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In 2005, Boards of Canada released their third studio album, titled '''The Campfire Headphase'''. Perhaps the most organic of their publicly available output, The Campfire Headphase represents a significant departure both in mood and timbre from its predecessor, Geogaddi. "We decided to make an escapist soundtrack," Michael Sandison said in a 2005 Playlouder [[interview]], "like a kind of sanctuary; a day-glo vista you can visit by putting the record on." 
 +
 
 +
In place of the dense and highly electronic nature of Geogaddi, The Campfire Headphase favors a more stripped-down, acoustic approach, with a significantly reduced use of synthesizers. As Marcus pointed out to Playlouder magazine: "There's less use of synths on this record. We've leaned heavily towards a whole 'played, taped and sampled' backdrop this time. I guess sampling for us is different from a lot of other bands, because we routinely sample ourselves rather than other records, so most of the sound generation is coming from real instruments that we played ourselves, mostly recorded with microphones, and a lot of location recording. What you hear on the record is kind of a wall of sound created by sampling as many gnarled acoustic sources [as] we could find."
 +
 
 +
The most obvious of these acoustic sources is the frequent (and recognizable) use of guitar on TCHP. "With the new album," Marcus explains,"we deliberately went for a lo-fi guitar sound on a few of the tracks because we were going for a sun-bleached, Californian summer kind of sound, it's almost reminiscent of a Joni Mitchell sound in places."
 +
 
 +
Indeed, the brothers have admitted several times in interviews that the North American landscape (and its music) heavily influenced the direction of The Campfire Headphase. "This time we set out to make something simple that had shades of a road movie soundtrack, like the musical score to a surreal journey across a late 70's North American desert highway," Michael Sandison explains, also characterizing the record as something "like a futuristic western or something...but [always with] something subtle and surreal going on in the tracks to remind you that you're hearing something that has been tainted or spiked in some way by unfathomable futuristic technology. It's maybe like campfire music played by android cowboys."
 +
 
 +
But whatever the synthetic undercurrent,  [[The Campfire Headphase]] is noticeably lacking in one of [[Boards of Canada]]'s signature sounds: children's voices. "That was a deliberate thing," Marcus explained to Earplug magazine. "We got fed up with people saying that we're a formulaic band that you could kind of describe in a couple of sentences...I think it can become really dangerous for a band if you don't have a certain level of self-consciousness about these things. You always have to stay a few steps in front of your audience. We always have people putting fakes on the Internet before a new record is released, and the fakes are always really electronic with little kids' voices and things like that. Probably next time around all the fakes will include wobbly guitars like the ones we use on the new album [[The Campfire Headphase]] (laughs)."
 +
 
 +
This sort of self-conscious reaction, however, may account in part for why opinion on this record has been so divided. When asked by Pitchfork about whether or not the brothers feared being pigeonholed, Michael responded that "[t]he new record is probably the slowest record that we've done. And it's got guitars on it as well. This is something that we've done slightly deliberately. We knew that we had to break away from this thing [being pigeonholed]. It bothered us that if you go into the big stores our stuff is always sitting in the dance music section. We never made a dance record in our entire career but our stuff still gets thrown in there. Our drive with this record is to try and get us out of the dance section and into the main section with all the other bands, like ABBA and A-Ha. We're just a band. Not an IDM band, not an electronic band, and not a dance band."
 +
 
 +
This conscious break with the conventions of the so-called IDM/Dance aesthetic (which so informed their previous work) have lead many to describe the record as boring or watered down. Pitchfork's Mark Richardson complained that "Campfire is a sluggish record, weary, pointed edges dulled as if by the march of time. Boards could previously be counted on to offer a display of crisp, forceful drum programming to jar you out of your narcotic haze ("Telephasic Workshop" and "Gyroscope"). The Campfire Headphase is all midrange, the mid-tempo shuffles putting the mind-boggling array of instrumental processing front and center."
  
