Music Has the Right to Children era

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.

^[1]

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...

Simplicity is very important to us,

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

It's easier to affect people emotionally if you keep things simple. Obviously there's a lot of great music in the world that's complex but as far as we're concerned the important thing is that you can whistle our tunes.

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.

If it doesn't affect me emotionally it doesn't interest me,

explains fellow Boarder Marcus Eoin.

I think a lot of it is trying to capture a nostalgic feeling buried somewhere in our minds. We are nostalgic people trying to get back moments from our pasts.

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.

Music for commercials, documentary soundtracks and children's TV themes,

continues Michael.

The spaces in between the music you're supposed to listen to. That's where our interest lies. These melodies might only last a second at the end of a TV programme but they are quietly more important to the public psyche than most pop music.

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

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. ^[2]

'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.

The name Boards of Canada is inspired by The National Filmboard of Canada. Could you explain what was so special about the nature-documentaries and their soundtracks?

"Yes the NFB films were one of our influences when we were younger. I think most of their films have been socio-political, but there are animations and suchlike. The thing about the older films is that the quality of picture and soundtrack wasn't perfect, it was grainy and wobbly. We used to record compositions on cheap tapes which gave a similar rough quality, and we've always returned to that sound because it feels personal and nostalgic."

Where you living in Canada when you saw the documentaries?

"We saw a lot of those films here in the UK during the 1970's, but we both lived in Alberta briefly in the late 70's."

Apart from these soundtracks, you also namedrop Joni Mitchell and the Incredible String Band when it comes to instrumentation. What was so special about their musical aproach?

"Much of the music we like is not electronic, although we've probably been influenced by Devo. We love acoustic music on old recordings because they tend to have natural qualities such as tape compression and distortion. But I think Joni Mitchell's voice is so beautiful it almost sounds synthesised, so maybe there's the connection. The Incredible String Band still sound unusual today, because they changed the arrangement for every song, and their own influences were far and wide apart, and they always wrote emotional melodies which were a bit unusual, you know, with melodies which took unexpected twists. A unique band."

What else do you consider important musical influences, past and present?

"Devo, Walter/Wendy Carlos, DAF, television themes, corporate jingles from TV and film, Jeff Wayne, Julian Cope, My Bloody Valentine, 80's pop music."

Could you tell me more about your so-called Psychedelic aproach, the alterations from start to finish in a track?

"We sometimes make a tune metamorphose as it plays. An example is "Nlogax" from the "Hi Scores" EP on Skam, which begins like an old electro or disco track but halfway through it suddenly becomes something nightmarish, like your brain is starting to malfunction in the middle of the tune. Psychedelics make music sound entirely different. Tiny details become massive, a five-minute track can feel like it's five hours long on psychedelics. You know when you're on a ride at a fairground, the pitch of the music rises and falls because of the Doppler-Effect? That's another thing we love to do in our tracks, and it's a fairly psychedelic-sounding effect too."

How *DO* you write music? What's the starting point? A feeling, a sound or an idea? And who of you two makes the first sketches?

"It's a team effort. Usually the starting point is a melody. We write hundreds of little melodies, and the most attractive ones last in our minds. We go back to them and pick the ones that really stand out, then we start piecing together rhythms. Both of us write the tunes and rhythms. On the album "Music Has The Right To Children" 50% was by Marcus, 50% by me (Mike, rp). Not one of the tracks was totally written by one person."

The album is joint release by Skam & Warp. Was this done to improve promotion & distribution?

"We began work on the album at the beginning of 1997 and it was meant to be for Skam, but in the summer Warp came to us and said "we'd like this album", so the labels decided to co-release it."

Skam gained respect amongst IDM-minded musiclovers in very little time. A new Skam record is considered something special nowadays. But they're always hard to find.

"Skam is truly underground, truly independent. I'm sure that if we asked Skam to release only one copy of a new release, they would do it."

But why make music that (almost) no one can get their hands on, like the two MASK ep's, which were released in issues of 100 and 200 copies?

"We've been making music since we were at school in the early 80's, and nobody will ever hear most of it, so it doesn't bother us to do a really limited release. Our friends and families hear all the music we write, and that's all that matters really. You wouldn't believe how much music we have on tape."

But why release records at all, if all that matters is that your friends and families hear all the music? You must feel some sort of proud when records are bought by musicfans and get good press reviews. Or don't you?

"Of course, it's lovely to hear that people we've never met are really enjoying our music, because it feels as though we must have something in common, I mean psychologically, with those listeners. So it is satisfying, and fascinating."

Do you feel any pressure, now that you have signed a contract with Warp?

"Yes, that's part of what you accept when you sign to a bigger label."

Warp has announced a second BoC-album, to be released at the end of this year. In what ways will it differ from the first album?

"I won't give away our plans for the next one, but it will be different. It's going to be stranger, more concentrated, more melodic."

Melody is very important in most of your work. While many other electronic musicians focus more on rhythm. Is this perhaps one of the secrects of your succes?

"We're much more interested in melody than rhythm, and we appreciate the emotional power of a melody. Maybe that's too uncool for a lot of electronic artists."

Some people might argue that Boards of Canada make 'depressing' music.What would you like to comment on that? Are you pessimistic or optimistic towards life?

"We're very optimistic. We might sound melancholy, but that's just the way we write music."

What kind of special equipment do you use? I understand some of your machines are quite big. And you have something what you call 'the SecretWeapon'.

"If I told you what the secret weapon is, it wouldn't be a secret anymore. We have more than one really. We use a mixture of old and new equipment. We don't have lots of synths, we use hi-fi gear and other tricks to achieve our sound."

You run a company called Music70. What is the goal of this company?

"Music70 makes short films and creates images, paintings and other art. It's done purely for ourselves and our friends, and it has no commercial aims at all. Most Music70 work is like D.I.Y., but it's always emotional."

How is the planned full length Super-8 movie with soundtrack coming along?

"That film will start shooting in summer."

You use a bunker in the Pentland Hills as a studio. Does the atmosphere of the Hexagon Studio reflects in any way on your music?

"We don't have an urban lifestyle, so that might make us unusual in electronic music. The things we do with friends are more rural or organic, like outdoor gatherings and so on."

Some of the tracktitles are quite cryptic. Could you please explain some of them?

"Our titles are always cryptic references which the listener might understand or might not. Some of them are personal, so the listener is unlikely to know what it refers to. "Music Has The Right To Children" is a statement of our intention to affect the audience using sound. "The Color Of The Fire" was a reference to a friend's psychedelic experience. "Kaini Industries" is a company that was set up in Canada ( by coincidence in the month Mike was born), to create employment for a settlement of Cree Indians. "Olson" is the surname of a family we know, and "Smokes Quantity" is the nickname of a friend of ours."

Is Bocuma perhaps named after Bochum Welt? It sounds very 'Bochummy' :)

"Sorry, I'm afraid not... It's an abbreviation/crossover of BOC Maxima and Documa, an obscure reference to 80's video culture."

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

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.^[3]

This is an original text copied verbatim from the original source. Do not edit this text to correct errors or misspellings. Aside from added wikilinks, this text is exactly as it originally appeared.

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...

VIRGIN MEGAWEB: Votre biographie est écrite de telle façon qu'on ne voit pas bien qui vous êtes, ce que vous avez fait, vous êtes écossais, non ?

BOARDS OF CANADA: C'est juste, nous vivons en Ecosse, dans la campagne à quelques kilomètres d'Edimbourg...

Apparemment, vous n'avez jamais été liés à une scène ou à un style particulier de musique ? Vous semblez assez isolés ?

Oui, ce n'est que depuis deux ans que nous avons commencé à prendre des contacts avec d'autres musiciens, en particulier des artistes de Skam Records et de chez Warp. En fait, cela fait depuis très longtemps que le groupe vit, entre amis. Cela remonte au début des années 80, lorsque nous étions à l'école...

Vous avez commencé adolescent à faire de la musique en réalité ?

Yeah ! Nous avions tous deux une dizaine d'années, quelque chose comme ça. Nous avons appris à jouer des instruments plus jeunes encore, puis très tôt nous avons manipulé des enregistrements, des cassettes et bandes magnétiques, faisant des collages. Nous avons commencé à écrire et jouer de manière plus sérieuse aux environs de 1987, il y a dix ans, dans le format qui est le nôtre.

Vous deux seulement ?

Non, avec d'autres musiciens, dans le cadre d'un véritable groupe bien plus large. Mais, il y a quelques années, après avoir joué des guitares et de la batterie acoustique, nous sommes revenus à une forme plus franchement électronique...

En réalité, lorsque vous avez commencé à jouer, c'était plutôt comme un jeu d'adolescents, expérimentant avec des enregistrements de films et des instruments. Vous ne cherchiez pas à faire carrière...

On s'amusait avec des sons qui nous plaisaient, d'où qu'ils viennent. Notre parcours est un peu compliqué. D'abord, on a expérimenté sans se poser de questions, avec les moyens du bord, puis on a beaucoup travaillé avec des musiciens et de vrais instruments, on a complexifié notre musique. Il y a cinq ans, elle sonnait beaucoup plus gothique, plus proche du rock expérimental, avec des vocaux à l'occasion... Il y avait quand même pas mal d'électronique, déjà on samplait nos propres instruments. Puis nous sommes revenus à un esprit plus proche de nos débuts, simple et instinctif, à la seule différence que nous utilisons désormais toutes les merveilles du numérique, et qu'il est donc bien plus facile de s'amuser et d'obtenir ce qu'on souhaite...

Vous vous sentez proches de toute la génération du home studio ?

En un sens, peut-être. Notre démarche des débuts avec nos vieux appareils à enregistrer était comme une version pauvre de ce que d'autres ont fait par la suite avec le home studio. Mais si on a été proche de l'esprit de génération, c'est par hasard et par moment, car nous avons toujours avancé un peu isolés dans notre coin, nous inspirant de rock comme d'électronique.

Vous n'avez aucun lien avec la génération de l'acid house ?

Non. En réalité, à cette époque, au début des années 90, nous enregistrions une musique avec des vocaux et des guitares, très influencée par des groupes de rock expérimental et atmosphérique comme My Bloody Valentine. Ce n'est qu'avant et après l'explosion de l'acid house, en décalage complet, que nous avons peut-être été proches du mouvement...

Finalement, pourquoi alors êtes-vous revenus à l'électronique ?

C'était plus naturel pour nous... Nous avons toujours beaucoup travaillé, peaufinant sans cesse nos morceaux, même lorsqu'ils sonnaient plus rock. Pendant un mois, deux mois, on revient sur nos morceaux, changeant un son ici, en ajoutant un autre... On se sample nous-mêmes sans cesse, revenir à un son presque exclusivement électronique, c'était simplement aller jusqu'au bout de notre logique.

Cette opportunité de sampler grâce aux nouveaux outils technologiques, que vous n'aviez pas à vos débuts, était-elle l'une des raisons de votre retour à l'électronique ?

Yeah... Cette technologie nous a permis de simplifier notre démarche. Avec le sampler, vous avez le contrôle absolu de votre musique. Vous pouvez prendre le son d'un instrument, et le faire sonner à votre guise à coups d'aller retour. Un exemple : sur notre dernnier album, il y a des titres pour lesquels nous avons utilisé un piano. Grâce au sampling, nous avons transformé le son de ce piano de plein de façons différentes, au point de le faire sonner comme un très très vieux piano, ou au point que personne ne se rende compte en écoutant l'album qu'il y a du piano. Même topo pour les guitares. Nous avons joué d'instruments électriques ou acoustiques pour "Music Has The Right To Children", mais nous avons complètement retravaillé leur son grâce à l'électronique.

Pourquoi ces mélodies enfantines sur votre album, d'où cela vient-il ?

On y retrouve l'écho des mélodies qui ont marqué notre enfance, et ces mélodies, pour la plupart, viennent de la télé, et notamment des films et émissions enfantines. C'est l'univers qui a marqué notre génération. Nous avons tous le même âge. Nous avons grandi en voyant les mêmes programmes TV, et c'est pour nous une influence bien plus forte que les musiques d'aujourd'hui ou que d'autres musiques que nous écoutions à l'époque. Ce sont ces airs qui restent dans nos têtes, qu'on le veuille ou non...

Vous êtes très nostalgiques de votre enfance ?

Yeah... Même chez des groupes comme Autechre, sous une surface très expérimentale, très minimale et industrielle, on perçoit des échos de cette nostalgie, des programmes télé qui ont marqué leur enfance. Et je crois qu'ils vont aller plus loin dans cette direction. C'est un processus naturel de création. On invente à partir des traces de sa mémoire autant qu'à partir de ses désirs et de ses humeurs du moment. On réinterprète sans cesse...

Vous utilisez des samples de programmes TV ?

On essaye de l'éviter. On le fait à l'occasion. Mais, de façon générale, nous créons nos propres mélodies et nos propres vocaux avec les gens d'ici. Même les mélodies qui sonnent comme des samples sont faites par nous, puis détruites par le sampling.

Parfois, en écoutant l'album, on a l'impression d'entendre des chants d'oiseaux, des bruits de la nature... Ce ne sont pas des samples ?

C'est une grande influence, c'est juste que la nature nous influence, tous comme les fenêtres ouvertes du studio (rires). Il y a ce titre, "Rue the World", sur l'album, où on entend des oiseaux chanter. En fait, j'écoutais ce morceau, et, bizarrement, je percevais des bruits d'oiseaux. C'est là que je me suis rendu compte que la fenêtre était ouverte, et comme ces chants se mariaient à merveille avec la musique, nous les avons enregistrés pour retrouver l'impression ressentie en écoutant le titre avec la fenêtre ouverte.

C'est peut-être aussi à cause du nom du groupe, qui fait naître plein d'images...

