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{{interview
 
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|title=O Brothers Where Art Thou
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|title=Boards of Canada: O Brothers, Where Art Thou?
 
|author=Heiko Hoffmann   
 
|author=Heiko Hoffmann   
 
|date=2005/11
 
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== Original Text ==
 
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[[O Brothers Where Art Thou]] was an interview (in German) by Heiko Hoffmann originally published November 2005 in Groove magazine Number 97 (November/December).
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[[Boards of Canada: O Brothers, Where Art Thou?]] was an interview (in German) by Heiko Hoffmann originally published November 2005 in Groove magazine Number 97 (November/December).
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== Original Text ==
 
  
 
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=== Boards of Canada: O Brothers, Where Art Thou? ===
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'''Über kaum eine Band, die so erfolgreich ist, ist so wenig bekannt, wie über Boards Of Canada. In einem seltenen Interview melden sich die beiden Schotten Mike Sandison und Marucs Eoin anlässlich ihres Albums The Campfire Headphase nach fast vier Jahren zurück und sprechen über ihre missverstandene letzte Platte, die Schwierigkeit, sich unter Erwartungsdruck weiterzuentwickeln und ihre Nostalgie-getränkte Electronica. Und überraschen gleich zu Beginn mit einem Outing.'''
 
'''Über kaum eine Band, die so erfolgreich ist, ist so wenig bekannt, wie über Boards Of Canada. In einem seltenen Interview melden sich die beiden Schotten Mike Sandison und Marucs Eoin anlässlich ihres Albums The Campfire Headphase nach fast vier Jahren zurück und sprechen über ihre missverstandene letzte Platte, die Schwierigkeit, sich unter Erwartungsdruck weiterzuentwickeln und ihre Nostalgie-getränkte Electronica. Und überraschen gleich zu Beginn mit einem Outing.'''
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===TRANSLATED TEXT===
  
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Hardly any band that is so successful is as mysterious as Boards Of Canada. In a rare interview, the two Scots Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin report back after almost four years on the occasion of their album The Campfire Headphase and talk about their misunderstood last record, the difficulty of developing under pressure of expectations and their nostalgia-soaked electronica. And surprise right at the beginning with an outing.
 
  
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Text: Heiko Hoffmann, Photography: Peter Iain Campbell
 
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Mike Sandison looks slightly irritated. He is talking, but seems to be thinking about something else. He looks at Marcus Eoin. Hesitates. Then he asks to turn off the recorder for a moment and asks Marcus if it's okay to talk about it. The interview has only been going on for a few minutes. It's the first conversation Boards Of Canada have had with a German journalist since they released their debut album Music Has The Right To Children seven years ago. And actually, things are getting off to a surprisingly relaxed start. In the cafeteria of the Royal Museum in Edinburgh there are no obdurate electronic earth suckers sitting opposite you as you had feared - on the contrary. Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin seem very openly sympathetic and articulate. But then you're suddenly asked to pause the interview just for asking again the standard question of when the two met in the first place. Mike, who wears not only a baseball cap to match his light blue hoodie, but also a light blue band-aid on his right hand, apologizes and explains: {{boc|We've never talked about it before, but Marcus and I are brothers!}}
 
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Until now, Mike and Marcus Sandison ("Eoin," the last name Marcus always gives, is actually his middle name) had always said they had become friends as children because their parents lived in the same village on the north coast of Scotland. So now they are brothers. They have hidden their relationship until now, they say, because at the beginning of their career they wanted to avoid comparisons with the brother duo Orbital. And anyway, that information would have only distracted from what's really important: their music. {{boc|It's not a big deal for us,}} says '''Mike''', who at 34 is two years older than the two brothers. {{boc|But because no one has asked us about it, we haven't felt compelled to set the record straight yet.}}
 
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The first surprise is followed by a shrug of the shoulders. While bands like White Stripes or Ween pretended to be siblings in the past and thus attracted increased attention, it's the opposite with Boards Of Canada. But the surprise is limited, because in the public the two members were always perceived only as a unit without existing as individuals. Since both appear exclusively as members of Boards Of Canada and they don't perform any clearly distinguishable roles in their music (unlike, for example, other sibling bands like the Sparks, Oasis or even the Jackson 5), it hardly matters in which relationship the two stand to each other.
 
