The Power of Myth

title	The Power of Myth
author	Piotr Orlov
publication	Grooves
date	2002-07
issue	08
pages

"The Power of Myth" is a 2002 interview by Piotr Orlov It originally appeared in Grooves issue 08.

Note: Not an original interview. Source material from the NME interview, HMV interview and Fader interview.

Original text

Since 1996, Boards of Canada has spun a self-styled legend around its existence. Time to time the webs of intrigue together, and sew a yarn.

Among the most interesting things about Boards of Canada has always been the fully constructed focus of thought within their music. Scotsmen Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin have produced two albums (1998's epic Music Has the Right to Children and this year's spectacular Geogaddi) and four EPs of luminous, digi-log ambient-pop vignettes (think Satie/Eno melodic melancholy basking in Whitman's pastoralism) underpinned by second-line hip-hop rhythms. More so, they have, for all intents and purposes created a brave new universe of sound and thought. Nature, films, childhood nostalgia, spirituality, the apocalypse, geometrical shapes, and mathematical equations, the old emotions, the new emotions, the in-the-way emotions – all swirl together in their compositions, forming a symbolist manifesto for a new way of life.

But, hey, BoC record for WARP – isn't an idiosyncratic outlook part of the artist contract there? Yet unlike similarly hermetic label-mates Aphex Twin and Autechre, Sandison and Eoin have never allowed their mythology to stand outside of the world they inhabit. If anything, much of the power of BoC's music comes from the inherent interaction between their belief systems and the environment these're expressed in. That nobody has coerced BoC into an in-depth exploration of just what they're getting at, says as much of the short-sighted abilities of third estate interrogators as it does of their deftly built defense systems against pseudo-intellectual wank intruders. Until now – or so I thought.

Chase an enigma for answers you believe promised to you by the all-powerful decree of the music-press machine, and you'll inevitably find yourself spending time describing the outlines, the textures, the release dates, and musical influences yet no closer to fitting together the puzzle you imagined could be completed just over the horizon.

Consider me Oedipa Maas – Sandison and Eoin twin Thomas Pynchon. While they're ensconced in relative, creative isolation, a studio bunker called Hexagon Sun in the rural outland of Scotland's Petland Hills, dropping musical hints of muted horns and orchestrating a mythological fantasia, I'm stuck on the outside, looking for clues and wondering to myself “what does it all mean?” Only difference is, I'm not the product of their imagination and the focus of my frustration does not conclude when the bidder for lot "sixtyten" is revealed.

How did I get here? Around the time of Geogaddi's release, BoC agreed to a handful of interviews (including one with Grooves) that would be conducted by e-mail. Send in some questions, wait awhile, and expect thought-through answers from behind the turquoise curtain. But a funny thing happened on the way back from the inquisition: The answers never arrived in my in-box. After weeks of waiting and a story still expected, I had to take a different approach. And the approach was basically side two of Neu 2.

What follows then is a collage of answers BoC gave in interviews they did complete on the Geogaddi press tour. Yet rather than focusing on recording techniques, length of time spent following-up Music, their “musical influences”, and other standard operating inquiries of pop musician interviews, I chose to look for the very insights I initially went seeking. We may never know just how much of Sandison and Eoin's philosophies of life have specific political or literary seeds: whether they feel an affinity towards the work of Glenn Gould, another musical modernist/traditionalist inspired by his isolated natural surroundings who chose to interact with society on his own terms; or if the Gaddi portion of their recent masterpiece refers to the so-named peoples of northern India, a cast of “untouchables” known for their love of the land, honesty, and mysticism. Yet we can, however briefly, glimpse upon BoC's psychological scroll and the symbolic make-up of their holographic universe. One day, we'll hopefully get more.

(Many thanks are due to HMV.com's Mike Pitlyk, the NME's John Mulvey, The Fader Japan's Nobuki Nishiyama, and Grooves contributor Philip Sherburne, whose own Q&A can be read in Alternative Press, for the material remixed here.)

"Sunshine Recorder"s

Michael Sandison: We love the sound of music that seems to be barely under control, music that's out of tune in a beautiful way, or dissonant, or damaged. It's okay to be imperfect – in fact the imperfections are where the magic is. To us, perfect music sounds sterile and dead. We actually put a lot of effort into making things rough and difficult and noisy. 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. (NME)

Sandison: We don't use laptops, but I do appreciate the sound of very complex rhythmic electronic music, though I fear that it's a finite direction if it's lacking the emotional effect of either a tune or some kind of reference point. To me, the ultimate composition is the one you can write in 15 minutes that has instant musical resonance, whereas complex rhythmic work is more like software engineering, it takes a long time and doesn't always result in something of any significance in the end. We really prefer to approach a song as though it could work on just a single instrument, like an acoustic guitar, so that it has enough basic musicality to make it able to be played that way, or even sung. A lot of current electronic music seems to me to be 100 percent dependent on the specific sounds used for that specific arrangement. But we don't get anything out of music like that. To us, music has to be more than just production and sound effects; it has to have melody and an ability to change people's feelings. (Fader)