Le nom du groupe vient du soundtrack de l'un de ces films animaliers qui ont bercé notre enfance. On y retrouve ce côté nostalgique. Mais aussi un côté plus rauque, plus dur, plus sombre. Notre musique naît d'un mariage bizarre entre ces airs de l'enfance et des humeurs plus difficiles, comme une vision d'une réalité plus terrible qui se mêle paradoxalement à nos amours enfantines.

Pourquoi ? A cause des fantômes ?

(rires)

Non... Cela reflète l'étendue des sujets qui nous passionnent, par exemple les expériences psychédéliques, dont on retrouve des échos dans l'album, bad trip et good trip. Ou encore la numérologie, avec tous ses aspects noirs... C'est la face adulte de notre travail, pessimiste... On joue en quelque sorte d'une double radicalité, l'ombre et la lumière...

Vous vivez à la campagne ?

Oui, depuis assez peu de temps. On a construit notre studio dans les Pentland Hills. Et maintenant, on commence à vivre de la musique, sans faire autant de jobs qu'auparavant.

Quels types de jobs ?

Rien de honteux, des boulots universitaires par exemple, mais on préfère ne pas en parler...

Vous avez toujours eu ce nom de Boards of Canada ?

Non. Juste depuis quatre ans officiellement. Mais, de fait, ce nom existait depuis des années, comme le titre d'un morceau, avant de devenir le nom du groupe.

Au début de l'interview, vous parliez de vos amis et de votre famille autour de vous, s'agit-il d'une communauté d'artistes ? D'étudiants en histoire de l'art ?

Certains de nos amis sont des étudiants en histoire de l'art, ou des professeurs d'art moderne. certains sont des artistes, d'autres ne sont que des amis enthousiastes. On y trouve des photographes, des réalisateurs de films, artistes et musiciens... Et puis beaucoup d'amis que nous avons gardés depuis l'école. Lorsque nous étions à l'école, tous nos amis étaient dans des groupes de rock, nous étions les seuls à faire de l'électronique. A cette époque, nous avons commencé à faire des films, des vidéos en plus de la musique... On a produit des travaux de certains de nos amis, qu'il s'agisse d'expos ou de documentaires...

Vous réalisez des vidéos dans le même esprit que votre musique ? Ce n'est pas de la vidéo high tech ?

Oui, tout-à-fait. C'est un peu de la Do It Yourself vidéo, sauf que nous utilisons pas mal d'équipements high tech. On aime bien dégrader les images photo ou vidéo comme on dégrade le son, rendre les images plus dures, primaires, sales... On essaye de corrompre la technologie.

Cela vous arrive-t-il de créer d'un même élan musique et images ? De penser votre musique en images ?

Oui, bien sûr, mais de façon naturelle et intuitive plus que calculée. Les musiciens les plus décalés de la musique électronique comme Aphex Twin aiment que leur musique sonne cinématique, c'est-à-dire en images. C'est une démarche d'autant plus facile pour les musiciens que ne pensent pas systématiquement aux clubs lorsqu'ils créent un titre... Si l'on peut danser sur l'un de nos titres, c'est parfait, mais nous ne le cherchons pas. Nous nous laissons toute liberté, avec l'objectif de traduire des émotions plutôt que de faire danser. Il y a des tas de gens qui font ça tellement mieux que nous. Pourquoi nous y mettre nous aussi en le faisant moins bien ?

Il y a pourtant des morceaux qui iraient bien en club sur l'album...

C'est bien. Certes, nous travaillons les rythmes, mais pour nous il s'agit d'un véhicule pour de belles et étranges mélodies. Nous essayons de varier les effets, et c'est d'autant plus important pour la scène. D'autre part, nous aimons les rythmes appuyés, presque binaires, parce qu'ils collent bien à notre désir de créer des atmosphères sombres et obsessionnelles pour les marier à nos mélodies.

On retrouve cette dualité dans un titre comme "An Eagle In Your Mind"...

C'est exactement ça. D'un côté des mélodies et des voix presque naïves, de l'autre, un processus de corruption de ces voix et mélodies, par une ambiance ou des transformations, comme dans le titre que tu cites ou "Sixtyten"... On ne souhaite pas aller vers des rythmes comme ceux de la jungle, qui, par leur ambition et leur complexité, peuvent foutre en l'air ce type d'effet et l'émotion trouble et ambigüe que nous souhaitons créer. Le rythme doit rester simple. C'est une question d'équilibre.

En concert, est-ce que vous essayez de mêler son et image, comme s'ils se répondaient l'un l'autre ?

Non, pas encore. Certes, nous essayons de marier image et son. Nous essayons de créer des visuels qui collent à la musique, mais dans la limite des possibilités techniques... Nous avons été très influencés par un groupe qui s'appelle Test Departement, qui jouait beaucoup avec les images et les sons, et qui n'avait rien à faire de la dance ou de la pop comme beaucoup d'artistes de l'époque. Ils ont toujours suivi leur voie, sans se soucier de la mode. En 1998, le rythme de l'époque est la jungle, en 1988, c'était l'acid. Un groupe comme Test Departement, même s'il pouvait faire danser, se contrefoutait du rythme de l'époque. Ils étaient très fort, en particulier sur scène, parce qu'ils ne ressemblaient à personne. Ils faisaient de la musique industrielle, mais à l'occasion y mêlaient des influences celtes ou des rythmes à danser... Ils nous ont montré qu'on pouvait survivre et être respecté en menant sa propre voie, sans essayer de copier le style des autres. Ce n'est pas parce qu'aujourd'hui la mode est à la jungle qu'on ne peut pas survivre sur le territoire de la musique électronique sans faire de la jungle.

Vos concerts sont très bien préparés, ou y a-t-il une place pour l'improvisation, notamment par l'image ?

On ne peut vraiment pas improviser avec l'image. C'est un objectif mais c'est très dur. On va commencer à utiliser des ordinateurs pour avancer sur cette voie, utilisant des captures vidéo, afin de traiter les clips vidéo comme des sources de samples image. Aujourd'hui, sur scène, on ne peut jouer avec la vidéo comme on le fait avec les vinyls. Il y a un élément de hasard néanmoins. Nous ne voulons pas qu'un show soit parfait, car nous n'aimons pas la perfection. Nous souhaitons qu'il y ait du chaos dans un spectacle ou une musique, de la dureté, des surprises... Cela rend tout plus excitant...

Votre grand studio est dans une petite ville ?

Il est dans la campagne, avec quelques maisons, à une dizaine de miles d'Edimbourgh. Ce n'est pas un studio très grand, mais il est plein de matos...

C'est une sorte de communauté ?

Non, juste un groupe d'amis. Chacun avec sa famille...

Ce n'est pas un bunker comme on peut le lire dans la bio ?

C'est une exagération de la maison de disques.

Dans des villes comme Glasgow ou Edimbourg, il y a une scène artistique très active, en art, en vidéo et en musique électronique bien sûr, avec des artistes très jeunes, des festivals, etc, en êtes-vous proches ?

Il s'y passe des choses formidables, impossibles à suivre toutes. Jamais il n'y a eu autant de lieux et d'initiatives pour la musique expérimentale, et, plus largement, pour toutes les initiatives artistiques audacieuses. Il y a eu des shows de vidéo avec Internet par exemple, des vidéo mixes en live, des tas de trucs très bizarres impliquant le public... Il y a aussi une scène techno très riche, comme il n'en existait pas auparavant...

Vous connaissez Soma Records ?

Yeah... Pas personnellement, mais nous les connaissons...

Toutes les voix que vous utilisez sont celles d'amis ?

Oui, pour la plupart. Quelques-unes viennent d'enregistrements télé, mais c'est une minorité. C'est un mix. On utilise par exemple des cassettes vidéo que nous avions enregistrées il y a dix ans, qu'on écoute comme ça, et dont on utilise un mot. On se laisse aller aux redécouvertes du hasard.

Vous avez parlé du chaos tout à l'heure. Les théories du Chaos vous intéressent ? Les sciences un peu barjes ?

Yeah... Les fractales. Je ne sais pas d'où ça vient, mais les sciences étranges nous ont toujours passionné.

La vie artificielle, etc...

Et les nombres... Markus a étudié l'Intelligence Artificielle... Cela influence ce que nous faisons. Moi, ce sont plutôt les nombres et leur forme. J'ai toujours été passionné des rapports de la musique et des nombres. L'expérience psychédélique va dans ce sens, elle peut nous aider à voir les choses en termes de nombres et de formes, de structures, comme si la musique était faite de cristaux.

Cela vous influence ? C'est un aspect de votre univers ?

MS: On ne se dit pas, tiens, là ce sont les robots qui vont nous influencer. Non, ces sciences étranges font partie de notre univers, et on le retrouve dans nos titres. Pas la science-fiction, mais ces sciences qui concrétisent aujourd'hui des visions de la SF du passé. Nous avons grandi dans les seventies, à une époque de grande paranoïa par rapport aux sciences, paranoïa que l'on retrouvait dans la science-fiction de l'époque, dans les bouquins comme dans les films. C'est cette paranoïa, ce pessimisme, cette crainte de la science que l'on retrouve dans notre musique au même titre que d'autres influences. A l'époque où nous avons grandi dans les seventies, la vision du futur qui transparaissait à la télé ou dans des films était très noire, et très forte. Cela a changé, notamment avec les jeux vidéo.

Vous avez également parlé de psychédélisme ?

Oui, nous avons plongé dans l'art et la musique psychédélique à une époque. On réécoute souvent des groupes de la fin des sixties...

"Good Vibrations" ?

Oui, exactement ce genre de choses, les Beach Boys de l'époque "Good Vibrations", les Beatles de 1967. Pour nous, les Beatles sont vraiment devenus passionnants avec le psychédélisme. Ou encore des trucs inspirés de films ou sinon l'Incredible String Band...

Comment êtes-vous entrés en contact avec Skam Records ?

Nous avons fait un album, un EP. On l'a envoyé à quelques personnes, dont Sean Booth d'Autechre. Le lendemain du jour où il l'a reçu, Sean nous appelé, et nous a dit que nous devrions faire quelque chose avec Skam. On a parlé avec eux pendant deux mois. On leur on a donné un titre pour une compilation, et l'année dernière on a commencé à travailler sur un album pour Skam. Vers septembre, nous avons également sympathisé avec les gens de Warp. Ils nous ont dit qu'ils voulaient cet album aussi, mais sans le piquer à Skam, c'est pourquoi l'album sort avec le double label Skam et Warp.

Et Internet, vous utilisez Internet ?

Oui, trop. On y passe beaucoup de temps. On l'utilise depuis longtemps. Mais depuis quelques mois, on l'utilise également en studio, pour chercher des sons, des images. Il y a un important site artistique, une plate-forme, qui a créé une page sur nous, mais nous sommes en train de créer notre propre site, qui sera un acte en lui-même, une petite oeuvre de sons et d'images, d'expériences.

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.

Your biography is written in such a way that it's not easy to tell who you are or what you have done. You're Scottish, aren't you?

"That's right, we live in Scotland, out in the country, a few miles from Edinburgh."

It seems that you've never been tied to any particular scene, or style of music. Are you quite isolated?

"Yes, in fact, it's only in the last couple of years that we've started getting in touch with other musicians, in particular, those of Skam Records and Warp. In fact, the group has been going for a long time, among friends. It goes back to the early 80's, while we were still at school."

So you really started making music as teenagers?

"Yeah! We were both about 10, something like that. We had started playing instruments even younger, and very soon we were playing around with recordings on cassettes and magnetic tapes, making audio collages. We began writing and playing music in a more serious way at some point around 1987, for about the last decade now in our own style."

Just the two of you?

"No, with other musicians within the framework of a much larger collective. But, a few years ago, after having played with guitars and acoustic drum kits, we returned to a more starkly electronic form."

So, really, when you began to play, it was more like a teenage game, experimenting with recordings of films and instruments. You weren't looking to make a career out of it?

"We played about with sounds we liked, wherever they came from. Our career has been a little tortuous. At first, we experimented without setting ourselves any questions, with whatever means were available to us, then we worked a lot with other musicians and with real instruments, which brought more complexity into our music. Five years ago, we sounded a lot more Gothic, much closer to experimental rock, with the occasional vocal. Though it was heading for electronic music; already we were sampling our own instruments. Then we went back to something closer to our original spirit: simple and instinctive, the only difference being that from then on, we could use all the wonders of digital technology, and so it was a lot easier to experiment and to get what we wanted."

Do you feel close to the generation that worked with home studios?

"Perhaps, in a way. Our original approach to recording with our old equiment was an inferior version of what others did later on with their home studios. But if we were close to the spirit of that generation, it was by luck, and only at times, since we always pushed ahead a little isolated, off in a corner, drawing inspiration from rock music as well as electronic music."

You have no connection to the Acid House generation?

"No. Really, at that time - the start of the 90's - we were recording music with vocals and guitars, greatly influenced by experimental atmospheric rock groups like "My Bloody Valentine". It was only before and after the acid house explosion, totally out of step with them, that we were perhaps close to the movement."

What made you finally go back to electronic music?

"It was more natural for us. We always worked hard, polishing off our tracks all the time, even those that had more of a "rock" feel to them. For a month or two we would come back to the tracks, changing a sound here, adding one there. We sampled ourselves all the time, heading for a sound that was almost entirely electronic, and it was easy to take that to its logical conclusion."

Being able to use sampling, courtesy of the new technologies that weren't available when you started up; was that one of the reasons for your return to an electronic sound?