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{{boc|'''Mike Sandison''': We were about six or seven years old when we started learning instruments and making music together. Then we started recording our music when we were ten. When your parents have a tape recorder and a piano sitting around, you start playing around with it. Of course, we didn't have a multitrack recorder back then, but we had two cassette recorders. So with the one recorder, we recorded music that we played on the piano, for example. Then we would put the recording into the other recorder, play it back, and accompany it on a guitar or drums while we recorded it all together again on the other recorder, which was fifty inches away. We repeated this process until the recordings sounded so distorted that you could barely make out the individual instruments and the tape was already completely shredded. It was an extremely simple way of multitrack recording, but for us it was a good way to learn to compose our own stuff.}}
 
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{{boc|'''Marcus''': Later, when we went to high school, we were in different bands for a while.}}
 
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{{boc|'''Mike''': But we continued to record music together at home. In the mid-eighties, Marcus was in a terrible heavy metal band whose music I didn't like at all. So one day I asked him if he would like to play in my band. That was the first time we started working with synthesizers, while all the other bands at our school were pure guitar bands.}}
 
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Influenced by EBM and industrial groups such as Nitzer Ebb, Front 242 and Test Department, folk musicians such as the Incredible String Band, also from Scotland, and Joni Mitchell, as well as the ethereal-sounding rock groups Cocteau Twins and My Bloody Valentine, the Sandison brothers have been making music as Boards Of Canada in various line-ups since 1989. The name was inspired by the public education and nature TV films of the National Film Board Of Canada, which left a lasting impression on the two as children.
 
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Around the Sandisons, the loose artist collective Hexagon Sun was formed, making music as well as films and hosting full moon parties in castle ruins and forests. In 1996 they sent demo tapes, still as a trio (the third member would release records under the name Christ. years later on the Edinburgh label Benbecula), to the Warp, Rephlex and Skam labels. The Skam label, run by Autechre, was the only one to report back, releasing a series of well-received singles in small print runs and partly in collaboration with the Funkstörung label Musik Aus Strom, as well as the mini-album "Hi Scores", which was reissued just at the same time as the new album was released. In retrospect, this period seems to be the only one in which Boards Of Canada could be attributed to a certain scene. Boards Of Canada played as support band for Seefeel and Autechre, collaborated with Funkstörung's Michael Fakesch and were eventually signed to Warp after all.
 
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Music Has The Right To Children, the debut album released in 1998, not only marked a milestone in electronic music with its carefully assembled nostalgic electronica, but was also declared one of the most important albums of the 90s even by rock magazines such as the English Mojo. For Warp, it also meant the biggest surprise success in the label's history: the original 5,000 records produced have now become more than 200,000 albums sold - which probably makes Boards Of Canada the most successful group that neither releases singles or videos, nor goes on tour. In the following years, their characteristic mixture of children's voice samples, mono synthesizers and hip-hop beats could not only be found on countless electronica productions, but their sound also had an influence on the music of Air or Radiohead's Kid A album.
 
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'''Campfire Headphase'''
 
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Already when the last album Geogaddi was released three and a half years ago, Boards Of Canada announced that the follow-up record was already half finished. But only now the new album The Campfire Headphase is released. Three and a half years is an above average time for a new record for most other musicians, but for Mike and Marcus Sandison this circumstance is amplified by their other lack of output. Apart from three remixes for Boom Bip, Clouddead and most recently Beck, not a single new sound has been released by Boards Of Canada in the meantime, and they have also refrained from playing concerts in the meantime. Similiarly perhaps only with Kraftwerk, one wonders what Boards Of Canada do all day long. {{boc|There were some changes in our lives,}} '''Mike''' explains. {{boc|First, we both moved and set up new studios, which took almost a year. Then I had a baby and for the first nine months music was out of the question. Both brothers now live near Edinburgh on old farms. Marcus in East Lothian on the east coast of Scotland, Mike in the Boarders on the border with England. A little over a year they have both actually spent finishing the new record. By June, they were working 12 to 15 hours a day in one of their two home studios.}}
 
