Difference between revisions of "The Great Escape"
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{{boc|Marcus: Well, we do try to put themes and references into most of our tracks, usually as a kind of āspikeā. Sometimes we put things into tracks where we think the idea is so obscure and arcane that nobody will ever notice it. But they always do, and it gets a bit crazy at times when we realise people are really going to incredible lengths to analyse everything we do, you know, even stripping tracks apart with spectral analysis.}} | {{boc|Marcus: Well, we do try to put themes and references into most of our tracks, usually as a kind of āspikeā. Sometimes we put things into tracks where we think the idea is so obscure and arcane that nobody will ever notice it. But they always do, and it gets a bit crazy at times when we realise people are really going to incredible lengths to analyse everything we do, you know, even stripping tracks apart with spectral analysis.}} | ||
| ā | {{question|How might your music change if the environment you make it in did?} | + | {{question|How might your music change if the environment you make it in did?}} |
{{boc|Marcus: I donāt think nature and rural life is really what itās all about. The main thing for us about being based away from the city is that it allows us to switch off. We can create a hermetic bubble where our music exists without any outside influence at all. When your studio is out in the country you can easily imagine that youāre in any place, or even any era that you like.}} | {{boc|Marcus: I donāt think nature and rural life is really what itās all about. The main thing for us about being based away from the city is that it allows us to switch off. We can create a hermetic bubble where our music exists without any outside influence at all. When your studio is out in the country you can easily imagine that youāre in any place, or even any era that you like.}} | ||
Revision as of 12:27, 21 October 2018
| title | The Great Escape |
|---|---|
| author | Mark Robertson |
| publication | The List |
| date | Oct 2005 |
| issue | Issue 533 |
| pages | 18-19 |
Text
The Great Escape
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 Canadaās 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 thereās 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 deļ¬nable edge that made it Boards of Canadaā. 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 unidentiļ¬ed 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 alchemistās cupboard, Hexagon Sun. They continue to thrive and seem as content as any musicians youāre likely to meet.