"Yeah! The technology allowed us to simpify our way of working. With the sampler, you have total control over your music. You can take the sound of an instrument, and make it sound however you like, with the ability to go back again. For example, on our last album, there are some tracks where we have used a piano. Through sampling, we've transformed the sound of the piano in lots of different ways, to the point where it sounds like a very very old piano, or even to the point where no one listening to the album would think that there was a piano there. It's the same story with guitars. We played electronic and acoustic instruments on "Music has the right to children", but we completely reworked their sound electronically."

Why the melodies evocative of childhood on your album? Where did that come from?

"We're recalling the echo of the melodies that marked our own childhood, and these melodies mostly come from TV, especially from films and programmes for children. It's the world that characterised our generation. We're the same ages. We grew up watching the same TV programs, and for us they're 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."

Are you very nostalgic about your own childhoods?"

"Yeah. It's the same with groups like Autechre, where, beneath a surface that's very experimental, very mininal and industrial, you can pick out echoes of that nostalgia. I think they'd like to take that further; it's a natural creative process. We create things starting from these memories every bit as much as we do from our current wishes and moods. We reinterpret them constantly."

Do you use samples from TV programmes?

"We try to avoid it. We do it sometimes. But, on the whole, we make our own melodies and vocal samples using the people here. Even tunes that sound like samples are really made by us, but destroyed by the sampling process."

Sometimes, when listening to the album, there's an impression of hearing birdsong and other sounds of nature. Aren't those samples?

"It's a big influence - it's certainly true that nature influences us, especially when the studio windows are open! (laughs). There's this track on the album called "Rue The Whirl", where you can hear birds singing. What happened was that I was listening to the track, and, oddly, I could hear birds singing. Then I realized that the window was open in the studio, and since the birdsong went so well with the music, we recorded it to capture the feel of what we experienced listening with the window open."

Is it also perhaps because of the name of the group, which evokes lots of images?

"The name of the group comes from the soundtrack of one of the nature films that had such a big influence on our childhood. That's our nostalgic side. But there's also a more raucous side, harder, and darker. Our music is born from a strange union of the air of childhood and more troubled feelings, representing a more terrible reality which blends paradoxically with our childhood dreams."

Why? Because of ghosts?

"(laughs) No. It reflects the range of subjects that we feel strongly about, for example, psychedelic experiences (there are echoes of those in the album), good trips and bad trips. And also numerology, with its darker connotations. It's the grown-up face of our work, the pessimistic side. We move around in the space between two extremes, light and shadow."

Do you live in the country?

"Yes, we've not been there long. We set up our studio in the Pentland Hills. Now we can start to live for our music, instead of being distracted by having to do other jobs, as before."

What sort of jobs?

" Nothing to be ashamed off. Working in universities, for example, but we prefer not to talk about it."

Have you always had the name "Boards of Canada"?

"No; officially, only for four years. But the name existed for years before that, as the title of one of our tracks, before it became the name of the group."

At the start of the interview, you spoke about your friends and family around you, is it like a community of artists - students of the history of art?

"Some of our friends are students of the history of art, or they teach modern art. Some are artists, others are just enthousiastic friends. There are photographers, film-makers, artists, and musicians. And lots of friends we've kept in touch with from school. When we were at school, all our friends were in rock bands. We were the only ones making electronic music. Back then, we started making videos, films to go with our music. We made some for our friends, about expos and documentaries."

Do you make videos in the same way you make music. Is it high-tech?

"Absolutely. It's sort of "Do It Yourself Video", except that we use reasonably high-tech gear. We like to degrade photo and video images in the same way that we degrade sound, making the images harder, more primal, dirtier. We try to subvert the technology."

Do you ever think of making the music and images all in the one go? Do you think of your music in terms of images?

" Of course, but more in a natural intuitive way, rather than being deliberate about it. The most outstanding electronic musicians, like Aphex Twin, like their music to sound "cinematique", in other words, in terms of images. It's a way of working that is all the easier for musicians who don't specifically have the dancefloor in mind when they're making a track. If you can dance to one of our tracks, well and good, but it's not what we're aiming at. We give ourselves the greatest possible freedom to work in, with the goal of translating emotions rather than trying to make people dance. There are plenty of people who can do that better than we can. So what would be the point of setting ourselves up to make a worse job of it?"

There are some tracks on the album which would be ideal for the dancefloor.

"That's true. Yes, we do work with rhythms, but for us it's just as a vehicle for carrying strange and beautiful melodies. We try to vary the effects; that's particularly important for live performance. Also, we like rhythms that are strong, almost binary, because that really goes with our aim of creating dark, obsessive backdrops to go with our melodies."

You can see that sort of duality in tracks like "an eagle in your mind".

"Quite so. On the one hand, we have melodies and almost naïve vocals; on the other, a process of corruption of these melodies and vocals, by means of a certain ambience, or through transformations, as in the track you mentioned, or "sixtyten". We don't want to go in the direction of jungle beats, which, by their very ambitiousness and complexity, can really mess up the feel of the type of effect- the troubled emotions and ambiguity - that we are trying to achieve. The rhythm has to remain simple; it's a matter of balance."

In live performance, do you try to mix sound and images, as though they were responding to each other?

"No, not really. Certainly, we try to make the images fit the sounds. We try to make images that go with the sounds, within the bounds of what's technically possible. We've been very much influenced by a group called "Test Department", who played around a great deal with sound and images, and who had nothing to do with dance or pop music like most of the other artists of that period. They always followed their own path, without worrying about what was trendy. In 1998, the rhythm of the time was jungle. In 1988, it was acid. A group like Test Department, while they could make people dance, went against the rhythms of their day. They were really good, especially on stage, because there was no one else quite like them. They made industrial music, but they sometimes threw in some Celtic influences, or dance beats. They showed us that it was possible to survive, and to gain respect, while following your own path, without trying to imitate the style of others. It isn't so nowadays when the fashion is jungle, and you can't get by in the world of electronic music without making jungle music."

Are your concerts very well rehearsed, or is there still a place for improvisation, particularly, with images?

"It isn't really possible to improvise with images. It's something to strive for, but it would be really difficult. We'll start along this route with the help of computers, using captured video, in order to treat video clips as sources for sampled images. Today, on stage, you can't play around with video in the same way you would with vinyl records. All the same, there's still an element of chance involved. We wouldn't want a show to be perfect, because we don't like perfection. We want there to be an element of chaos in a show, or in our music; a raw edge; surprises. That makes it all more exciting."

Is your big studio in a small town?

"It's in the country, with other houses, several miles from Edinburgh. It's not really a big studio, but it is full of gear."

A sort of commune?

"No, just a bunch of pals, each with their family."

So it isn't a bunker as the biography claimed?

"That's just an exaggeration on the part of the record label."

In places like Glasgow or Edinburgh, is there an active artistic scene, in the arts, video, electronic music, of course, with young artists; festivals, etc. Are you involved in this?

"There are lots of great things going on, it's impossible to keep up with it all. There have never been so many places and initiatives for electronic music, and, on the larger scale, for all sorts of bold artistic enterprises. There have been video shows using the Internet, for example; live mixing of videos; and all sorts of bizarre goings-on that the general public can get involved in. There's also a very rich techno scene, which there wasn't before.

Do you know Soma Records?

"Yeah. Not personally, but we know of them."

So, all the voices you use are those of friends?

"Yes, mostly. Sometimes they come from old video tapes, but that's the exception. It's a bit of a mix: for example, we might use a video we taped ten years ago, that we listen to like that, and we take one word from it. We let ourselves rediscover things by chance."

You mentioned Chaos a moment ago. Are you interested in Chaos Theory - sciences that are a little offbeat?

"Yeah. Fractals. I don't know why, but strange sciences have always fascinated us."

Artificial life, etc.

"And numbers. Marcus studied Artificial Intelligence. That has influenced what we've done. With me, it's more numbers and their form. I've always been fascinated by the connection between music and numbers. Psychedelic experiences lead in this direction; they help us to see things in terms of numbers and their forms, of structures, as if the music was made out of crystals.

Does that influence you? Is it a part of your world?

"I can't really say that, hey, there it's robots who will influence us. No, strange sciences are part of our world, and you can find that in our works. Not science-fiction, but the sciences which have made the sci-fi visions of the past into a reality today. We grew up in the 70's, a time of great paranoia about science, a paranoia which comes across in the science fiction of that era, in books as well as in films. It's this paranoia, this pessimism, this fear of science, which can be found in our music along with other influences. When we were growing up in the 70's, the view of the future shown in TV and films was very dark, very powerful. That has changed, especially now with video games."

You also mentioned psychedelism.

"Yes, we immersed ourselves in the art and psychedelic music of the time. We often listen again to groups from the late 60's."

"Good Vibrations"?

"Yes, that's exactly the sort of thing we mean: the Beach Boys of the "Good Vibrations" era, the Beatles of 1967. The Beatles really became enthralling to us through their psychedelism. Also, some inspired moments in films, not to mention the Incredible String Band."

How do you get in touch with Skam Records?

"We had made an album, an EP. We sent it around various people, one of whom was Sean Booth of Autechre. The very next day after he got it, Sean gave us a call, and said that we ought to do something with Skam. We had dealings with them for a couple of months. We gave them a track for a compilation album, and last year we started work on an album for Skam. Around September, we were also having friendly dealings with some folk at Warp. They told us that they would also like this album, but they didn't want to tread on Skam's toes, so that's why the album came out under two labels, Skam and Warp."

What about the Internet, do you use that?

"Yes, a lot; we spend quite some time on it. We've been using it for a while now. For the last few months, we've also been making use of it in the studio, to look for sounds and images. There's an important artistic site, a platform, which has got a page on us, but at the moment we're working on making our own site, which will be a little work in itself, a mini-opus of sounds, pictures, and experiences."

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

Space Age Bachelor 1998 interview

REDIRECT Space Age Bachelor

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

This is an original text copied verbatim from the original source. Do not edit this text to correct errors or misspellings. Aside from added wikilinks, this text is exactly as it originally appeared.

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.

How does your film collective, Music70, relate to Boards of Canada's music?

"Sandison: We started making short films as kids in the '80s, when we were also starting to play gigs and write our own music. So we wrote music for the films. We made abstract movies with our friends, so our music became pretty abstract too. Then it got to the point where we were making film music before the films had been created, so we'd get this gang of friends to make a movie around some recordings we'd done. Now our work is a hybrid of those things."

You've named yourself after a Canadian film documentary organization. What aspect of documentaries made such a noteworthy impression?

"Sandison: Documentary soundtracks have always influenced us to some extent, not the ethereal, meaningless [sounds] that you often hear, but the bizarre music that composers can get away with in that context. Public information films fascinate us. We've also been inspired by composers of feature film music like Walter [Wendy] Carlos. Certain soundtracks are very special, like the one for Picnic at Hanging Rock. We're also influenced by experimental filmmakers, particularly animators like Jan Svankmajer."

Do you plan on releasing any of your visual work outside of broadcast during live performances?

"Marcus Eoin: Yeah, that'll happen because much of our film work isn't appropriate for live situations. Now we're working on films combining live action with music and animation - it's like anti-Disney!"

Michael Sandison's Top Ten Films

Be Glad for the Song Has No End

Picnic at Hanging Rock

The New Numbers (unknown)

Heavenly Creatures

Dark Star

The Elephant Man

Dandelion Seed (unknown)

Followers

A Man Escaped

Revolution (unknown)

Marcus Eoin's Top Ten Films

Papillon

Ice Core Drilling (unknown - thought to perhaps be an NFBC film)

The Invention of Destruction

Zabriskie Point

Alice

The Andromeda Strain

Jesus Christ Superstar

Diagram (unknown - may refer to Paul Glabicki's 1978 Diagram Film)

Capricorn One

The Wizard of Oz

interview by Daniel Chamberlin, February 1999.

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

This is an original text copied verbatim from the original source. Do not edit this text to correct errors or misspellings. Aside from added wikilinks, this text is exactly as it originally appeared.

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.

One time we were out in the woods on a really wet day,

remembers Boards of Canada's Marcus Eoin.

My friend bet me I couldn't start a fire using only one match. But I managed to get this meagre little flame going in this damp little patch of ground. Then when we were about a mile down the road, we looked back and it was like, 'whoosh!' - the whole wood was on fire!

Everybody's favourite commune-dwelling creators of pastoral electronica, arsonists? Whatever next? Adverts for Shell oil?

I love the countryside,

Marcus protests, adding,

I hate the idea that animals or trees or anything might get hurt. I had dreams about it for months afterwards.

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.

We never expected to have anything like this kind of impact,

confesses Michael Sandison in the rather sterile confines of Warp's new London offices.

We've had people ringing up wanting us to produce them and it's been like (mimes covering the receiver while gesticulating excitedly), 'Marcus, you'd never believe who's on the phone!

The pair are sprawled relaxedly on the purple sofa, Michael long-haired, Marcus shaven-headed, hooded-topped and baggy-trousered, gear simultaneously eterna-hip and, as is the way with country folk, strangely practical.

We don't mind influencing people like Super Furry Animals,

continues Michael in his precise, (Miss Jean) Brodie-esque brogue.

We know they're really into music. But we've got fed up with the magpies. The people who just pay minions to keep their ear to the ground and check out what's hip.

Like Radiohead?

No. We think they're brilliant,

Michael demurs.

I think Kid A's the best thing they've ever done,

adds Marcus in his thicker Scots slur.

So who are we talking about?

Bigger people than that.

Bigger?

Artists whose status is somewhere between Radiohead and God,

answers Marcus, mystifyingly.

They won't be drawn any further.

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.

It's one of the reasons we don't like playing live,

says Marcus, still running with his theme.

You worry about who might be in the audience, scouting for ideas.

He pauses.

Then again, last time we played live, it was a disaster.

The monitors exploded in the middle of the set,

Mike explains, laughing.

