Aquarius contains a sample from the song of the same name on Galt MacDermot's 1979 soundtrack for the film "Hair" (the slap bass riff that's present throughout the Boards of Canada version).
Contains a sample from a sketch in a vintage Sesame Street episode (Orange).
Contains samples from yet another vintage Sesame Street episode (children's laughter and the "yeah, that's right" sample).
A sequence of numbers is read by a professional-sounding woman's voice that strongly resembles the voice-over in "One Very Important Thought," except that domain-specific speech synthesis is used, giving the numbers a robotic quality. The sequence varies:
In Version 3, the sequence ends with "...42, 24, 45, sixty-ten, 64, 47, 52, 23, 23, 23, 23, 23"
The same voice that recites the number sequence says "Orange".
A chorused male voice sings "I'm listening" (Version 3 only)
At 4:40, a synthesized male voice says "sixtyten new aquarius" (Version 3 only)[2]
A girl's voice saying what is believed to be the phrase "for Sandisons." [3]
Cultural References
One number heard throughout the sequence is sixtyten, a reference to the song of the same name on this album but also the brother's own label, Music70.
23, another number heard in the sequence (especially in Version 3), is a prominent theme in the Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. "23" occurrs five times at the end of the sequence in Version 3; another major theme in the same book is the "law of fives". The band has cited Robert Anton Wilson as an influence on their work[4], and their music has appeared on the sountrack of Maybe Logic: The Lives And Ideas Of Robert Anton Wilson.[5]