title	It's Hard To Get To Know Someone
author	Benjy Eisen
publication	Filter
date	(Holiday) December 2005
issue	18
pages	p.28

"It's Hard To Get To Know Someone" is an interview by Benjy Eisen originally published December 2005 in Filter magazine.

Original text

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.

IT'S HARD TO GET TO KNOW SOMEONE when they insist on only meeting in cyberspace. You lose the subtleties of sighs and smiles, the giveaways of grins and grimaces, and how much tip they leave on the table. There's much less demeanor in a mouse click.

Then again, online exchanges have the ability to show bone, cutting right through the skin of small talk. Internet conversations can actually be illuminating experiences. But it takes more than listing your favorite books and movies on MySpace to be able to make something as mechanical as a computer express something as incorporeal as a personality - much like it takes more than keystrokes to create music that connects with people, emotionally.

As for Boards of Canada - producer-musicians Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin - well, they were just sick of being asked their favorite color.

"We like to do email interviews,"

writes Sandison,

"because the questions are usually a bit more interesting."

That's good, because Boards of Canada aren't really a band you'd want to ask dumb questions anyway. I mean, here's a pair of art geeks who create soundtrack music with a catch - the soundtracks don't necessarily sync to film; they sync to concepts, to notions, to visual ideas captured sonically but non-verbally, and their open-source plots are encoded cleverly in bits and pieces...somewhere...somehow.

"With instrumental music you can hint at specific things by creating a storyboard through the mood of the tracks, or by using samples, or with specific word-ing in the titles,"

emails Eoin.

"There's also a fair bit you can do with the sound design in the tracks too, with found sounds, or in our case, even designing riffs to sound like something specific from the past."

Much of the music on 2002's Geogaddi was based on number theory and mathematical concepts, including the Fibonacci Ratio. Two years earlier the band released In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country, which cryptically referenced the 1993 showdown in Waco, Texas, between FBI agents and the Branch Davidians. But in 1998, long before anyone figured out, "Hey the guys are giving us secret messages!" the band established their own worldwide web of 'til-death-do-they-part followers simply by releasing a great album: Music Has a Right to Children. An electronic masterpiece - nobody bothered to look for clues to decode - it was just great music.

Sandison writes,

"There's a bit of a tradition where instrumental electronic bands have got to have meaningless track titles and no context, but it doesn't have to be like that. We try to make our tracks work on the two levels - on the melodic level, but also on a referential level if you want to go hunting for it."

Well, I don't. Given the chance, I'd much rather jus ask. Like, what's with their new record The Campfire Headphase? What should I be looking for? Huh? The songs "84 Pontiac Dream" and "Slow This Bird Down" could both reference a joyride with a T-Bird. The snapshots on the album art could be slides from a vacation. But "Ataronchronon"? "Chromake Dreamcoat"? I've Googled, I've deconstructed. I've imagined - how do I know if I'm on the right track? And what if I choose my own adventure or come to a different conclusion? Do I still get a prize?

"The thing with this record,"

replies Sandison,

"is that it's laid-back on the surface but there's a pretty dark idea behind the flow of the tracks. It's taking the sound of a sun-baked vintage road trip as a starting point, so it sets itself up with a few forward-looking, euphoric-sounding tunes and then it gradually becomes more maudlin and tragic. There's an overall idea of what the headphase is, but we didn't really want to explain it fully because it might defeat the purpose of the record. It's about final moments. Flashbacks through all the good memories."

Much like their music, emails generated from the Boards of Canada camp are both revealing and concealing at the same time - mysteries whose illuminations are perhaps nothing more than a mirror for the person reading them. You see what you want to see, even if you never do find out what their favorite color is.

Fair enough. F

Scans

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Highlights

• Michael Sandison mentions a darker take of the album by explaining "headphase". There is a "pretty dark idea behind the flow of the tracks...then it gradually becomes more maudlin and tragic. There's an overall idea of what the headphase is...It's about final moments. "