People were cheering because they thought it was deliberate pyrotechnics!

Marcus adds.

Yeah, well, shame it was out of time,

says Mike.

While an EP, In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country, is issued this month (a BoC manifesto if ever there was one), the eagerly-anticipated second album is running more than a year behind schedule with no release date in sight. Hmm, three year gaps between records:: you're proper Warp artist now then?

Slightly embarrassed grins.

When you've got Aphex on your label, everyone else seems easy.

So did the impact of the first album just make it hard to follow?

No,

says Marcus, thoughtfully,

I think we lost about a year just rebuilding our studio.

Less Stone Roses than My Bloody Valentine, then?

Well, we haven't put sandbags around it yet!

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.

We take such long, individual paths to get where we go, paths that nobody else could ever follow,

says Mike.

So it takes us ten times as long to finish things,

says Marcus.

Where some people will work on a track solidly for four days, we'll spend that long just on a hi-hat sound,

Mike laughs.

It'd be funny if it wasn't true,

Marcus chuckles.

Then again, if there was a way of doing it easily, by pushing a button, we'd do something else because it wouldn't be special anymore,

says Michael.

We like to make things hard for ourselves,

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.

It's the only way to do it,

says Mike.

Cut yourself off, pull the shutters down.

The world's getting smaller and smaller now,

continues Marcus.

We're all sharing the same clothes, the same magazines and the same ideas: everyone's got the same reference points.

He laughs.

It's globalisation, man!

It's never people who are part of the general flow who make amazing art,

says Mike.

Everyone's collectively going down one particular branch of music. With the last album we were too affected by what was going on in that particular moment in history. But the new one is going to be in its own outlandish and unique universe. It's like we're inhabiting an alternative, parallel present where maybe someone in the past took a different branch to the way things actually went.

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.

They can't jump through thin air,

says Mike.

I'm really paranoid about security,

adds Marcus.

We've got all these tapes and discs going back 15 years or so. I've got this really complicated solar alarm on my house so that it's impossible to switch it off without cutting five different wires in different places simultaneously.

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

You have to remember you've got a body with two legs,

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:

Just 50 people around a bonfire with a ghetto blaster.

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.

As the title indicates, the new EP is typically BoC. "Kid for Today" sounds like what it is - a Music Has the Right to Children contender, while "Amo Bishop Roden" and "Zoetrope" (named after Francis Ford Coppola's San Francisco studio) go deeper into the hazy territory between sleep waking.

It's like when you glaze over when you're listening to something,

says Marcus,

but you're still there at the same time.

There's a sort of running theme of melancholy to it,

says Mike,

but it's true, it's not a great leap from 'Music Has the Right...' The nearest clue to where we're going is on the title track. But a lot of it will be even more outlandish than that. If you could call the last album electronica, you definitely couldn't call the new album that.

We've split and gone in two directions,

continues Marcus.

There are some things which are just acoustic instruments playing acoustic music, while we've also done some even more electronic tracks. Some of the best ones manage to achieve both at the same time.

Apart from this EP, the only Boards of Canada music that's emerged since their characteristically immaculate contribution to Warp's tenth anniversary album has been the music for, of all things, an advert for Telecom Italia. Not just any old advert, either, but one which also features Leonardo Di Caprio. Today Boards of Canada are full of surprises.

It's not the first one we've done either,

grins Mike.

We did one for Nissan last year. Then again, I drive a Nissan.

Always did, or do now?

I'd have been more than happy to have been paid in cars, believe me!

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.

We actually gave him an hour and a half's worth of music, of which he used one 20 second fragment. He was just really excited to have new Boards of Canada tracks that no one else has heard, that's why he likes working with us. But we trust him. We know he wouldn't do anything else with it.

Marcus grins:

He also knows we'd break both his legs if he did.

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

He utters one word. God knows what he got paid. We wanted to record 'Leonardo Di Caprio is a wanker' and put it in the advert music backwards.

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

We've got a better notion now than we ever did of what Boards of Canada is,

says Mike.

Now we know that we're supposed to be doing really psychedelic, organic-sounding music. I think to some extent we've pandered to the electronic scene previously, putting elements in that we're not necessarily into.

Marcus continues:

It's going to be simultaneously more listenable and more out there, psychedelic, gorgeous and strange.

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.

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.

This is an original text copied verbatim from the original source. Do not edit this text to correct errors or misspellings. Aside from added wikilinks, this text is exactly as it originally appeared.

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.

We are being pretty ambitious with what we are trying to do with it musically,

says Sandison.

We want to do this one at our own pace and only deliver it when we think we've got something that is absolutely perfect, with no flaws. We want it to be so that every track on it is a really long lasting track that we personally love, and keep on loving, and play over and over again. It's a difficult thing to achieve, and the chances are that we're not going to do that because no one ever gets to that point. Sometimes I hear albums by bands that are so perfect that they could have, and in some case should have, retired, like My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. I would've been happy if they had never made another record after that.

It's like that thing...

adds Eoin.

What do you do if you make the perfect album?

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,

I don't really like singling people out as influences because it's too specific. I prefer to see all that as just branches coming off a completely chaotic, random tree, where some people are closer to each other than others.

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.

I think we are trying to do that more and more now,

says Sandison.

I like to think that where we are going is trying to compose totally horizontally. The vertical way of composing is the lazy way, where you just build stuff up and build stuff up, and then just bring them in and out. I think the way we work is so much more orchestrated, so that you can hear something that just happens, and you want it to carry on because it's so tantalizing, and you want to hear it again and again. We both understand the principle that if you put something beautiful into a piece of music just once, it makes people put the record back on because they want to hear it again.

Someone criticized me once,

recalls Eoin,

and asked why we'd made 'Roygbiv' so short. For us, that is exactly how long it should be. It's like that famous bit at the end of 'Strawberry Fields' by The Beatles, where you get the little voice at the end that says something like 'I buried Paul,' and it happens once, and it's such a transitory thing that's mixed in one ear really far away, but people went on and on about it for decades.

You know,

Sandison says,

if a contemporary producer, with that kind of '90s or 2000 mentality did something like that, it would be going 'bang, bang, bang, I buried Paul' over and over again all the way through it, and you would never want to hear it again. I really like putting things into songs that don't initially jump out at you, and you're not quite sure that you've actually heard it, like putting things really far away in the mix, so people are like, 'Am I imagining that, or is it just on my copy?'

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.

We've had that a lot with the new EP,

says Eoin.

People have said they liked it instantly, and that's kind of amusing because it's hitting the nail right on the head. For us the aim is to try and make something that you like instantly, but the important thing is actually the hidden mystery hypnotism that happens after ten listens.

Its almost like bait,

Sandison joins in.

You disguise a track as a nice big juicy worm, and then put a hook inside it! There is almost a critical point, a threshold, and if you get past that, then you are going to be completely immersed in what we are doing musically. We always assume that the listener is the most intelligent person imaginable. If you always think like that, you never insult the listener, and someone wanting to analyse what we do will always get something out of it.

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.

Retro is a consensus isn't it?

says Eoin.

Like the '70s where everyone shares that popular myth of what the '70s were like. Nostalgia is very personal, and music is very powerful at recalling images or feelings from your past.

I do actually believe that there are powers in music that are almost supernatural. I think you actually manipulate people with music, and that is definitely what we are trying to do. People go on about hypnotizing people with music, or subliminal messages, and we have dabbled in that intentionally. Sometimes that's just a bit of a private joke, just to see what we can sneak into the tracks.

If we were to explain all the tracks and their meanings, though,

says Sandison,

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.

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:

The original reason we started was just to make a beautiful little string of tunes which you just love playing in your car, and you don't really care whether anyone else is going to hear it, but I really like the idea of planting bombs. I'm not a bomber, but I like the idea of planting bombs of some kind, 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.

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.

This is an original text copied verbatim from the original source. Do not edit this text to correct errors or misspellings. Aside from added wikilinks, this text is exactly as it originally appeared.

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:

Geogaddi was one of the most highly anticipated electronic records in recent memory. Be honest: were you aware of the pressure?

Mike: We try not to pay attention to it. I think the best music we've made previously was written when there were no expectations on us. So now we just imagine nobody's going to hear it. The moment you start thinking about people waiting for your music, that's when you start damaging your creativity.

With Music Had The Right To Children, you had the luxury of plucking and/or reworking songs from previous, lesser-heard records. With Geogaddi, you were faced with the prospect of having to fashion a new record from scratch. Did this pose a problem at all?

Mike: Not at all because we recorded a hell of a lot of tracks in that period. The only difficult part was selecting them down to the tracks that worked well together on the record.

From a stylistic standpoint, there has been a consistency to Boards of Canada's work over the years. The conscious inclusion of certain signature elements (samples of children's voices, specific analog synth sounds, etc.) on Geogaddi implies that you went into this record with the intent to further build on your own established identity as artists. Is that a fair assumption? Is this a difficult thing to do without seeming regressive?

Marcus: I don't think it's as studied as that. We didn't consciously try to use signature sounds, because that's just the way we've always made our music. But I suppose maybe deep down we did want to reinforce the sound of the last album, because it has ended up sounding quite consistent with it. It kind of acts like a partner record to the last one before we do what we do next.

How do you respond to people who suggest that you didn't explore enough new territory with this record?

Mike: Well that's up to them. It's not meant to be a record that everyone will like. We didn't feel any need to change after only one previous album. It's our sound!...We love our music and we only expect a few people to click with it like we do. We see Boards of Canada as being as much about what we don't do as what we do, if you see what I mean. We're used to recording a lot of different music that never gets released. I guess we wanted to make Geogaddi sound the way it does so that we can go off at tangents on future records whilst keeping that sound as the foundation.

geo- or ge-: Earth: geocentric. gaddi n : a cushion on a throne for a prince in India; I'm not close at all, am I?

Marcus: Hehe, no. It can have several meanings. We have our own definite idea of it, a combination of words that describe an idea we had at the time of writing it, but we want listeners to make their own minds up.

The general consensus seems to be that Boards of Canada labour over their work. Is your creative process really as difficult as it seems to the outside world?

Mike: Not especially. We write lots of tracks simultaneously, I mean hundreds, that's what uses up our time. We're a lot more prolific than we let on. In the time between the last two albums we sketched out something approaching four hundred tracks, that's enough to put together several records. Some of the tracks on Geogaddi took quite a while to put together, maybe a few months, but there were also one or two tracks recorded in a day.

Can you recall one standout moment during the process of recording this record that was completely fulfilling from a creative standpoint?

Marcus: Yeah for me it would be the track Gyroscope. I dreamed the sound of it, and although I've recreated dreamt songs before, I managed to do that one so quickly that the end result was 99% like my dream. It spooks me to listen to it now.

Mike: We played out an early version of the album to some friends at a beach bonfire back at the end of last year before it was cut. It was a great night and now when I listen to those tracks I think about that night. That's how music should be.

The pre-release security on Geogaddi was incredibly high. Have the Internet and its various file-sharing utilities taken the glory out of proper release days?

Marcus: To an extent, yeah. There's been a lot of debate about whether the internet is helping bands like us or not. I think it's actually different depending on the style of music. In our case, I realize that bands who use a lot of electronics maybe attract a fairly web-literate audience so we're maybe more at risk of piracy than average rock bands. When our last EP was released, a journalist leaked it onto the internet many weeks before it's release date, and I think it does spoil the fun a bit. When I was a kid I used to get a buzz out of that 'day of release' thing, you know when you dive into the record shop at 9am to get an album. The world's gone a bit weird lately, everyone's attention span is so short, people don't seem to get excited about things as much anymore.

Like many of your contemporaries, you've gone to great lengths to maintain a certain degree of anonymity. Is music tangibly better when it's faceless?

Mike: We don't crave publicity. I suppose it can go too far, you know, sometimes these faceless bands are only like that because they don't have personalities in the first place. I think in a lot of pop and rock there's nothing wrong with a bit of glamour and personality because it's all fun, and it inspires people. But I think that with largely instrumental electronic music like ours, it just seems to sound better when you're not thinking about the people behind it.

Your reticence to talk to media outlets has resulted in a lot of conjecture about your origin and day-to-day lives. What's the most popular misconception about Boards of Canada? Do you enjoy the mystery?

Marcus: There are tons of misconceptions about us, but it just makes us laugh. Some of the most common ones are based on complete misunderstandings of what we're about, and people missing our sense of reference and irony. Another popular misconception, particularly amongst cosseted suburban American internet music-pirating kids, is that bands like us are making a lot of money. Those kids are probably getting more pocket money.

You've probably had this one many times, but I'd be remiss for not asking. Radiohead name-dropped you on numerous occasions during the Kid A/Amnesiac rigamarole. Were you honoured, irritated or somewhere in between?

Mike: It's great... I'd have to admit that neither of us were fans of their early stuff, but their last couple of releases are great records. I think they come across as some of the most decent people in music. They got so much flak just for having the balls to do something different.

How different would your music really be if you were creating it from the belly of some urban, metropolitan area? Is isolation always good for the creative process?

Marcus: We don't hate the city, just the homogenized culture you get in urban areas. I think for musicians, being isolated away from certain scenes can keep you focused doing your own thing.

The sounds on this record imply a particularly high level of craftsmanship. How long do you spend programming synths and toying with samples to achieve the BOC sound?

Marcus: A long long time. Usually I start with a sound that is half way towards what I want it to be, and I can spend days tweaking it until it's right. A lot of the synthetic-sounding things you hear are actually recordings of us playing other instruments, pianos, flutes or twanging guitar strings or field sounds we get from walking around with portable tape recorders, like electronic beeps in shops, or vehicles, then they are mangled beyond recognition. We have an arsenal of old hi-fi tricks up our sleeves and we basically destroy the sounds until they're really lovely and fucked up. So we're using sounds that are totally our own thing.

