on our time in Canada because we moved around a lot when we were kids. I think from travelling a lot I’ve been left with a personal association between the west and the past, and that’s a strong source of inspiration for me in the music.}}

{{boc|'''Mike''': It’s very difficult to answer that one as we’re on the inside of this music. I can tell you, from the very beginning we’ve just been trying to make something that we would have loved somebody else to come along and do, but nobody else was coming along and doing it, so we had to make it ourselves. It always felt to us like some kind of a dead zone in music, like an obvious space to us, but somehow nobody was there. So it was like “okay, that’s where we belong”.}}

{{boc|'''Marcus''': In the early nineties mainstream electronic music had mostly become really terrible dance music. We’ve never been into dance music. We were big fans of all the great industrial bands in the eighties, so when dance music came along it was almost as though all that great dark stuff in the eighties had never happened. In the early days of the band our music was much more influenced by what you might call new wave or post-punk and industrial. We’d begun making very experimental music ourselves in the mid eighties, and then by the start of the nineties we were making melodic ambient electronic music, and it felt to us that almost nobody else out there at the time was interested in melody. I think that is why we gravitated towards the artists on [[Warp]]. It felt to us that there was actually a strong connection between artists who wanted to make really extreme noise-based music and those who wanted to make extremely minimal, melodic ambient music. Anything as long as you’re not just somewhere in the middle.}}

{{boc|'''Mike''': That’s still absolutely a driving force in our work. It’s something we love doing, we can never run out of inspiration in this direction, because if you only pay attention to current music then you can’t help sounding pinned down to the fashion of today. But when you allow yourself to explore music from various eras in the past, you can find starting points that were never fully explored, like tangents that didn’t actually occur in the real history of music, and that’s really exciting to me. Especially in the face of so much current music that is becoming indistinguishable because all the producers are basically using the same tools.}}

{{boc|'''Marcus''': Yes of course. Everyone grows up of course and in some cases they start families or have careers of their own, but yeah we’re still all very much in touch.}}

{{boc|'''Mike''': It’s not really an environmental thing, it’s much more to do with people and the direction our civilization is taking us in. We’re not literally talking about plants when we use the term “seeds”, so you have to think sideways about the song titles. We’re living in a time of very dramatic change in terms of population numbers and insidious political events and in some ways it now feels that some sort of crash on the horizon is not just inevitable but in fact necessary.}}

{{question|One of you once said: “I like the idea of doing things that in five, ten, or twenty years time will be able to reveal something about our music, that will make people completely re-examine what we’ve done, and see it in a completely different light.” So you’ve inspired many people with your ideas – would that fit your statement above?}}

{{question|There’s no way to not call it a comeback. Question is: Is this record a new beginning or maybe the end? How does it feel for you?}}

{{question|And finally, the most important thing: Please name your 3 favourite number stations and tell us why you like them.}}