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'''The Campfire Headphase''' is the third full-length album created and produced by [[Boards of Canada]]. This album marked a departure from their usual sound. Instead of snippets of childrens laughter and age-old educational videos there is a wismical, untuned guitar. They first make their appearance from the second track, "Chromakey Dreamcoat". The duo have told stories about the guitar effects, citing their origins and such. They were made mostly by using the worst possible recording apparatus available, going to some beautiful place out in the country and playing the aforementioned guitar. Boards of Canada have once said that the persona of Boards of Canada as we know it is only one "step" on their plan, if everything goes alright of
+
Yet for some, the very same departure yields the record its charm, even garnering some textural comparison to My Bloody Valentine's classic "Loveless." Differences of opinion aside, the record continues to be a favorite among many fans, and in any case, probably our best indicator of what is yet to come.
−
course. Maybe this marks their beginning to advance to that next level?
 
  
 
==Tracks==
 
==Tracks==
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# "[[Macquarie Ridge]]" – 4:57 (Japanese release only)
 
# "[[Macquarie Ridge]]" – 4:57 (Japanese release only)
  
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=== Analysis ===
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== Artwork ==
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[[Image:TCH yearbook comparison.jpg|thumb|right|''TCH'' inset image (top), IIT yearbook photo (bottom)]]
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:Album Cover
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The liner notes include a grid-like collage of apparently seventies-era photos, degraded in a manner similar to the cover. The source of a few of these images have been discovered:
−
 
 
−
The bottom left corner of the front cover (and onto the spine of the digipak) has a smudge that strongly resembles the hexagonal Geogaddi cover.  The front and back covers are repeated in the smaller pictures inside the digipak. The smaller pictures are less distorted than the covers.
 
−
 
 
−
 
 
−
:Into the Rainbow Vein
 
−
 
 
−
This intro sets the mood of the album just like "Wildlife Analysis" set the mood for [[Music Has the Right to Children]] and "Ready Let's Go" for [[Geogaddi]]. The song plays itself to be a happier than ''Geogaddi's''. "Rainbow Vein" is a band of quartz carbonate from which gold is mined, located in the Bad Vermilion Lake Area, 250 km west of Thunder Bay, Ontario. It was discovered and named by Stellar Gold Mines Co. Ltd in 1934. [http://www.kingsbaygold.com/stellar.html Link] to more information.
 
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−
 
 
−
:Chromakey Dreamcoat
 
−
 
 
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There are unidentified "samples" of computer game like noises near the end of the this track. There are also voices in the coda of this track. Between 5:16 and 5:35 is a recording of a woman talking and laughing.  She laughs (5:20), says what sounds like "You know, this won't last..." (5:22-5:24), "I didn't like ... that before (?) ... times(?)" (5:28-5:30), laughs (5:32).  It sounds like a sentence of some sort but a lot of words drop out.  "Chromakey" (or colorkey) is a technique used in video production to swap in a separate signal source over a particular chrominance range across the source video, e.g. in bluescreen cinema effects. There appears to be a sample of a seagulls call at around 2:40 and again at 3:10. However these sound different from those sampled on "Happy Cycling".
 
−
 
 
−
The title Chromakey Dreamcoat could also be a pun on a musical by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber called "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat".
 
−
 
 
−
 
 
−
:Satellite Anthem Icarus
 
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Icarus is a character in Greek mythology who loses his wings when he flies too close to the sun. Icarus and his father were imprisoned on an island and determined to escape by constructing themselves wings and flying from captivity. During their escape, Icarus deviated from the careful lead of his father, flying too high, where the sun melted the wax holding his wing’s feathers together. As a result, Icarus fell from the sky and drowned in the ocean below.  Icarus is also quite literally a celestial body orbiting the sun, and could even be considered a satellite, depending on the definition.
 
−
 
 
−
 
 
−
:Peacock Tail
 
−
 
 
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Clear voices. Apart from being the most colourful feature of the peacock, it was also a figure used by Euclid to prove the Pythagorean theorem. [http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PeacocksTail.html Link]
 
−
 
 
−
 
 
−
:Dayvan Cowboy
 
−
 
 
−
 
 
−
:A Moment of Clarity
 
−
 
 
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This track is very similar to the mislabeled third track on the ''[[Live @ Warp10]]'' collection albeit without the flutes.
 