Which do you hear quoted back to you more frequently: "Orange!" or "Yeeeeeah, that's right!" (Two vocal samples featured prominently in BOC's landmark track 'Aquarius.')

Mike: 'Orange', definitely.

I realize you're not about to go in-depth about your setup, but in general terms: what does your working environment look like? Do you get these sounds with modern gear or older, analog equipment? How big a role do computers play?

Mike: It's a mix of old and new technology. About half of our kit is old gnarly broken gear, and the other half is pretty new stuff. We have a lot of cheap instruments, it's like a junkshop. The best way I'd describe it is that our sound sources are almost always something like a real instrument or an analog synth, and our recording techniques and processes are a bit unorthodox. We don't like using digital things or computer effects so we get sounds by doing things like running whole parts through a really bad tape recorder or something like that. Like the intro on 'Julie and Candy' for example, we just played the melody on a couple of whistles and then we bounced it back and forward between the internal mics of two tape-decks until the sound started disappearing into hell. Like when you look at an image reflected within two mirrors forever, in the distance it gets darker and greener and murkier. We record a lot of live stuff, just for fun, most of what we record hasn't been released. We tend to break equipment frequently. We'd probably make professional studio engineers weep if they saw us working. And some of our electronic tracks are not sequenced, we just put them down as samples onto multi-track tape, because it can sound more real and characteristic. We use a hardware sequencer for arranging but it has incredible glitches at the end of every pattern of music, which is interesting up to a point. We usually only use computers for accurate sequencing now, you know, German timing.

Your music is often described as a playground for the drug-addled mind. Surely you're not thinking along these lines when you're creating it...

Mike: No, not really. I like to think of the music as being the drug. People shouldn't have to take drugs to enjoy music.

There's a restraint to your compositions that is often absent from contemporary electronic music. Does that reflect your faith in the listener?

Marcus: I think it's a lot to do with why we write our music. We're not trying to get people to dance or anything. I want it to be listened to, and part of that is respecting the listener's intelligence, to know that they will notice the little things you put in there, you don't have to surround ideas in explosions and neon lights.

Are you satisfied with the general state of electronic music at the moment? Doesn't it seem like there are a lot of artists running around in circles?

Marcus: I've heard some incredible new music in the last couple of years, people really breaking the rules of what's gone before. It's in my nature to lean towards the artists who are mixing organic with electronic, I think that's where the most interesting music lies. But you're right about people going in circles, we get sent a lot of music to our postal box, and I try to listen to as much of it as possible. I've noticed that it falls into two camps, a small amount is really original stuff that's beautiful, like Aspera, and the Anticon stuff, but a lot of the other music going about is just samey laptop clicky tracks.

Imitation. The sincerest form of flattery or hard evidence of creative bankruptcy?

Mike: I'd guess it's a bit of both, I mean all musicians have to start somewhere and usually they're inspired to write music because of someone else's music that they love.

Somebody somewhere once said that the best electronic music is music that you could never quite imagine on your own; yours seems to fall distinctly in that territory. Are you aware as to how strangely your music seems to co-exist with the subconscious?

Mike: I don't know if we hear it quite the way the listener does. For us the whole point of writing music is to get something infectious into the back of the listener's mind, something that feels so personal to you that you couldn't even possibly convey it in words to a close friend. I find personally that I only really enjoy music if it has that effect on me, so it's a challenge for me to write tunes that do that for other people. If you listen to a tune by some musician and it really gets to you emotionally, it's as though for a few minutes you've tuned into the feelings that were in the musician's head. There's a sort of knowing connection there between the listener and the musician that ordinary language would never be able to achieve. In a way it's like the closest you'll ever get to being psychic.

(Early release) Twoism was going for 600 pounds on eBay! Discuss.

Marcus: Some people have clearly got too much money on their hands.

And so where do you go from here? Another four years 'til the next one? Any North American shows lined up?

Mike: The next album will be a lot sooner.There aren't any live dates planned at the moment, because we're already working on new records.

Interview by Mark Pytlik, February 2002.

The Most Mysterious & Revered Men in Electronica

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.

This is an original text copied verbatim from the original source. Do not edit this text to correct errors or misspellings. Aside from added wikilinks, this text is exactly as it originally appeared.

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.

We take that as a real compliment,

accepts Sandison.

We love the sound of music that seems to be barely under control. We love music that's out of tune in a beautiful way, or dissonant, or damaged. We tried to make the record work as a giddy, swirling soundtrack. It's okay to be imperfect - in fact the imperfections are where the magic is. To us, perfect music sounds sterile and dead. The tunes we write are imperfect, the sounds are imperfect, even the artwork. I can't listen to perfect music, it bores me. We actually put a lot of effort into making things rough and difficult and noisy, even more so on this than on the last album. I think most bands get more polished and over-produced as they go along. But one of the ideas with 'Geogaddi' was to go the opposite way, to get it to sound as though it was recorded before the last one.

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.

My parents worked in the construction industry out there,

writes Sandison.

My memory of Calgary is a picture of boxy 1970s office blocks dumped in the middle of nowhere against a permanent sunset.

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.

We're a bit anal about this,

admits Eoin,

and I guess one year we might hunt through it all and release some of it. Though we've actually already got the next album half-finished, which will surprise some people to hear. There's a lot of music.

Though the paucity of their released might suggest otherwise, Sandison and Eoin are anything but lazy.

A typical day for us,

writes Eoin,

is something like 15 hours thumping the shit out of drums and synthesizers and samplers, with frequent breaks for coffee or a beer.

Expectations and pressures from the outside world hardly make an impact, either.

We're too busy to give a shit,

reckons Sandison.

Either working in our studio or being out in the fresh air with our friends somewhere. We put pressure on ourselves more than anything. Marcus and myself are pretty ruthless to one another, musically. That's the toughest criticism we get, which is another reason the album took a long time.

Why is it so much better to live in the country rather than the city?

Mike: I don't think it's easy to be truly independent as an artist at the same time as being part of an urban community. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it just doesn't suit us. Besides, when I'm faced with the choice of hanging out with my friends round a bonfire where we live, or being squashed in a London tube with some suit's elbow in my face, it's an easy choice to make.

What's the significance of hexagons to you?

Marcus: The hexagon theme represents that whole idea of being able to see reality for what it is, the raw maths or patterns that make everything. We've always been interested in science and maths. Sometimes music or art or drugs can pull back the curtain for you and reveal the Wizard of Oz, so to speak, busy pushing the levers and pressing buttons. That's what maths is, the wizard. It sounds like nonsense but I'm sure a lot of people know what I'm talking about.

The turquoise hexagon sun idea, the ring of people on the 'Geogaddi' cover, and that slightly eerie bucolic feel there is in a lot of your music, suggests something cultish, vaguely pagan.

Mike: That's probably just a reflection of the way we live our lives. We are a bit ritualistic, although not religious at all. We're not really conscious of it in our music but I can see that it is happening. We're interested in symbols. I don't know, we never just make a pleasant tune and leave it at that, it would be pointless. So I suppose there is an intention to let the more adult, disturbed, atrocious sides of our imaginations slip into view through the pretty tunes.

What's the fascination with children's voices? Is it to do with a nostalgia for childhood?

Mike: It's something that has a peculiar effect in music, it ought not to be there, especially in atonal, synthetic music. It's completely out of place, and yet in that context that you can really feel the sadness of a child's voice. Being a kid is such a transitory, fleeting part of your lifespan. If you have siblings, then if you think about it, you'll have known them as adults for a lot longer than you ever knew them as children. It's like a little kid lost, gone.

You've talked in the past about subliminal messages, hidden ideas, bombs planted in your tunes. What's the fascination, and what form do these take?

Marcus: If you're in a position where you're making recordings of music that thousands of people are going to listen to repeatedly, it gets you thinking, 'What can we do with this? We could experiment with this...' And so we do try to add elements that are more than just the music. Sometimes we just include voices to see if we can trigger ideas, and sometimes we even design tracks musically to follow rules that you just wouldn't pick up on consciously, but unconsciously, who knows? 'The Devil Is In The Details' has a riff that was designed to imitate a specific well-known equation, but in musical terms. Maybe it won't mean anything to anyone, but it's interesting just to try it. We do things like this sometimes.

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.

Another Miracle of The Post-modern Sensibility

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.

This is an original text copied verbatim from the original source. Do not edit this text to correct errors or misspellings. Aside from added wikilinks, this text is exactly as it originally appeared.

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.

Sandison: Somos culpables de ello. Grabamos mucha música a lo largo de los últimos años, pero nos tomamos un respiro hasta sentirnos satisfechos con la combinación definitiva de las canciones. Es importante conseguir un equilibrio entre los distintos tipos de canciones, especialmente porque nosotros esperamos que la gente se escuche el álbum de un tirón. Nosotros realmente no vemos las canciones de nuestros discos como piezas individuales, sino que todo compone una gran historia. Así que los temas en ´Geogaddi´ son en sí mismos un grupo, un sabor, y hemos grabado suficiente música como para editar otro disco.

Eoin: Pero no, no ha sido muy difícil. De hecho, nuestro mayor problema como banda es que tendemos a grabar demasiada música, aunque posteriormente sólo nos centremos en una pequeña proporción de lo que hemos hecho. La única dificultad reside en combinar canciones que se adapten entre sí. Por cada canción incluida en ´Geogaddi´ existen doce que hemos obviado por alguna razón determinada.

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.

Eoin: Esta vez decidimos revolucionarnos un poco y hacer los ritmos menos convencionales. Nosotros siempre tenemos el sentimiento hip hop merodeando, pero en ´Geogaddi´ intentamos dejar que las cosas crecieran estilísticamente, y esto también afectaba a los ritmos. En el disco hay un beat realmente satisfactorio para nosotros, es el de ´You Could Feel The Sky [uno de los mejores momentos de todo el minutaje], que suena como si una cuerda fuese estirada sobre la cubierta de un barco de madera.

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.

Sandison: Bueno, sí, nosotros últimamente hemos empezado a volver al antiguo, y también más simple, método de trabajo. Tras ´Music Has The Right To Children´ nos empeñamos en usar más tecnología de ordenador con la equivocada intención de acelerar nuestro proceso de composición. Pero con los ordenadores siempre te acaban entorpeciendo las posibilidades que ofrece la producción técnica, que tiene el desagradable efecto de secarte paulatinamente toda tu inspiración. Así que reaccionamos contra ello y ahora hemos vuelto a la forma más simple de hacer las cosas, tal y como trabajamos en nuestros inicios: simplemente usando un sampler, un secuenciador y yendo al grano con las melodías. Esto lo hace más instantáneo y divertido paranosotros.

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.

Eoin: Intentamos crear melodías que vayan al grano, algunas de ellas basadas en sonidos uniformes o en la repetición de riffs que aparecen súbitamente y luego se desarrollan. Tú escuchas el disco y te quedas con algunos momentos encantadores que, en todo caso, son transitorios; pero después de sucesivas escuchas te sorprendes nuevamente cuando encuentras algo que habías olvidado desde la primera escucha.

¿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.

Sandison: Estoy de acuerdo: nuestra música tiene que ver más con la emoción que con la inteligencia. Pero no nos acercamos a las canciones con la intención de hacerlas emocionales de forma deliberada. Las melodías básicas de nuestras canciones acostumbran a escribirse de forma rápida e instintiva, así que nunca son conscientes o deliberadas. Yo siempre encuentro un sonido que me gusta, improviso y experimento a su alrededor, y entonces aparece una melodía y me quedo con ella. Después de este proceso es cuando empezamos a aplicar técnicas de composición conscientemente.

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.

Sandison: Supongo que la cuestión es que nosotros no escribimos a conciencia canciones que entristecen a la gente. Nosotros simplemente escribimos aquello que sentimos, y habitualmente la música surge de ese modo. Muchas de las melodías han sido escritas por mí, y sé que yo tengo cierta tendencia a la tristeza.

Eoin: Creo que el hecho de sonar nostálgicos y todo eso no es algo que persigamos, sino que ocurre por cómo somos como personas y cómo pensamos. Tenemos una privada y amorfa idea en nuestras mentes de cómo se supone que debe sonar el último disco de Boards Of Canada. Es como un objetivo que tenemos claro y al que siempre nos estamos aproximando, pero al que nunca acabamos de llegar. Eso nos mantiene porque sabemos que está en nuestras manos hablar a través de nuestras ideas; tan sólo tenemos claro que si seguimos trabajando llegaremos algún día a ese objetivo.

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.

Sandison: We are guilty of it. We recorded a lot of music over the past few years, but we took a break until we felt satisfied with the final combination of the songs. It is important to achieve a balance between the different types of songs, especially because we hope people listen to the album in one go. We really do not see the songs on our records as individual pieces, but rather everything makes up one big story. So the tracks on Geogaddi are in themselves a group, a flavor, and we have recorded enough music to release another album.

Eoin: But no, it has not been very difficult. In fact, our biggest problem as a band is that we tend to record too much music, although we later focus only on a small proportion of what we have done. The only difficulty lies in combining songs that fit together. For every song included in Geogaddi there are twelve that we have omitted for some particular reason.

Divided into two fronts (on one side, songs with introduction, knot, and outcome, in the old-fashioned way; on the other, brief ambient inserts that not only reinforce the whole but, on occasions, function autonomously), this album does not bring changes at first glance within the Boards' discourse. But here, the pursuit is not the metamorphosis that, like a revolutionary tax, the current situation and the course of events demand (what did you want: nu school breakz?). Precisely, the maximum point of support of this work lies in its internal functioning. Its search does not attempt to transcend the laws of the moment but the laws of its own sound. That is to say: Geogaddi is a valuable step forward in the construction of the Boards Of Canada discourse. It improves, solidifies, emboldens, and complements it. And from there, it greatly benefits from that close and modest exploration. The main ones affected are the rhythms. It is worth pausing on this element because a thorough analysis of it invites great joy: the beats on this album feature one of the most overwhelming works of recent months.

