http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/interviews/b/boards-of-canada-05/
Mon:09-26-05
Interview: Boards of Canada
Story by Heiko Hoffmann
With their Warp albums Music Has the Right to Children and Geogaddi,
Boards of Canada have become one of the most well-loved and critically
revered contemporary artists without releasing singles, videos, or even
going on tour. At the same time their sound of electronic psychedelia
has been copied so often as to make the duo wonder what to do next. In
this interview, which took place at the Royal Museum in Edinburgh,
Scotland,ÊMike and Marcus Sandison speak for the first time about their
backgrounds, obsessive reactions to Geogaddi, and their upcoming new
album The Campfire Headphase.
Pitchfork: In the interviews you've given over the years and in the bios
that your record label sends out it's never been mentioned when and how
you got to know each other. So at what age did you guys meet?
Mike Sandison: Oh. Mmh, just very, very young, actually. We lived in the
same place near Inverness in Scotland, a very small coastal town in the
middle of nowhere. Our parents were in the same gang of friends.
Pitchfork: How old where you when you started making music?
Mike: We were about 6 or 7 years old when we started to learn
instruments and play together. We actually started to record our own
music when we were about 10. If your parents have tape recorders, pianos
and stuff like lying around in the house you are just going to play
around with them.
Pitchfork: Are you coming from musical families?
Mike: Yeah. And of course it's a big help when your parents play
instruments...[pauses]. Actually can I just stop the recorder there for
a second?
[Recorder is switched off. Mike asks Marcus if it's ok to talk about it.
Marcus says yes. Mike checks if the recorder is off and explains that
they are in fact brothers, but have concealed that as they didn't want
to provoke comparisons to Orbital,the electronic duo of brothers Phil
and Paul Hartnoll, when they started to release records in the mid-90s.
Recorder is switched on again.]
Marcus Eoin: Obviously, certain people know us as real people. We
haven't gone out of our way to conceal the fact we're brothers. It's not
that big of a deal. If people don't ask about it then we don't bring it
up. When we started releasing records we just wanted to avoid
comparisons to Orbital...
Mike: Or even the Osmonds or the Jacksons [laughs].
Marcus: I never thought about it but Ween are brothers as well, aren't they?
Mike: No, they are not.
Marcus: I thought they were. Are they not?
Mike: No, they just pretend that they are. [Laughs]
Marcus: That's fantastic! [Laughs]
Mike: See, some people go out of their way to do things like that, while
we are trying to avoid it.
Pitchfork: So who had to adopt a new family name for the sake of Boards
of Canada?
Mike: We are both Sandisons. And Eoin is actually Marcus' middle name.
So that's a pretty simple explanation.
Pitchfork: When did you live in Canada?
Mike: From 1979 to 1980. I was eight years old and Marcus was a bit
younger. Our father worked in construction. He helped to build the
Saddle Dome in Calgary. There was a lot of work at that time in Canada
so that's why we moved there. We moved around quite a lot and then
relocated to Scotland. We've been based around Edinburgh for the last 20
years, so this is home.
Pitchfork: Why did the educational TV films from the National Film Board
of Canada, that you named yourself after, have such a big impact on you
and your music if you'd only been exposed to them for a year?
Marcus: We saw them in both Canada and Scotland. The films were on
television in the UK for years. For a long time we weren't sure what
[the NFBC] would think about a band being named after them. Only
recently did we find out that they had used our music on some of their
films. So we took that as approval.
Mike: They have a newsletter and even ran an article on us a couple of
years ago. So that's a strange feedback loop.
Marcus: Back then television was a really big deal for us because we
were so bored. We weren't old enough to go to the cinema and we were in
a town where there was absolutely bugger all to do. So we just went out
and vandalized property. [Laughs] Or sneak in video nasties from the
local video store. Or got our friends together to make films. We had our
crappy early-80s bikes and went out with my dad's super-8 camera making
films.
Pitchfork: And you really started recording music at the age of 10?
Marcus: Yeah but I wouldn't describe it as Boards of Canada music at
that time.
Mike: Obviously we didn't have a multitrack recorder, but we had two
tape recoders. What you could do is record something on one tape
recorder, play it back across two feet of air and while it was playing
accompany it with something else on the guitar, the piano, the drums,
whatever. We would do this, swap the cassettes over and do it again and
again until the tapes started getting so distorted that you couldn't do
it any longer. So it was really crude old-school multitrack recording.
But it was a good way for us to learn how to compose our own stuff.
Pitchfork: Was it always just the two of you playing together?
Mike: Well, I went to high school before Marcus did, and I formed a band
there with friends.
Marcus: Initially we were in different bands in high school.
Mike: But when we came home [from school] we were recording music
together. At one point in the mid-80s Marcus was in a really trashy
heavy metal band and I wasn't into their music at all. So I invited him
to play with my band. We then started to play around with synths. We
were the only group at our high school to use synths.
Pitchfork: You only started sending demo tapes to record labels in the
mid-90s. Why did take you such a long time to approach a label to
release your music?
Mike: We just didn't think that we were good enough. We kept changing
what we were doing. The problem with us as a band is that we have a
schizophrenic approach to music, which still haunts us. We had a kind of
battle when we worked on this album [The Campfire Headphase]. A lot of
what we did for this record was really electronic stuff and a lot of
what we did was really guitar-y music. I mean much more guitar-y than
what ended up on the record. But this problem-- how to fuse these two
things-- always plagued us.
Marcus: For me, there's an era of music in the early 90s when people
started to combine electronic music with guitar music, forcing them to
come together, and I always hated this music.
Pitchfork: Do you mean bands like EMF or Jesus Jones?