−
 
 
−
 
 
−
:'84 Pontiac Dream
 
−
 
 
−
Part of the melody in a recurring section of the track is built from what sounds like a 1980's corporate [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingle jingle] (e.g. at 0:27-0:30 on the right channel). This helps the listener remember (if they lived through it) the time period when corporations and organizations were using a certain type of synthetic sound for their catchy jingle melodies to seem "futuristic" and "forward-thinking" while their logo was displayed on the TV. For many this sound should create a nostalgic feeling. Contemporarily we still come across these audio-visual artifacts on certain old VHS tapes, which are usually pretty worn out and imperfect, further enhancing the nostalgia when we re-experience them. BoC, using a jingle in a track with such a title, might be illustrating how certain sensory perceptions experienced repetitively in waking life (as these jingles were in 1984) can become part of the texture in a dream and furthermore that the worn quality of the recording reflects the imperfect quality of memory.
 
−
 
 
−
 
 
−
:Sherbet Head
 
−
 
 
−
Throughout the track is a recording of some human voices that are garbled and buried and are, therefore, hard to comprehend.  The recording seems to be slightly detuned, probably by one or two semi-tones.  The voices are clearest at the beginning, before the bass kicks in.  Noticeable in this section is a man saying a word or two (0:00-0:04), a phrase said by a woman (0:10-0:12) and a phrase said twice by a third voice (0:20-0:24).  It sounds like the microphone is being banged against objects as if somebody is walking around somewhere with a hand-held tape recorder.  Also audible is the sound of a child screaming (0:57).  Similar sounds continue on for the rest of the track's duration.  Perhaps it is a field recording of some public space. 
 
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:Oscar See through Red Eye
 
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:Ataronchronon
 
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The ending sounds a bit like 'Gann', the short track off Boards of Canada's [http://www.boardsofcanada.com website].  The Ataronchronon or "People of the Marshes" were a tribal people living in seventeenth century Ontario.
 
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:Hey Saturday Sun
 
−
 
 
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:Constants Are Changing
 
−
 
 
−
 
 
−
:Slow This Bird Down
 
−
 
 
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Near the end of this song is an aural collage of shortwave radio noise. Morse, teletype, and various data signals can be heard including a radio modem (called the Harris RF-5710) used by hobbyists and naval military services.
 
−
 
 
  
−
:Tears from the Compound Eye
+
* A photo of a curly-haired man sitting at an [[wikipedia:Commodore International|Commodore]] CBM 2001 computer was taken from a 1979 yearbook photo from the [[wikipedia:Illinois Institute of Technology|Illinois Institute of Technology]]. [http://forum.watmm.com/index.php?showtopic=8386] [http://web.archive.org/web/20070228221147/http://www.iit.edu/alumni/updates/yearbook/1970s/images/campus%20and%20student%20in%20computer%20center%201979.jpg]
 +
* A photo of blonde-haired woman in profile was taken from a 1972 anti-drug propaganda film called ''[http://www.archive.org/details/social_seminar_tom Social Seminar: Tom]''.  A sample of dialogue from the film was also used towards the end of the album track "[[Chromakey Dreamcoat]]".
  
−
The compound eye is found on most insects and some crustaceans, which is composed of many light-sensitive elements, each having its own refractive system and each forming a portion of an image. Most compound eyes feature hexagonal lenses in an array forming the pattern.
+
== Comments and Trivia==
  
 +
*When asked if the record (and especially its artwork) was a throw back to Music Has the Right to Children, Marcus replied that "it's deliberately reminiscent of ‘Music Has the Right to Children'. Musically it's like an echo of that record, all bleached-out blue skies and so on. In some ways it sounds older than ‘Music Has the Right…' because of the choice of instruments and the sheer amount of damage we've done to the sound."
  
−
:Farewell Fire
+
*The bottom left corner of the front cover (and onto the spine of the digipak) has a smudge that strongly resembles the hexagonal Geogaddi cover.  The front and back covers are repeated in the smaller pictures inside the digipak. The smaller pictures are less distorted than the covers.
  
−
The melody continues very silently until the end.
+
*On the vinyl release, a bird's chirp can be heard in the runout grooves, typically sides C and D.
  
 +
*Playing the vinyl release at 45rpm evokes a completely different listening experience. 
  
−
:Macquarie Ridge
+
*When inverting the colors on the back cover art, the child's expression changes into a ghostly, almost horrified, stare.
−
 
 
−
Macquarie Ridge is a song exclusive to the Japanese release of ''The Campfire Headphase''.
 