Eoin: This time we decided to revolutionize a bit and make the rhythms less conventional. We always have the hip hop feeling lurking, but in Geogaddi we tried to let things grow stylistically, and this also affected the rhythms. There is a really satisfying beat for us on the album, it is "You Could Feel The Sky" (one of the best moments of the entire length), which sounds like a rope being stretched over the deck of a wooden ship.

All this is supported by a change in the working method. It is in the rare perception one has when listening to their discourse that one stumbles upon old elements and views. In their process of self-construction, the band confronts the artisanal touch and the organic pulse with the elusive patterns of the computer and machines.

Sandison: Well, yes, we have recently started to return to the old, and also simpler, working method. After Music Has The Right To Children we insisted on using more computer technology with the mistaken intention of speeding up our composition process. But with computers, you always end up being hindered by the possibilities offered by technical production, which has the unpleasant effect of gradually drying up all your inspiration. So we reacted against it and have now returned to the simpler way of doing things, just as we did in the beginning: simply using a sampler, a sequencer, and going straight to the point with the melodies. This makes it more instantaneous and fun for us.

With that premise, they both absorb sounds and ideas to integrate their melodies into the rhythmic framework. More organic, we insist, and twisted than in Music Has The Right To Children and their EP In a Beautiful Place out in the Country, they offer an emotional catalog that is confusing, extremely strange, almost psychedelic.

Eoin: We try to create melodies that go straight to the point, some of them based on uniform sounds or the repetition of riffs that appear suddenly and then develop. You listen to the album and you stay with some charming moments that, in any case, are transient; but after successive listens, you are surprised again when you find something you had forgotten since the first listen.

Rediscovery work and sensitive puzzle? Why worry when what we have here, right now, in the CD player, is a wild plea for pure and detoxified emotion. Another desperate antidote against the overestimation of electronics as an inexhaustible source of lective lucidity and creative progress without attachment to the dictates of the epidermis. God knows that in Boards Of Canada the only thing that matters is the capacity of their music to move the listener.

Sandison: I agree: our music has more to do with emotion than with intelligence. But we do not approach songs with the intention of making them emotional deliberately. The basic melodies of our songs are usually written quickly and instinctively, so they are never conscious or deliberate. I always find a sound I like, improvise and experiment around it, and then a melody appears and I stick with it. After this process is when we start to apply composition techniques consciously.

A vital point, in any case, on which a heartbreaking proposal takes shape. Eoin and Sandison are shaping up, album by album, as two chronic nostalgics, as two creators withered by an incessant sadness that translates, undoubtedly, into each of their staves. Unintentionally, perhaps, they photograph the warmth of collapse, the hunger of melancholy. And that is, most probably, one of the aspects that distinguish them from many other electronic references that have not yet opted to sacrifice the imperatives of the psyche. They create music infinitely more human and close than many rock, emocore, pop, folk, or techno bands.

Sandison: I suppose the point is that we do not consciously write songs that sadden people. We simply write what we feel, and usually, the music comes out that way. Many of the melodies have been written by me, and I know I have a certain tendency towards sadness.

Eoin: I think the fact that we sound nostalgic and all that is not something we pursue, but it happens because of who we are as people and how we think. We have a private and amorphous idea in our minds of how the last Boards Of Canada album is supposed to sound. It's like a goal that we are clear about and always approaching, but never quite reaching. That keeps us going because we know that it is in our hands to speak through our ideas; we just know that if we keep working, we will reach that goal someday.

Author: David Broc

Photography: Archive

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 ^[4]. The abbreviated version (in Dutch) published in the OOR magazine can be found here.

This is an original text copied verbatim from the original source. Do not edit this text to correct errors or misspellings. Aside from added wikilinks, this text is exactly as it originally appeared.

Hi Michael & Marcus, Where are you? How are you doing?

Marcus: We're at our studio right now, the whole place is under snow at the moment. Everything's cool.

Geogaddi must be one of the most anticipated records of 2002. I guess this weekend saw the first string of reviews in the magazines. What's the best and the worst criticism you got so far?

Marcus: We try not to look at reviews. It starts to affect your work if you read the comments people make. Even positive comments can be damaging, I mean it's a lot easier for us to have fun writing music if we imagine nobody is listening to it.

What's with the secrecy surrounding the release of the album? a) we don't care about music business politics and promotion schedules b) we tried to keep the music from the net (and miraculously succeeded) c) we like a little mystery d) all above is true

Mike: a and b. Especially a.

Music Has The Right To Children was one of those seminal records that got better and more personal every time you listened to it. Its reputation seemed to grow every year. It's a modern classic. Geogaddi won't get the time and space to grow in people's subconsciousness, as MHTRTC did. People are taking in the album from day one, swallowing every track, hungry as they are.

Mike: Thanks, yeah I think you're right, it's easier when you appear out of nowhere with your first album. After that, if people let their expectations grow too much, then it's inevitable that any subsequent records won't have the same effect, no matter what the music sounds like. Our music is never intended to do its work on just the first listen. Like Jack Dangers said, "play twice before listening.

How did you cope with this situation? Do you feel comfortable with the idea that a lot more people are gonna hear your music, giving it momentum, building up a hype rather than letting it "capture a nostalgic feeling buried somewhere in our mind", as one journalist so accurately wrote.

Mike: We'd much rather that people find our music by themselves, you know, so that it's something that feels like it belongs to them. If it was up to us there would be no promotion for our music at all.

MHTRTC was a one-off moment of magic you can't possibly repeat -because of the aforementioned situation. Wasn't it? Is it fair to expect another album of such class? Best thing to do in a situation like this is to disappear for good...and let legend begin.

Mike: Our best work is still ahead of us. We were writing and recording our own music for about fifteen years before 'Music Has The Right...', and we're never going to stop creating music. We wouldn't have left it at just that album, just because that's the first record that became quite widely-known. The truth is that when we released that record we had no idea it would develop the kind of cult thing that it has.

You've been shying away from the media and are very fastidious when it comes to playing live. How important is Boards Of Canada, The Myth, to you?

Marcus: We're not into milking the media and we're not interested in trying to become famous. There are too many artists out there who barely put any records out, yet they're on television and in magazines all the time. If that's what they want, that's fine, but I think that's the mentality of someone who came to the music world quite late in their life, but for us we've been doing what we do for years already, and we'd be doing it anyway even if nobody knew us. The music industry is full of people who are famous for being famous. We just want to create good music, and it doesn't matter to us to do all the other nonsense.

There's a nostalgic feeling speaking through your music. The ultimate conclusion would be: perceiving your music as if it were nostalgia itself, originating from another time and space. Something out there. Not of today's world.

Mike: That's exactly why we try to create a sound that isn't attached to the current time. I hope our music could be enjoyed thirty years in the future without sounding like it came from an identifiable trend or a scene. We've always loved the sound of things that are a little sad and broken-sounding. I think that because we try to capture a damaged, eerie effect in our music, it ends up sounding nostalgic to some listeners. But you could be right because the intention is to make it sound like it's something strangely familiar but perpendicular to the real world, and in a way timeless.

You've recorded over 90 songs for Geogaddi. Only 22 - and the silent Magic Window - made it onto the album. At Cambersands you played an utterly brilliant new track that's not on the album.

Marcus: It's about what fits in the context of the album. When we play live we often play tracks that haven't been released. Sometimes those tracks will be used later, sometimes we will move on from that sound and leave the track behind.

How many hours of music went through the drain? Any chance of a quick follow-up to Geogaddi or, at least, an EP then?

Mike: Haha, yeah there will be another record very soon after this one. As Marcus said, you make an album by compiling what fits together, and we're already putting together a different record.

How did you make the selection between the 'full on' tracks and the strange intermezzos and miniature melodies that slowly grow into little gems after a while? Is there an overall theme/direction that connects the tracks on the album?

Mike: It's meant to play like the soundtrack for some strange musical, or an imagined movie. The theme with Geogaddi is a kind of confusion, as though you're going through a kind of 'Alice in Wonderland' adventure, but with a damaged mind. Those short tracks you mention, we write far more of those than the so-called "full on" tracks, and in a way, they are our own favorites.

These hidden treasures, little as they are, appear to be even bigger in numbers than on Music Has The Right To Children. Is seems like you're teasing us. It's hidden, so find it! True?

Mike: If we wanted, we could release 10 albums tomorrow made up only with those short tracks. The ones on Geogaddi are the ones that make most sense in the overall flow.

At the time of the release of In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country, November 2000, you were said to have recorded 64 tracks from which 23 would be pared down to an album. Fifteen months later there's an album of 23 tracks - selected out of 90-plus. How does Geogaddi differ from the album you could have put together on and a half year ago?

Mike: If you mean how does it differ from what might have been compiled into an album in 2000, I think it would have been pretty different. We go through phases, Geogaddi has a lot to do with what we were listening to in the last year. If we'd made it in 2000 it might have been more electronic, but over time we've tried to create something more fuzzy and organic. Every time we make a record we see it as an individual project, separate from what went before and what will happen afterwards. Likewise the next record will sound different.

The aim for Geogaddi is the perfect album, you once said. How perfect is Geogaddi? Is the devil really in the details? Is that why it took you another year to finish the album?

Marcus: The idea of the perfect album is this amorphous thing that we're always aiming at. For us it can mean something that's full of imperfection, because part of our aim has always been to destroy the sound in a beautiful way. It doesn't mean that we expect everyone would like it. I'm not sure that we will ever get there, to make the perfect record. But the whole point of making music is at least to aim at your own idea of perfection.

Did In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country originate from the same sessions as the tracks on Geogaddi? Those were four 'full on'tracks. Put too many of these on an album and it will become a collection of songs, not an organic work of art as a whole, is that what you believe?

Mike: That's partially true. For the album we hoped to make something where all the tracks had a similar undercurrent while being diverse. The songs on IABPOITC could have ended up on Geogaddi, but at the time, we realized they worked well together so they became their own EP."

Amo Bishop Roden was outstanding. Very minimal (Reich, Glass, La Monte Young), very ambient. Zoetrope had a similar vibe. It's a vibe that shines through on Geogaddi (esp. in You Could Feel The Sky), but not as much as I expected. It's not a big step from MHTRTC to Geogaddi really. Or is it?

Marcus: We don't try to plot a route with where we go musically. It has more to do with our own moods at the time of writing, and for example, what we have read or watched as an influence. That EP had it's own little theme. Because Geogaddi has a lot more tracks than an EP, it's easier to draw a connection between it and our last album, because we are the same band! Usually we're a lot more minimal than the songs on Geogaddi, but this time we wanted to do something with more facets, more detail and a kind of concentrated recipe of chaotic little melodies. It reflected a chaotic time in our personal lives. I guess we'll probably go back in a more minimal direction next.

If you were to point out one difference, one progression from MHTRTC, what would it be?

Mike: I would say 'Music Has The Right...' is a record for outdoors on a cold, blue-skied day, while 'Geogaddi' is a record for some sort of trial-by-fire, a claustrophobic, twisting journey that takes you into some pretty dark experiences before you reach the open air again. It has a kind of narrative. That's why we ended it with 'Corsair', it's like the light at the end of the tunnel.

"It's darker than their previous work," Steve Beckett, head of Warp Records, said about In A Beautiful Place, back then. Does that count for Geogaddi as well?

Marcus: Definitely, even more so. Our influences while creating Geogaddi involved much darker material, so I think this comes through in the album.

Minimal tracks like Amo Bishop Roden, Zoetrope and You Could Feel The Sky, are they pointing out a new direction for BOC, you think?

Mike: Yeah it's possible. I think the best way to freshen up what you're doing is to strip it down and go minimal, so we'll see. Though our next EP could just as easily be a collection of ROYGBIV-like songs. Every so often we like to stop ourselves and change direction, it's important to do that or you can become tired of your own music. Every record is like a reaction to the last one, so I guess at the moment we're feeling more like heading in a minimal direction, simplifying the sound again.

Does it bother you that one half of the IDM population is copying Autechre/Aphex and the other half is copying you, stealing your voice and style?

Marcus: I think it's flattering that we may be influencing others to create music. But I think everyone should find their own path. In a way, if people copy us closely, it just keeps me on my toes.

How important is the folk influence that crops up in every review, like "the production aesthetics of late 60s and early 70s folk artists"?

Mike: Very. There's a lot of acoustic instrumentation used in Geogaddi, though not in obvious ways. We love artists like Joni Mitchell and The Incredible Stringband. There's a sort of purity of sound that they have, and I guess we are striving for that ourselves.

A friend of mine (and Plaid's) draw my attention to the psychedelic folk of fellow Scotchmen The Incredible Stringband. Their late sixties albums The 5000 Spirits and The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, would that be the kind of stuff you're into? Ehm… the album covers of The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter and Music Has The Right To Children make a nice pair, that's for sure!

Marcus: Definitely! We have all the Stringband records! In fact, they come from the same place where we live now. We see them from time to time. So I guess our rural sensibilities are similar. Personally, I think they are one of the most important and underrated bands in the past forty years of music. They influenced so many other artists yet they never get due credit.

Someone like David Tibet/Current 93 has been tracing the pagan roots of folk music for years. Taking influences on a spiritual rather than a musical level, is that an angle you can relate to?