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The Campfire Headphase is again a distinctive Boards Of Canada record, but with some significant innovations: The previously typical use of vocal samples is dispensed with this time and the tracks sound clearer, simpler and also more optimistic than on Geogaddi. Striking is also the use of strings, drums and especially slightly out-of-tune sounding guitars, which sometimes remind of My Bloody Valentines "Loveless". Exemplary for this new direction is the track "Dayvan Cowboy", which was released in advance on Bleep.com. After a long, atmospheric intro during which nothing much seems to happen, the track builds up to a wild track by Boards Of Canada standards full of percussion, strings and tremolo guitars that should delight DJ Shadow and Sigur Ros alike.
 
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{{boc|'''Mike''': We wanted to take a few steps back on the new record and just be a band. We wanted to make a record like a garage rock band would make. We imagined a trip where someone parks their car in the middle of the night somewhere in the country, lights a campfire, and then dreams up the rest of their trip. We wanted to generate sounds reminiscent of old 70s folk records by John Denver or Joni Mitchell. The problem with us is that we have this schizophrenic approach to music that haunts us even now. When we started working on the new record we had a kind of struggle. On the one hand, we wanted to make a very heavily electronic record, and on the other hand, a very guitar-driven record. The problem is how we can bring these two extremes together. We've never been big fans of laptop music, and it was more important to us on this record than before to create music that didn't come exclusively from electronic boxes.}}
 
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{{boc|'''Marcus''': Some of the tracks we worked on are so extreme in one direction that we just can't use them. They just don't fit into the BOC thing at all. The first reactions to our new record already show that while there are some people who are very happy with the result, there are also some who have a problem with the guitar stuff. So if we would have gone completely in this direction, nobody would believe that it's still the same group. It wouldn't occur to anyone that it was us.}}
 
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{{boc|'''Mike''': The new record is probably the slowest we've ever done. We deliberately used the guitars because we needed to move on. We were bothered by the fact that you go to the big record stores and find our music in the dance section. We haven't made a single dance record in our entire career, but our records still get sorted there. With this record we want to get out of the dance section and into the main section next to bands like Abba and A-ha (laughs). We are just a band and neither an IDM band nor a dance band.}}
 
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'''The Devil In The Details'''
 
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Boards Of Canada live with the contradiction that, on the one hand, they are rather reclusive and publicity-shy artists to whom all activities beyond their productions seem suspect, but on the other hand, they are very - perhaps too much - concerned with the external perception of their releases. An important reason why Mike and Marcus Sandison are now opening up is certainly Geogaddi and its unexpected consequences.
 
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On their second album, Boards Of Canada created a dark dream world in 2002, on which there was much to discover, not only musically. The record is full of, partly hidden, allusions to mathematical equations, pagan art and occultism. Already when you put the CD in, the player shows a total running time of 66 minutes and 6 seconds. On the track "The Devil Is In The Details", for example, a slowed-down female voice can be heard speaking in self-hynosis, accompanied by what at first sounds like snatches of singing, but then turns out to be a child screaming in despair. Furthermore, there is a riff in the piece that Fibonacci's Golden Ratio serves as the compositional basis for. On "You Could Feel The Sky," after two minutes and 13 seconds, while a church bell is ringing, a voice can be heard in the background. If you play it backwards it says: "A God With Horns... A God With Hooves" - which can't mean anyone else but the devil. And all this after the previously released EP "A Beautiful Place In The Country", which at first glance praises an idyllic country life, turns out to be a record about the Branch Davidian sect, which perished in a bloodbath in 1993 in the American city of Waco.
 