  
 
=== Reviews ===
 
=== Reviews ===
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* ''[http://www.warprecords.com/mart/music/release.php?cat=WARP123 The Campfire Headphase]'' at WarpMart
 
* ''[http://www.warprecords.com/mart/music/release.php?cat=WARP123 The Campfire Headphase]'' at WarpMart
 
* ''[http://bleep.com/?bleep=WARP123 The Campfire Headphase]'' at Bleep.com
 
* ''[http://bleep.com/?bleep=WARP123 The Campfire Headphase]'' at Bleep.com
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== Artwork ==
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category = The Campfire Headphase artwork
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[[Category: The Campfire Headphase]]
 
[[Category: The Campfire Headphase]]
 
{{Nav-Releases}}
 
{{Nav-Releases}}

Latest revision as of 11:26, 17 November 2017

The Campfire Headphase
The Campfire Headphase album cover.jpg
Label(s) warp
Catalogue No(s) warplp123
warpcd123
Release date(s) 13 October 2005 (Japan)
17 October 2005 (Europe)
Format(s) gatefold 2xlp
cd (jewel case)
cd (digipak)
Running time(s) 62:05 (standard)
67:02 (japanese)


In 2005, Boards of Canada released their third studio album, titled The Campfire Headphase. Perhaps the most organic of their publicly available output, The Campfire Headphase represents a significant departure both in mood and timbre from its predecessor, Geogaddi. "We decided to make an escapist soundtrack," Michael Sandison said in a 2005 Playlouder interview, "like a kind of sanctuary; a day-glo vista you can visit by putting the record on."

In place of the dense and highly electronic nature of Geogaddi, The Campfire Headphase favors a more stripped-down, acoustic approach, with a significantly reduced use of synthesizers. As Marcus pointed out to Playlouder magazine: "There's less use of synths on this record. We've leaned heavily towards a whole 'played, taped and sampled' backdrop this time. I guess sampling for us is different from a lot of other bands, because we routinely sample ourselves rather than other records, so most of the sound generation is coming from real instruments that we played ourselves, mostly recorded with microphones, and a lot of location recording. What you hear on the record is kind of a wall of sound created by sampling as many gnarled acoustic sources [as] we could find."

The most obvious of these acoustic sources is the frequent (and recognizable) use of guitar on TCHP. "With the new album," Marcus explains,"we deliberately went for a lo-fi guitar sound on a few of the tracks because we were going for a sun-bleached, Californian summer kind of sound, it's almost reminiscent of a Joni Mitchell sound in places."

Indeed, the brothers have admitted several times in interviews that the North American landscape (and its music) heavily influenced the direction of The Campfire Headphase. "This time we set out to make something simple that had shades of a road movie soundtrack, like the musical score to a surreal journey across a late 70's North American desert highway," Michael Sandison explains, also characterizing the record as something "like a futuristic western or something...but [always with] something subtle and surreal going on in the tracks to remind you that you're hearing something that has been tainted or spiked in some way by unfathomable futuristic technology. It's maybe like campfire music played by android cowboys."

But whatever the synthetic undercurrent, The Campfire Headphase is noticeably lacking in one of Boards of Canada's signature sounds: children's voices. "That was a deliberate thing," Marcus explained to Earplug magazine. "We got fed up with people saying that we're a formulaic band that you could kind of describe in a couple of sentences...I think it can become really dangerous for a band if you don't have a certain level of self-consciousness about these things. You always have to stay a few steps in front of your audience. We always have people putting fakes on the Internet before a new record is released, and the fakes are always really electronic with little kids' voices and things like that. Probably next time around all the fakes will include wobbly guitars like the ones we use on the new album The Campfire Headphase (laughs)."

This sort of self-conscious reaction, however, may account in part for why opinion on this record has been so divided. When asked by Pitchfork about whether or not the brothers feared being pigeonholed, Michael responded that "[t]he new record is probably the slowest record that we've done. And it's got guitars on it as well. This is something that we've done slightly deliberately. We knew that we had to break away from this thing [being pigeonholed]. It bothered us that if you go into the big stores our stuff is always sitting in the dance music section. We never made a dance record in our entire career but our stuff still gets thrown in there. Our drive with this record is to try and get us out of the dance section and into the main section with all the other bands, like ABBA and A-Ha. We're just a band. Not an IDM band, not an electronic band, and not a dance band."

