Old Tunes Vol. 1, also known as A Few Old Tunes, is one of two known cassette tape compilations produced by Boards of Canada in 1996. Along with its counterpart Old Tunes Vol. 2, it was self-released under Boards of Canada's Music70 label and distributed to the band's friends and family. Notable recipients of the tapes include Sean Booth of Autechre, and Mike Paradinas. The tapes came to wider attention in the early 2000s when they leaked onto peer-to-peer file-sharing networks such as Soulseek, and are now widely available on sites like YouTube.
A Few Old Tunes seems to be sourced from a cassette tape containing a (presumably) hand-selected set of pre-BoC Maxima tracks. The leaking of these tracks to p2p networks (Soulseek, originally) provided much drama on WATMM.
Commonly referred to as A Few Old Tunes, due to its label; however, according to the Twoism forum user dealer, who posted new photos of the cassette and liner notes, it is also the true Old Tunes Vol. 1 (and not the tape previously assumed to be OTV1). But, on the other hand, the WATMM forum user phaelam posted new scans from a different angle which depict A Few Old Tunes as the cover and the cassette label. This leads to believe Boards of Canada used two different labelings for the very same cassette. See the two conflicting scans below.
According to KToiBalToi: "the girl on the cover of "a few old tunes" is Louise Campbell, the younger sister of (Peter) Iain Campbell who has worked with them on other art projects. I think it was taken as a still from an old family video."[1]
Frazer Clarke played on
Happy Cycling
Thanks Music70 gang
esp. Simon Yuill, Iain,
Chris Horne
Right of track listing:
All
live drums by Mike
Thanks Jimbo
Mostly recorded between
1991-1995. Everything
by Mike+Marcus except:
'Trapped' contains sample of Colonol Abrams
'Devil" contains sample of Dirt Devil commercial
'Blockbusters' contains sample of 'Blockbusters'
'The Way You Show' contains sample of Kool + The Gang