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In Internet forums and newsgroups, fans developed a sometimes obsessive interest in the record. More and more new - actual as well as suspected - hidden details of the record were discovered. The rumor mill was bubbling. From then on, Boards Of Canada were regarded by many as occultists. Who knows, maybe they even ran their own satanic sect in the seclusion of the hills of Scotland?
 
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{{boc|'''Mike''': When we did Geogaddi, we were into all kinds of obscure stuff like numerology and formulas, architecture...}}
 
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{{boc|'''Marcus''': ... pagan art...}}
 
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{{boc|'''Mike''': ... religious art in general and stuff like that. We tried to hint at those things, but it's not like the album is just about that. It's not a concept album. But these themes have been reflected in the artwork, the titles and to some extent the tracks themselves. In that sense, our new album is a direct response to Geogaddi. The whole mood of the record is more uplifting and joyful. We got to a point where we found all the mystery and magic and nonsense that built up around the last record just ridiculous. People suddenly found things in our music that weren't there at all and claimed that all the pieces had a devilish undertone. We are not like that at all. It was one of the themes we wanted to pursue on Geogaddi, but people concluded that we always and everywhere put secret, dark and satanic things in our music. And all of that suddenly became more important than the music itself. With the new record, we wanted to make it simpler again and focus on the music.}}
 
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{{boc|'''Marcus''': We found that some people who listened to our records, instead of listening to the music, immediately started looking for hidden stuff.}}
 
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{{boc|'''Mike''': People are starting to look for it again now, even though there are no hidden messages on the new record. Geogaddi was an experiment that was too successful. We thought that with these secret things, we would do an interesting thing that one or two people would stumble upon when they got into the record. We didn't realize it would create that cult following.}}
 
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{{boc|'''Mike''': I think if it wasn't for the Internet, it would have been okay. But because of the internet, this stuff got spread very quickly and got out of hand. For us, some of it was nothing more than a joke between the two of us. Some of that gritty stuff, but we just did it for fun, or to give the tracks more texture. Things like voices that you can understand when you play them backwards are a nod to all the bands that did that kind of thing in the '70s.}}
 
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{{boc|'''Marcus''': For example, the decision to make the record 66.06 minutes long was made at the last moment. We were bothered by the fact that people often put their CD players on repeat and then the record immediately starts all over again without a break. We really liked the last track on Geogaddi and wanted to avoid that. So we wanted to add some silence to the last track so that there would be a pause before the album starts all over again. When we were thinking about how long the pause should be, Steve Beckett (Warp boss) suggested making the record 66 minutes and 6 seconds long in total, because then everyone would think the devil made the record. And we just laughed.}}
 
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{{boc|'''Mike''': People then found stuff that didn't exist. There was writing about palindromes, words that sound exactly alike backwards and forwards. There is actually a palindrome, but people claim there are many more. Others said: if you slow this song down at this point you hear a sound that sounds like a cymbal, but if you play it backwards you hear a child screaming. Yet it's just a cymbal!}}
 
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'''The Nostalgia Of Storage Media'''
 
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All three Boards Of Canada albums are characterized by their careful and sometimes obsessive handling of their sound texture. Typical is the artificial aging of the tracks. With numerous effects Mike and Marc Sandison try to give their tracks a fictitious history and make them sound aesthetically like recordings from a certain time. On their debut album, for example, the documentary and animated short films of the National Film Board Of Canada, which regularly won Oscars at the end of the 70s and were also broadcast in Germany, served as a sonic model. Not least because of this adaptation, their music often has a sentimental effect and evokes memories that evaporate even before you can name them concretely. This has nothing to do with retro. Boards Of Canada make music as it can only be created today, but in the post-processing they provide it with a sound that refers to the time of their childhood. {{boc|For us it is a very personal thing, with which we also want to express our sadness about the loss of the ability to perceive, which one has as a child,}} '''Mike Sandison''' explains. {{boc|Sometimes I think our music is strongly tied to this generation. Kids growing up today will probably once think nostalgically of the perfect digital photos and Crazy Frog ringtones of their childhood. I can't relate to that anymore. It's inevitably a different time.}}
 
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Boards Of Canada belong to a generation that has been significantly shaped by the shift from analog to digital storage media - from Super 8 films to VHS to DVD, from records to cassettes and CDs to Mp3s-leading to a nostalgia for the analog artifacts of their childhood. From yellowed Polaroid family pictures featured on their covers to vinyl crackles and leaking tapes.
 