This conscious break with the conventions of the so-called IDM/Dance aesthetic (which so informed their previous work) have lead many to describe the record as boring or watered down. Pitchfork's Mark Richardson complained that "Campfire is a sluggish record, weary, pointed edges dulled as if by the march of time. Boards could previously be counted on to offer a display of crisp, forceful drum programming to jar you out of your narcotic haze ("Telephasic Workshop" and "Gyroscope"). The Campfire Headphase is all midrange, the mid-tempo shuffles putting the mind-boggling array of instrumental processing front and center."

Yet for some, the very same departure yields the record its charm, even garnering some textural comparison to My Bloody Valentine's classic "Loveless." Differences of opinion aside, the record continues to be a favorite among many fans, and in any case, probably our best indicator of what is yet to come.

Tracks[edit]

  1. "Into the Rainbow Vein" – 0:44 (Bleep preview)
  2. "Chromakey Dreamcoat" – 5:47
  3. "Satellite Anthem Icarus" – 6:04
  4. "Peacock Tail" – 5:24
  5. "Dayvan Cowboy" – 5:00
  6. "A Moment of Clarity" – 0:51
  7. "'84 Pontiac Dream" – 3:49
  8. "Sherbet Head" – 2:41
  9. "Oscar See through Red Eye" – 5:08
  10. "Ataronchronon" – 1:14
  11. "Hey Saturday Sun" – 4:56
  12. "Constants Are Changing" – 1:42
  13. "Slow This Bird Down" – 6:09
  14. "Tears from the Compound Eye" – 4:03
  15. "Farewell Fire" – 8:26
  16. "Macquarie Ridge" – 4:57 (Japanese release only)

Artwork[edit]

TCH inset image (top), IIT yearbook photo (bottom)

The liner notes include a grid-like collage of apparently seventies-era photos, degraded in a manner similar to the cover. The source of a few of these images have been discovered:

Comments and Trivia[edit]

  • When asked if the record (and especially its artwork) was a throw back to Music Has the Right to Children, Marcus replied that "it's deliberately reminiscent of ‘Music Has the Right to Children'. Musically it's like an echo of that record, all bleached-out blue skies and so on. In some ways it sounds older than ‘Music Has the Right…' because of the choice of instruments and the sheer amount of damage we've done to the sound."
  • The bottom left corner of the front cover (and onto the spine of the digipak) has a smudge that strongly resembles the hexagonal Geogaddi cover. The front and back covers are repeated in the smaller pictures inside the digipak. The smaller pictures are less distorted than the covers.
  • On the vinyl release, a bird's chirp can be heard in the runout grooves, typically sides C and D.
  • Playing the vinyl release at 45rpm evokes a completely different listening experience.
  • When inverting the colors on the back cover art, the child's expression changes into a ghostly, almost horrified, stare.

Reviews[edit]

External links[edit]

Artwork[edit]

Discography Overview | view • edit
Rare/Early releases Catalog 3 • Acid Memories • Closes Vol. 1 • Play by Numbers • Hooper Bay • Boc Maxima • Old Tunes Vol. 1 • Old Tunes Vol. 2 • Random 35 Tracks Tape • Geogaddi (test pressing)
General releases (albums) Music Has the Right to Children • Geogaddi • The Campfire Headphase • Tomorrow's Harvest
General releases (EPs/12"s) Twoism • Hi Scores • Aquarius • Peel Session • In a Beautiful Place out in the Country • Trans Canada Highway
Mixtapes Marcus Eoin's Campfire Mixtape • Societas x Tape
Live Sets Live @ Warp10 • Live @ Lighthouse • Live @ ATP • All Gigs
Promotional Releases Telephasic Workshop • MHTRTC (promo cassette) • Orange Romeda • Geogaddi (promo lp) • Geogaddi (promo cassette) • ------ / ------ / ------ / XXXXXX / ------ / ------ • Reach For The Dead (promo cd) • Come To Dust (promo cd)
Produced by BoC for Others Here Come the Rubber Cops
Bootleg Releases Unreleased Tracks
Other Kaleidoscope • Promotional Events • Promotional Items • T-Shirts



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