Mike: We are interested in pagan roots. We're very much into older cultures and lifestyles. People forget just how transitory this period of time in the modern world is. It's important to be able to consider other approaches to society and life than what's around you. Take a look at Julian Cope for example, he uses these influences to fuel his music in a wonderful unique way. It can influence your work in other ways too, not necessarily just in the sound of the music.

Hexagon Sun (studio). Chris H aka Christ (former bandmember). Redmoon nights. Hell Interface (sometimes used alias for BOC). The Devil Is In The Details. 66 minutes and 6 seconds. Artwork full of hexagrams. Supposedly subliminal messages… How evil is BOC?

Marcus: As evil as Mickey Mouse.

What does the hexagram symbolize for you? (Depending on your beliefs it is: a powerful tool to invoke Satan, a stand-by for magicians, witches and alchemists, and a pagan symbol of sexual union and reproduction, esp. of the sexually oriented rites and ceremonies of Baalism).

Mike: It's just a pattern. It captures some people's imaginations.

Are you putting a hex/curse on us?

Marcus: Heh, only if you want it to happen.

My guess: it's about a deeply-rooted believe in Mother Earth, as displayed in the ancient traditions of paganism.

Mike: You could say that. We're not Satanists, or Christians, or pagans. We're not religious at all. We just put symbols into our music sometimes, depending on what we're interested in at the time. We do care about people and the state of the world, and if we're spiritual at all it's purely in the sense of caring about art and inspiring people with ideas.

Call it folk, nostalgia, pagan - it all comes down to the rustic/rural settings of your music, doesn't it? The music being dreamt up and worked out In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country, the land we inherited from our ancestors and haven't yet ruined completely. Being isolated from The City, Modern Life and the delusion of Ongoing Progress. How does that show in your music, you think?

Marcus: We're very much anti-globalization. One think that disturbs me is a trend today for technology to be created and used just for it's own sake. I recently heard a politician in the UK saying that population decline was a terrible thing and that if we don't build more houses then quality of life and the economy would suffer. It's such a naive and ignorant approach to the world. Where exactly do they stop? Once there is no land left, just industrial estates and housing? I think it's the saddest thing in the world that we have all the space and resources to give everyone a decent life, but it doesn't happen. George Bush is right in that there is an "axis of evil", but it lies at the door of big business and government. We try to support the idea of a less urbanized lifestyle in our music, but I don't want to preach to anyone.

For years - since Kraftwerk actually - electronic music has been associated with science fiction, futurism, cyberspace, technology, a world of robots and machinery. Your music seem to be a reaction to all that: it's not shaping the future, but recapturing the past - with a child-like innocence. Is that a correct interpretation? How important is the child-like innocence in this.

Mike: I think you're quite right, and to us the association of electronic music with science fiction and futurism is a cliche. It's a really corny, dated, unsophisticated way of thinking. And yet most current electronic artists still seem to fall into that trap. It might have been original in the 1970's when Kraftwerk were at their peak, but not now. For us, the technological aspect of our music goes as far as the studio recording techniques we use, but we don't let the technology dictate the purpose of our art to us. Too many electronic bands get carried away with the influences of computers and the internet and other technology, and they end up using that as their sole inspiration because at the end of the day that's all they do. So they let their song-titles and themes be direct references to current technological buzzwords or fashions, and to us that's a total lack of imagination. They're geeks obsessed with equipment and computers and ultimately it's become fucking predictable and boring. They should go out and live. Or travel around or something, get some real ideas, and real emotions. I mean, we too are interested in technology and science, but our music is influenced by much further-reaching ideas than that. And it's not just about recapturing the past. We've touched upon the theme of lost childhood a few times because it's something personal to me that gives me real inspiration through its sadness. I think sometimes the best way to get inspiration is to face up to the things that make you very sad in your life, and use them.

What makes the past more interesting than the future to you?

Mike: The future is very interesting to us too, we're very forward-thinking. But as I said, it's become the accepted standard for electronic artists to be constantly projecting into the future, and as a band we love electronic music but we hate the cliches. As people we're both quite reflective, particularly myself, and sometimes I find that the most positive way to convey hope for the future is to delve into the past. It could just as easily be an exploration of a tragedy or it could be a reflection of some wonderful golden period from the past.

"1969 in the sunshine"(from: 1969). What memory is that? Woodstock? A yellowed picture of your parents? A collective memory that fits your music?

Mike: In that song it refers to a specific period in the history of a religious group, and at the same time the period in general, the hopefulness of a forward-thinking generation that wasn't aware of what was coming in their collective future.

It's these references that give your music a context. Or is there more to it than just context… a message?

Marcus: It's a bit of both. Some of our tracks are using messages to lend the sound of the tune a context, to make it easier for people to understand what frame of mind we intend the track to be taken in. It can mean the difference between someone understanding our sense of irony or not. We're very conscious of what we sound like, and we have a sense of humor that can be completely missed if you don't fully understand what we're about. At the same time, we're quite serious about a lot of issues, we're politically motivated, and we're genuinely interested in a lot of cultural and scientific subjects. We do a lot of research. So, some of our tracks are putting across a very specific message.

Music Is Math, you state. Is it true that you've been experimenting with the Fibonacci Sequence and the golden ratio (as they appear in nature) in your music? Did it get you anywhere?

Marcus: It's true and we've experimented with a lot of other equations and phenomena. But it's not the primary purpose behind the band. Most of the time we're really just into making music the normal way.

What is The Smallest Weird Number?

Mike: Seventy."

Many plants show the Fibonacci Numbers in the arrangement of the leaves around their stem. It's these mysterious phenomenons, where nature and science meet, that seem to fascinate you more than anything. See: Gyroscope, Sunshine Recorder, Magic Window, I Saw Drones and the volcano and energy warnings on Geogaddi.

Mike: Yeah the main thing is these titles are evocative and the idea is it helps put a picture in your mind to associate with the track. We don't want to go too far as it's important to leave a certain space there for the listener's imagination. On this album a lot of the tracks are referring to science and nature and maths, it's just what we were into at the time of writing it. When we work on music we often imagine a visual part, as though the track is meant to accompany a short film of some kind, so yeah I suppose each track has a theme that we want to convey in some vague way.

Would this be the kind of movies you're making with the Music 70 collective?

Marcus: Yes the films we've done are mostly abstract, organic-looking things. Loops and collages of clips, made into patterns, which seem to be in the style of documentaries or information films, or nature films. We want our music to be provocative and inspiring so we try to put suggestions into the live visual show to reinforce this. We make them ourselves, we don't sample bits of other people's films, but we make them look like they came from something older.

I know there's some Super 8 footage shown at your live gigs. Are you involved with the visual part yourselves? Is this an integral part of your work?

Marcus: Most of the films we use in our live gigs are made entirely by Mike and myself.

How many people are involved with Music 70?

Marcus: It's a floating number of friends who are working on music or films or photography. There's only a handful of us, about a dozen. Mike and I have done other side projects in the past that are currently taking a back-seat while we concentrate on Boards of Canada, although in the future we intend to get into other things again, films and books.

Rumour has it that Warp bought the rights to the old Music 70 recordings. Is that true? Do you think they will do a 'Mbuki Mvuki/Trainer' in the near future?

Mike: Maybe.

What do think of Twoism being sold for up to 710 pounds on eBay? (Most offers coming from Edinburgh. It seems people want to cash in on their money before the old stuff is being re-released.)

Mike: We heard about this. It's ridiculous. If people have that much money to spend on music it's up to them. There has been no decision about doing any re-releases yet, and if there was, nobody would know about it because we never tell anybody anything.

Any plans to come to Europe and Holland this Spring/Summer? Do you enjoy playing live? It seems such an awkward normal thing to do, so hopelessly un-mysterious, so not-BOC.

Marcus: We'd like to play in Holland at some point if we get a chance, if anyone wants us to. There are no plans at the moment for a tour because we're working on another record, but we love visiting Europe and we'd love an excuse to experience Holland, so maybe it'll happen sometime soon.

Also not-very-BOC: the number of chill-out compilations that got Aquarius and other tracks from MHTRTC on them. What do you make of that? Do you consider your music as being chill-out music? What is the best situation to listen to your music?

Marcus: It's silly. We don't pay any attention to that. These compilations just lump us together with all sorts of music that has no connection with what we do. I don't know what 'chill-out' is. We're not into scenes or any of that. There isn't one phrase to describe our music because it changes drastically from one track to the next.

I know Mogwai tried to invite you for their All Tomorrow's Parties and other shows, but you've never answered their letters. Nobody seems to really know you. Not Arab Strap's Aidan Moffat, who's a also from Glasgow and a big fan. Mira Calix seems to be the only artist at Warp you keep in touch with - and Autechre, I guess. How real is the image of recluse loners, hidden in the Pentland Hills?

Mike: We don't keep in touch with anyone in the music world. It doesn't pay to be involved with people in the music industry. There's no specific preference or prejudice. We just keep everyone at the same distance.

Last question: what does Geogaddi mean in your twisted language? What does it stand for?

Mike: It's a combination of different words, there are a few different meanings you can take from it. We have our own meaning and we want the listener to make up his or her own meaning. It's more personal that way.

Thanks a lot for your time! I hope it was worth it. Keep making such amazing records. Cheers, Koen Poolman/OOR

BoC: Thanks Koen...

interview by by Koen Poolman, March 2002.

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).

This is an original text copied verbatim from the original source. Do not edit this text to correct errors or misspellings. Aside from added wikilinks, this text is exactly as it originally appeared.

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

What took so long to record the new album?

Marcus: 'We took a year off writing after Music Has The Right To Children and did a bit of traveling and filming. Then we spent a year or so changing and rebuilding our studios, and we had a lot of technical problems that took time to settle down. We where doing favors for people like remixes and so on. Most of the work for Geogaddi was done in the last two years. I guess we work slower than other bands, but were not interested in churning out record after record. The next one will come out a lot sooner.'

What do you feel is the major difference with Geogaddi?

Mike: 'We recorded so much music over the past couple of years, hundreds of tracks. A lot of what we've done that hasn't been released yet is totally different from what anyone might expect us to sound like. But we decided that we weren't finished exploring the kinds of sounds we used on Music. We'll be releasing records in the near future that will probably surprise people, so it was important to us to come back right now after this gap with an album that sounded like a partner to the last album, to reinforce the foundation. No matter where we go next, we want people to know that we'll keep returning to our roots, because we love our early records. There is a difference though between the themes of the two records, because Geogaddi has a more layered, darker sound. [It's] just a reflection of the mood we both had while writing. Maybe it affects some of the incidents that affected us in this time, because there have been some deaths of people close to us and other personal traumas. We had a loose idea to make a record on the themes of art, geometry, mathematics and religion, and that was it. It just seemed like the tracks that went well together turned into Geogaddi.'

You're clearly indebted to psychedelia, and your cover photographs point to a certain pastoralism. Now that Bucolica (Fridge, Manitoba, etc.) seems to be making such strides, how do you position yourselves with respect to that particular sound? Do you think there's a reason listeners are lapping up this kind of electro-organic sound?

Mike: 'Our sound probably comes from the fact that we listen to music from all time periods; in fact we're not influenced by much current electronic music at all. We just try to do our own thing. If people are lapping up those bands it's because the organic thing is refreshing against a backdrop of very urban-sounding electronics. There's a tidal wave of laptop kids making music at the moment, which on the one hand is a great thing because it's a whole new generation being encouraged to create. But on the other hand, it seems to have become a bit of a pissing contest between non-musicians who are more interested in computer components than art, all trying to elbow each other around to create the most impressively detailed clicky sci-fi sounds. [But] at the end of the day, emotional melodies are going to last a lot longer than impressive drum programming. For us it's not a conscious effort: If there is a pastoralism or whatever in the music, it's because we're not urban people.'

Marcus: 'We don't sample old tunes or soundtracks as some have suggested, we just make our own melodies and then try to get them to sound like recordings from 25 years ago. It's so easy to use technology to make clean, well-produced music, and we're not into that at all. We came to the electronic thing from the direction of having used real instruments on multitrack tapes for years. But the technology, like samplers, for instance, allows us to play our melodies on real instruments or synths and finely craft the sound in bizarre ways, and we set ourselves the challenge to make old, damaged, dirty-sounding music.

--Philip Sherburne

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.

This is an original text copied verbatim from the original source. Do not edit this text to correct errors or misspellings. Aside from added wikilinks, this text is exactly as it originally appeared.

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.

I've always thought that hype does a disservice to the things it seeks to elevate in that it doesn't allow for personal discovery. Instead, it imposes heightened expectation and scrutiny.

Marcus Eoin: Yeah, it seems impossible to get around this. A deliberate lack of promotion can accidentally become like a form of promotion in itself. We never had any concern about this sort of thing in the past because we've been used to having no more than four fans. When we did [Music Has the Right to Children] nobody had heard of us, and I wish we could do things with a blank slate like that every time. Expectations are higher now, but there's an even weirder phenomenon where some fans actually think they know how our new music is supposed to sound, [so] they scold us for getting it wrong! In the end, all that matters to us is the individual who is willing to give the music a fair go and ignore all the peripheral nonsense that we have no control over.

You have said that you're turned off by electronic musicians' celebration of the technological and urban. Still, even though you live in the country, it seems urbania hasn't left your songs altogether.

E: That's true, otherwise we'd just be making folk music with fiddles and accordions. Our primary instruments are the synth and sampler, and our primary inspiration comes from film and TV, so I suppose we've taken what we want from hi-tech culture, but the hi-tech doesn't govern what we do. Too many new electronic musicians are obsessed with hi-tech gear and software, and that's what they devote 99 percent of their time thinking and talking about. It's like a sculptor making something out of clay. He can buy the best clay and the best tools, but he needs to have some good ideas in his head in the first place.

Geogaddi continues your contrast of naïve, childlike sounds and imagery with unsettling, ominous atmospheres. What draws you to this juxtaposition?