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{{boc|'''Mike''': There was a brief period after Music Has The Right To Children when we experimented a lot with computers and sequencers like Logic Audio. But after about a year, we had all kinds of problems with that. The problem for us was that when you have an infinite amount of audio tracks available and no restrictions, you start going crazy. When you have a simple setup like a mono synthesizer and a drum machine, the things you can do with it are limited, but it also makes you more creative.}}
 
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{{boc|'''Marcus''': It's just more direct. You can get to the point right away.}}
 
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{{boc|'''Mike''': You're more likely to make more interesting music with just a few things, because you have to be more inventive. With an unlimited number of audio tracks, you can have anything: a big choir, strings and galloping horses... But the more you use, the more vague your music becomes. I think to some extent the limitations you have define your sound and make it distinct.}}
 
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{{boc|'''Marcus''': Take the White Stripes, for example: the limitations they put on themselves are what make their sound so special. It's just a guitar, his voice and the drums. I can't imagine a band starting out with a computer coming up with music like that.}}
 
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{{boc|'''Mike''': There's just a temptation to use more and more tracks just because they're available.}}
 
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{{boc|'''Marcus''': Meanwhile, we use Logic Audio more or less like a tape recorder. We've recorded a lot of instruments live and then used the computer about the same way we used the tape recorders when we were kids.}}
 
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{{boc|'''Mike''': A lot of times we record stuff and then tinker with it and edit it.}}
 
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{{boc|'''Marcus''': Actually finishing a song is the hardest part for us.}}
 
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{{boc|'''Mike''': Most of the tracks we worked on so meticulously that it took months to finish. For example, the track "84 Pontiac Dream" we originally did three and a half years ago and it's been with us in various guises ever since. We had already finished it about eight times. So you can assume that for every song on the album, there are about a dozen versions that didn't make it. We never work in a linear way, we work on many, many songs in parallel.}}
 
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{{boc|'''Marcus''': Instead of starting with one song and working on it until it's done, we sit on hundreds of pieces at the same time. And then depending on our mood, we pick different ones. We both have pretty short attention spans.}}
 
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{{boc|'''Mike''': We always have enough material for several other albums but while our material is sitting there waiting for us, we eventually get tired of it and move on to something else. So there's plenty of music that probably never gets released.}}
 
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{{boc|'''Marcus''': That's another manifestation of this schizophrenic problem we have. We're just trying to tackle too many things at once.}}
 
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{{boc|'''Mike''': Years ago we also did an acoustic version of Music Has The Right To Children, which still exists.}}
 
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{{boc|'''Marcus''': The reason we haven't released something like that yet is because it might seem like we're constantly dwelling on stuff we've already done.}}
 
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The interview is over. Through the rainy Scottish autumn afternoon, we head a few more corners to a pizzeria. Mike and Marcus Sandison chat about their plans after the studio marathon of the last months. Just recently, they had to turn down a remix offer from a "very well-known synth-pop group that has a new album coming out soon" due to scheduling issues. Now they're looking forward to spending time with families, snowboarding, visiting Venice, and finally listening to a Four Tet album. Or maybe going on tour after all? There are plans for a four-piece band with Ian Brown's bassist and elaborate video projections, at least. And an offer to collaborate with their old heroes Cocteau Twins. And even solo plans.
 
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{{boc|'''Mike''': Our next project will be radically different from what we've done before, but we don't want to talk about that right now. We wanted to do a series of albums with Music Has The Right To Children, Geogaddi and Campfire Headphase that you can look back on and see a common thread. I think if you look at these three albums together, you can understand that they form a complete set.}}
 
  
 
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== Highlights ==
 
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== External Links ==
 
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== References  ==
 
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