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

http://img109.imageshack.us/img109/7848/thecampfireheadphaseho3.jpg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tracks

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

Analysis

Album Cover

The bottom left corner of the front cover (and onto the spine of the digipak) has a smudge that strongly resembles the hexagonal Geogaddi cover. The front and back covers are repeated in the smaller pictures inside the digipak. The smaller pictures are less distorted than the covers.

Into the Rainbow Vein

This intro sets the mood of the album just like "Wildlife Analysis" set the mood for Music Has the Right to Children and "Ready Let's Go" for Geogaddi. The song plays itself to be a happier than Geogaddi's. "Rainbow Vein" is a band of quartz carbonate from which gold is mined, located in the Bad Vermilion Lake Area, 250 km west of Thunder Bay, Ontario. It was discovered and named by Stellar Gold Mines Co. Ltd in 1934. Link to more information.

Chromakey Dreamcoat

There are unidentified "samples" of computer game like noises near the end of the this track. There are also voices in the coda of this track. Between 5:16 and 5:35 is a recording of a woman talking and laughing. She laughs (5:20), says what sounds like "You know, this won't last..." (5:22-5:24), "I didn't like ... that before (?) ... times(?)" (5:28-5:30), laughs (5:32). It sounds like a sentence of some sort but a lot of words drop out. "Chromakey" (or colorkey) is a technique used in video production to swap in a separate signal source over a particular chrominance range across the source video, e.g. in bluescreen cinema effects. There appears to be a sample of a seagulls call at around 2:40 and again at 3:10. However these sound different from those sampled on "Happy Cycling".

The title Chromakey Dreamcoat could also be a pun on a musical by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber called "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat".

Satellite Anthem Icarus

Icarus is a character in Greek mythology who loses his wings when he flies too close to the sun. Icarus and his father were imprisoned on an island and determined to escape by constructing themselves wings and flying from captivity. During their escape, Icarus deviated from the careful lead of his father, flying too high, where the sun melted the wax holding his wing’s feathers together. As a result, Icarus fell from the sky and drowned in the ocean below. Icarus is also quite literally a celestial body orbiting the sun, and could even be considered a satellite, depending on the definition.

Peacock Tail

Clear voices. Apart from being the most colourful feature of the peacock, it was also a figure used by Euclid to prove the Pythagorean theorem. Link

Dayvan Cowboy

A Moment of Clarity

This track is very similar to the mislabeled third track on the Live @ Warp10 collection albeit without the flutes.

'84 Pontiac Dream

Part of the melody in a recurring section of the track is built from what sounds like a 1980's corporate jingle (e.g. at 0:27-0:30 on the right channel). This helps the listener remember (if they lived through it) the time period when corporations and organizations were using a certain type of synthetic sound for their catchy jingle melodies to seem "futuristic" and "forward-thinking" while their logo was displayed on the TV. For many this sound should create a nostalgic feeling. Contemporarily we still come across these audio-visual artifacts on certain old VHS tapes, which are usually pretty worn out and imperfect, further enhancing the nostalgia when we re-experience them. BoC, using a jingle in a track with such a title, might be illustrating how certain sensory perceptions experienced repetitively in waking life (as these jingles were in 1984) can become part of the texture in a dream and furthermore that the worn quality of the recording reflects the imperfect quality of memory.

Sherbet Head

Throughout the track is a recording of some human voices that are garbled and buried and are, therefore, hard to comprehend. The recording seems to be slightly detuned, probably by one or two semi-tones. The voices are clearest at the beginning, before the bass kicks in. Noticeable in this section is a man saying a word or two (0:00-0:04), a phrase said by a woman (0:10-0:12) and a phrase said twice by a third voice (0:20-0:24). It sounds like the microphone is being banged against objects as if somebody is walking around somewhere with a hand-held tape recorder. Also audible is the sound of a child screaming (0:57). Similar sounds continue on for the rest of the track's duration. Perhaps it is a field recording of some public space.

Oscar See through Red Eye

Ataronchronon

The ending sounds a bit like 'Gann', the short track off Boards of Canada's website. The Ataronchronon or "People of the Marshes" were a tribal people living in seventeenth century Ontario.

Hey Saturday Sun

Constants Are Changing

Slow This Bird Down

Near the end of this song is an aural collage of shortwave radio noise. Morse, teletype, and various data signals can be heard including a radio modem (called the Harris RF-5710) used by hobbyists and naval military services.

Tears from the Compound Eye

The compound eye is found on most insects and some crustaceans, which is composed of many light-sensitive elements, each having its own refractive system and each forming a portion of an image. Most compound eyes feature hexagonal lenses in an array forming the pattern.

Farewell Fire

The melody continues very silently until the end.

Macquarie Ridge

Macquarie Ridge is a song exclusive to the Japanese release of The Campfire Headphase.

Reviews

• CD Times review by Mark Thompson
• New Noise review by Jim Merrett
• Pitchfork review by Mark Richardson
• Brainwashed review by Matthew Jeanes
• Allmusic review by John Bush
• BBC review by Colin Buttimer
• Texture review
• Igloo Magazine review by Gabriel Weinstock
• The Observer review by Simon Reynolds

External links

• The Campfire Headphase at WarpMart
• The Campfire Headphase at Bleep.com