Michael Sandison: It's just a contrast that we've liked using quite a bit on the last two albums because it makes people look inside themselves and dredge up murky memories or nightmares and so on. There's no specific agenda, we just try to provoke feelings and I suppose we're more interested in sad, reflective or disturbing ideas for some reason. But you need to contrast things like that with innocent, positive, happy-rainbow sounds.

Your titles often reference geometry, numbers. Are you trying to draw parallels between natural patterns and technological ones?

E: I think we're more into the idea that everything is mathematical at the root level. But anything beautiful in nature or even manmade is only so because it has reached some sort of mathematical completeness, a kind of working equation in the form of tones and rhythms. And the way that we recognize mathematical perfection in say, a melody, is to say, "Hey, I like this bit of this tune."

The In a Beautiful Place Out in the country EP features both an image of David Koresh and a reference to him in the lyrics. Geogaddi was sequenced to play at 66 minutes and 6 seconds, you have a song titled "The Devil is in the Details" and at the All Tomorrow Parties music festival, your films featured clips of people losing themselves in euphoric religious abandon. What gives with the cultish phenomena?

E: We're interested in all kinds of subjects, and I suppose we went through a patch of looking at cults and the mass mind control of religion and so on. We read a lot and pay attention to cultural events, but we view everything from a distance. We're up here in our observation point, gathering up data about all the weird shit that's happening in the world and spewing it out in some way in our music and visuals. The Davidians thing was about the shock of seeing the way the U.S. authorities handled it all.

Geogaddi's cover art is very reminiscent of children's educational filmstrips. Were you going for this specific aesthetic?

S: It's as ambiguous as the title. We wanted the title to have multiple meanings so you can choose your own. The cover image can be taken more than one way too, because it's a bit simplistic and childish like a school textbook or a children's educational TV program, but it also has a kind of ritualistic pagan flavor. I think we're always trying to trigger ambiguous memories of things we've experienced as kids. We want to see if anyone out there is tuned in to what we're thinking.

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.

We wanted the general sound to be simple melodies played on unrecognizable textures,

says Eoin about Geogaddi.

We want to evoke the feel of old TV recordings,

adds Sandison.

We go to ridiculous lengths sometimes to make a piece of music sound dated and damaged.

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.

What role does reflection or memory play in your music?

Eoin: I suppose it's a big part of what we're about, whether we like it or not. We need that element to give tracks some sort of emotional purpose, because it's always been a driving factor in what we love about our favorite music - the time period that you mentally associate with whatever you're listening to. Sometimes even new music that you've not heard before can still achieve that effect of throwing your mind back through time and triggering some sort of feeling. It's nice when you get a potent, sad vibe from a bit of music that ultimately has a positive, inspiring effect on you, like reminding you of an excellent summer or something.

There is not only an orchestral feeling to some tracks on Geogaddi but also a surreal, nightmarish quality. Do you consciously seek to evoke dynamic swings in emotion?

Eoin: Yeah, the surreal element is deliberate. It's there on Music Has the Right to Children, too, particularly in the voices, but I think we went further this time because there was a vague plan to compile a record that had a sort of Through the Looking-Glass, mashed-up adventure feel about it.

Do specific childhood musical memories influence certain tracks?

Sandison: Definitely. I once did a track that starts with a synth flourish that sounds like an amalgam of every ABC, Lorimar, Stephen J. Cannell musical ID I'd ever soaked up as a kid. Most of the musical memories we try to put back into our music come from TV rather than pop music, especially stuff from the '70s or early '80s, like John Carpenter soundtracks and cheap American matinee TV movies that are about a fat kid with magic powers or something.

"Gyroscope" has a vocal that sounds like a woman in a porno movie counting to 10. Do you ever sample pop-culture sources such as TV and movies?

Sandison: That's not from a porno, although we've used porno speech a few times in the past, such as on "Sixtyniner." The voices are sometimes from old TV shows or tapes we've made. We have a lot of stuff we've collected, going back to the early '80s. But half of the time, it's things we've had friends record especially for us. We create tapes all the time. Practically everyone we know has been roped into recording something for us at some point. We don't sample music, just occasional bits of speech.

Does a vocal sample sometimes spark a track?

Sandison: Sometimes it can. I think that's what I did with "The Color of the Fire" on our first album.

Some tracks have disembodied, even ominous-sounding vocal samples. Do the vocal samples act simply as texture, or are they meant to imply meaning?

Eoin: Sometimes the whole point of the track is about what the voice is saying, so we create a song around it, like with "In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country." We often get friends to sing things for us with the intention of building a melody around it. It's different every time. Sometimes we deliberately disintegrate the vocal so your brain has to do a bit of work to reconstruct the phrase. Often, a tune can work beautifully with no voices on it at all, so you have to know when to say "hands off" and just leave them as they are.

You reside in a rural environment. What influence does nature play in your music, and did it play any role in the "geo-" prefix of the album title?

Sandison: Usually, our titles are self-explanatory, but this record's title is a composite that has more than one meaning. We have a meaning we understand from it, but it's up to listeners to choose their own meaning. I suppose the nature thing has an indirect effect on us while we're writing, because we're out here in the country most of the time. We're both heavily interested in science, too, which crosses over into nature and probably comes through in the music.

Does "Music Is Math" have anything to do with the mathematics and geometry that run through nature and, consequently, art, music and architecture?

Sandison: We've been interested in these things for a while, but on this album, we thought it'd be fun to put it in as a theme. The golden mean is nothing new in architecture and music. All through history, there have been guys like Mozart who got into the Masonic knowledge and were fascinated by this stuff. On Geogaddi, there's a vague theme of math and geometry and how they relate to religious iconography.

How has your gear changed since Music Has the Right to Children? Do you still rely more on tape and samplers than synths?

Eoin: We use computers, too, but shortly after Music Has the Right to Children, we started trying to work differently. We were composing primarily on computers, but pretty soon, it just started to bog us down and take away the spontaneity. So, now, we use computers sparingly for arranging things. Our stand-alone samplers are our primary instruments. Lately, we've returned to a really simple, stripped-down approach: just getting a sound or melody in a sampler and jamming it down to tape quickly, because it captures the moment.

Do you play the bulk of the instruments yourself and then treat them in the mix?

Eoin: We both play piano as our first instrument, and we both play guitar. Mike's a good drummer, and you can hear bits of that in there, too. We record a lot of stuff that doesn't make it onto BoC records because, stylistically, it doesn't fit. Maybe one day, we'll put that stuff out somehow. We've got a pretty weird collection of instruments at our studio - quite a few cheap guitars and a lot of flutes, percussion and old foreign instruments. We don't have that much money, so we just pick things up in second-hand shops for pennies. Mike recently picked up an Aeolian harp for £30 that plays itself in the wind. Our studio looks like a junk shop. A lot of the time, we play things quickly on a "real" instrument, get it into the sampler, and then we just destroy the sound. There are a lot of tunes on our records where you think you're listening to a synthetic sound when it's actually an acoustic guitar or voice that we twisted into something unrecognizable. It's a nice idea taking slack organic sounds and regimenting them in an unnatural way with a sampler and a sequencer.

Sandison: We made a lot of our percussion sounds by just wandering about with a portable DAT, denting things with drumsticks. On some tracks, we get people we know to record their voices making weird phonetic sounds. We chop it all up and use the plosive and fricative sounds for percussion and so on. All of the percussion on "An Eagle in Your Mind" was done with my girlfriend's voice."

How do you create your drum patterns?

Sandison: It's a mixture of live performance and step sequencing. Sometimes, we make up sounds and then program them tightly in a really synthetic way. Other times, we want it to sound really rough, so we'll just jam on the drums live. For instance, "Dawn Chorus" is a single-take jammed beat that I played, while "1969" has a live beat all the way through mixed with other beat tracks.

What are your favorite instruments?

Sandison: I have a lovely new Taylor Big Baby steel-string guitar. It didn't cost much, but it has a really great crystal sound with long sustain. And it's unvarnished, so it still smells like the workshop, like sawdust in the woodwork classroom. Our electronic gear is a mixture of old and newer stuff. We like early-'80s analog synths quite a bit, and we have some other things from that era that we're a bit protective of. We don't use any of the recent analog-modeling kit. I'm convinced I can hear the difference between modeled and real analog in music. We drop a lot of our music down onto a Tascam 4-track that has a great saturating effect on the sound. We have five or six samplers, but my favorite by far is still the Akai S1000. It's an old tank now, and the screen has faded so that I almost can't read it, but I know it inside out. It's the most spontaneous thing for making up little tunes. It adds something to the sound - maybe the lower bit depth has something to do with that. But most of our sound is achieved through a bunch of tricks we've taught ourselves. We've been experimenting for years. One of our techniques is to use a lot of hi-fi gear and outboard stuff. We have a brilliant old Rotel hi-fi that we run sounds through to get the feel we want, and we use various Drawmer compressors and filters to give sounds a specific time and place. Sometimes we get a bit carried away with the science of it, like even specifying what year we're imitating by the type of filtering used on the drums or the synth parts. It's a bit of a joke between us to aim at a specific sound, like the subtle difference between the graininess on a synth in a PBS jingle and a bit of incidental music from a British public information film from the same year.

How has your recording process changed, and can you elaborate at all on your creation process?

Sandison: Our songs almost always start with a melody. We usually make up little melodies, like sketches, and when you hit on something you really like, the rest falls into place around it.

Do you try to avoid blatant complexity in your compositions?

Eoin: Certainly on Geogaddi that's what we were going for. In the past, we've taken a much more minimal approach to the texture, like single melody lines where you could clearly hear the instrument. I guess we're heading back toward that empty sound now after Geogaddi, but sometimes it's nice to make a track that just sounds like a weird cacophony of undefined instruments. Most of "Julie and Candy" was actually made up of recorders and flutes.

You don't seem to be too concerned about having all the latest technology.

Sandison: Not really. If you let yourself get carried away with technology, then you end up spending all your time reading magazines and talking about high-tech gear but never actually writing any music. We'd much rather use what we've got and push it to do things it was never designed to do. But we do keep our ears to the ground, because there are certain instruments we've kind of invented in our minds and we're waiting for somebody to come along and make them. We read a comment recently where someone said they didn't like our use of digital plug-ins to make distorted sounds, which made us laugh because we don't use digital plug-ins. We use analog hi-fi units and overloaded tapes!

Do you want your music to reflect a clean, futuristic ideal or more of a rough, nostalgic archetype?

Sandison: A bit of both, really, although I think we lean towards the old rough sound. So many people in electronic music are making clean, futuristic sounds. There's nothing wrong with that. It obviously has its place, but then again, all you have to do to make clean, futuristic sounds with electronic gear is to switch it on. It's a lot more appealing to us to make dirty music.

Is your music new music or folk music?

Eoin: I think it's obviously new music because it references older things, and those references only work in the context of it being understood as being new music, if you get my drift.

Interview by Ken Micallef, July 2002.

The Campfire Headphase era

The Downtempo Duo

Part of the Fire

Splendid Isolation

Cross Out the Inappropriate

Above Board!

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

Stirred Up The Ashes

Two for the No-Show

Protect and Survive (interview)

The Last Secret of Pop

Wide Use of Guitars

Emotional Abuse

Peering Out from Behind the Curtain

[1] ttps://web.archive.org/web/19991109112959/www.ednet.co.uk/~ehx/inter/boc1.htm

[2] ttp://web.archive.org/web/20010305221908/http://www.forcefield.org/boc.html

[3] ttps://web.archive.org/web/19990221024531/http://www.virgin.fr/virgin/html/megactu/interview/boards.html

[4] ttps://web.archive.org/web/20020328062626/http://www.oor.nl/OorNL/custom/Boards.htm

[1

[2

[3

[4

Interviews-all

Revision as of 17:08, 25 June 2011 by Fredd-E (talk | contribs)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

Contents

Music Has the Right to Children era

The Age of Aquarius

Board Clever

A Bunker Full of Memories

Two Aesthetes of Electronic Music

Space Age Bachelor 1998 interview

Children Have the Right to Film

Boards of The Underground

Big Country

Geogaddi era

The Colour & The Fire

The Most Mysterious & Revered Men in Electronica

Another Miracle of The Post-modern Sensibility

Play Twice Before Listening

Stoned Immaculate

Country Comfort

Northern Exposure

The Campfire Headphase era

The Downtempo Duo

Part of the Fire

Splendid Isolation

Cross Out the Inappropriate

Above Board!

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

Stirred Up The Ashes

Two for the No-Show

Protect and Survive (interview)

The Last Secret of Pop

Wide Use of Guitars

Emotional Abuse

Peering Out from Behind the Curtain

Interviews-all

Revision as of 17:08, 25 June 2011 by Fredd-E (talk | contribs)(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

Contents

Music Has the Right to Children era

The Age of Aquarius

Board Clever

A Bunker Full of Memories

Two Aesthetes of Electronic Music

Space Age Bachelor 1998 interview

Children Have the Right to Film

Boards of The Underground

Big Country

Geogaddi era

The Colour & The Fire

The Most Mysterious & Revered Men in Electronica

Another Miracle of The Post-modern Sensibility

Play Twice Before Listening

Stoned Immaculate

Country Comfort

Northern Exposure

The Campfire Headphase era

The Downtempo Duo

Part of the Fire

Splendid Isolation

Cross Out the Inappropriate

Above Board!

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

Stirred Up The Ashes

Two for the No-Show

Protect and Survive (interview)

The Last Secret of Pop

Wide Use of Guitars

Emotional Abuse

Peering Out from Behind the Curtain

Revision as of 17:08, 25 June 2011 by Fredd-E (talk | contribs)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)