Sandison: We try to make the tunes work in more than one way, firstly in an ambiguous musical way, like most instrumental music, but also in an unsettling way. To us, music has to have some sort of purpose, usually to create some sort of an emotional change in the listener. In the past we've heard some people who have barely listened to our music making comments like “oh yes it's nice music to put on in the background”, but if they came to see the visual show or actually listened more closely to elements such as the voices in the tunes, they'd realize there's a much darker science going on. (Fader)

Marcus Eoin: 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? (NME)

Children Have the Right of Music

Eoin: For some reason I have distinct memories of the rhythmic sound of a train traveling over the railway sleepers, the hypnotic nature of that. I may be trying to capture some of that when I am writing music without realizing it. Also, I think the memories you carry from childhood tend to be either from times of total happiness, or from some kind of traumatic disturbance such as moving home. That could explain why I also think of the comforting but threatening sound of a jetliner from the viewpoint of the passenger. (Fader)

Sandison: [The nostalgia for childhood] is 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 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. (NME)

Sandison: When you're young, so much of the detail in the world around you, like a brightly colored bumblebee, or a distinctive smell or flavor, can be totally mesmerizing. Then as you get older these mundane details start to become like background noise to your brain. I think this is why adults are always trying to push their increasingly desensitized bodies into more extreme experiences of food or sex or whatever. I'm always trying to get back to that childish wonder through music and visuals; it's a form of voluntary simplification. (AP)

Eoin: I think that as people get older, they become conditioned by their workplace or society into ignoring the kinds of things they found exciting as kids, you know, like weird sounds, bright colors, smells etc. I read that very young kids can naturally experience sensations so vividly that synaesthesia occurs. (AP)

Music is Math – Vision of the Implicate

Eoin: I like the connection between science, psychedelia and art. The boundaries between music and mathematics, or color and sounds get broken down if you're in the right frame of mind or under the influence of a psychedelic substance. (AP)

Eoin: 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. (NME)

Sandison: There are people who believe that the mathematical basis of music is something created or imposed by the mind of the composer and listener, but it's important to recognize that rhythmic and harmonic patterns exist in nature and music is simply a collection of those patterns. Maths already exist; it isn't a human invention, it's a discovery. (Fader)

Eoin: Geogaddi's "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. (NME)

Sandison: We're interested in symbols. We never just make a pleasant tune and leave it at that. 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. (NME)

"Energy Warning"s to City Dwellers

Sandison: [The fact that our music suggests something vaguely pagan] is 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. (NME)

Eoin: We've always been inspired by nature, I think that our inclusion of nature-inspired influences is a reaction against everyone around us rushing to embrace everything that is technological, urban, and anti-nature. We try to keep our titles and themes close to experiences that are personal to us, but in a way that can be shared with the listener's imagination. Geogaddi has several meanings – that's what we wanted, to let people allow the album to mean what they want it to mean. (Fader)

Eoin: We don't hate the city, just the homogenized culture you get in urban areas. (HMV.com)

Sandison: 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 [in Scotland], or being squashed in a London tube with some suit's elbow in my face, it's an easy choice to make. (NME)

The Dawn's Chorus

Eoin: I dreamed the sound of "Gyroscope", and although I've recreated dreamt songs before, I managed to do that one so quickly that the end result was 99 percent like my dream. It spooks me to listen to it now. (HMV.com)

Somebody once said that the best electronic music is music that you could never quite imagine on your own. Are you aware as to how strangely your music seems to co-eist with the subconscious?

Sandison: 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. If you listen to a tune by some musician and it really gets 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 the closest you'll ever get to being psychic. (HMV.com)

Scans

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Highlights

Sandison: To me, the ultimate composition is the one you can write in 15 minutes that has instant musical resonance, whereas complex rhythmic work is more like software engineering, it takes a long time and doesn't always result in something of any significance in the end.
Sandison: In the past we've heard some people who have barely listened to our music making comments like “oh yes it's nice music to put on in the background”, but if they came to see the visual show or actually listened more closely to elements such as the voices in the tunes, they'd realize there's a much darker science going on.
Sandison: I'm always trying to get back to that childish wonder through music and visuals; it's a form of voluntary simplification.
Eoin: I dreamed the sound of "Gyroscope", and although I've recreated dreamt songs before, I managed to do that one so quickly that the end result was 99 percent like my dream. It spooks me to listen to it now.
Sandison: 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 the closest you'll ever get to being psychic.

External Links

References

Contents

Original text

Scans

Highlights

External Links

References