Marcus: Exactly! I wasn't going to name names but, yes. For me it didn't
really fit together. It was really rubbish.
Mike: Because we've always listened to huge amounts of different music
we experiment with lots of things. So you play guitar one minute and
then something extremely electronic the next minute. But if you're gonna
be a band you can't really afford to do that. You have to stick with
something. Nobody's gonna want to listen to a record where there's an
electronic tune and, let's say, a banjo tune right after. You have to
stay with a flavor.
Marcus: Some of the tracks that we worked on are so extreme in one
direction that we just can't use them. They don't fit the BoC thing at
all. We can't release them under this project. We're already seeing from
the reactions to this record that some people love it and are really
happy that we've done something different. But there are some people
having a problem with the guitars. So if we'd really gone full-on with
that they would have just never believed that it's the same group. You
would never know that it was us.
Pitchfork: Don't you underestimate your audiences openness for change?
Mike: Maybe. In the late-80s the three bands that were a huge influence
on us were Front 242 to some extent, and-- to a large extent-- Nitzer
Ebb and the Cocteau Twins. And they don't actually fit in the same
category...
Marcus: ...but we would listen to them at the same time. Maybe it's a
slightly gothic thing. You can imagine that there was already a seed
planted there where that was going in two different directions. I
actually rate bands like Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson who are a
hybrid of electronic and guitar music. I think they are brilliant but
the kind of people who are into that kind of thing now are not as
broad-minded as maybe people were 20 years ago. Now there's a feeling
that if you are one of these kids wearing black eyeliner who's into
Marilyn Manson you will never be open-minded enough to listen to
electronic music. I think there's a narrowing of taste rather than an
opening up of taste.
Mike: Or maybe it just seems like that from our point of view here in
Scotland.
Marcus: We've actually been in touch with the Cocteau Twins. Simon
Raymonde of Cocteau Twins is a fan of our music. He's been trying for
about four years to persuade us do some work on his label Bella Union
but we are contractually not allowed to do that. Plus we don't even have
the time. But it's a shame because we are such huge fans of theirs.
Pitchfork: It seems that on one hand you're afraid to alienate your
audience but on the other you try to avoid being pigeonholed.
Mike: Yeah. The new record is probably the slowest record that we've
done. And it's got guitars on it as well. This is something that we've
done slightly deliberately. We knew that we had to break away from this
thing. It bothered us that if you go into the big stores our stuff is
always sitting in the dance music section. We never made a dance record
in our entire career but our stuff stilll gets thrown in there. Our
drive with this record is to try and get us out of the dance section and
into the main section with all the others bands, like ABBA and A-Ha.
We're just a band. Not an IDM band, not an electronic band, and not a
dance band.
Pitchfork: But this will not happen. It's a losing battle.
Mike Eoin: Maybe not now, but in five or 10 years-- if shops are still
selling CDs. [Laughs]
Pitchfork: One reason why you feel quite a lot of pressure, surely is
the fact that it takes you such a long time to put a record out. Your
last album, Geogaddi, was released three and a half years ago.
Mike: We've really experienced high expectation regarding the new
record, partly because it took such a long time. And we think this works
against us as well.
Pitchfork: So what took you so long? When Geogaddi came out you were
saying that the new album was already half finished.
Mike: We both relocated and built new studios. That took us about a
year. Then I became a father last year and that was another year lost.
Personal things happen in everyone's lives and you find that it's very
difficult to get on with work. That was part of the problem.
But it's correct that we had done a lot of work on this record by the
time Geogaddi came out. We have this system of working where we never
work in a linear fashion. We work parallel on lots and lots of music at
once.
Marcus: Instead of starting on one song and working on it until its
finished we have hundreds of songs on the go at one time and depending
on our mood we try working on different ones. We both have pretty short
attention spans.
Mike: We always have enough material for several other albums but what
tends to happen is that our tastes move on and we kind of get fed up
with what we're doing. We actually have a huge amount of music that
people will probably never get to hear.
Marcus: It's just another manifestation of this schizophrenic problem,
trying to do too many things at once.
Mike: We also started working on an acoustic version of Music Has the
Right to Children years ago and it still exists.
Marcus: The reason why we haven't put something like this out is that it
can seem like a retread of something you've already done.
Pitchfork: Is The Campfire Headphase a direct reaction for you on Geogaddi?
Mike: Yes, to some extent I think it is. The whole mood of this record
is really uplifting and happy generally. It's really a case of saying:
All the mystery and magic and all this kind of nonsense that built up
around the last record got to a point where it was just silly. People
were understanding things from our music that we didn't put in there and
were saying there was an evil underrcurrent to everything. And we are
not like that at all. It was a theme that we wanted to persue on that
record but people have understood from that that we always put secret,
dark, sinister, and satanic things in our music. And that became more
important than the music itself.
Geogaddi was also the most abstract and surreal record we've done. A lot
of the tracks don't really have much structure. Some songs are more
soundscapes. With the new record we wanted to simplify the whole thing,
[to make it] just about music.
Marcus: We realized that there are some people who would listen to our
records but instead of listening to the music they would start looking
for some hidden things immediately.
Mike: People will look for secret things now in this record even if
there aren't any.
Pitchfork: More than any of your records before this one reminds me most
of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless.
Mike: Well, that's a great compliment. Of course we are massive fans of
My Bloody Valentine. Loveless is probably one of my top five favorite
albums of all time. I think that, even if we don't sound like them,
there's a connection in terms of the approach to the music. The idea of
making music where it's really difficult to figure out which instruments
you are listening to but you just don't care. At the same time we also
tried to get away from the notion that our music is entirely contained
within electronic boxes. It never has been and we are not big fans of
laptop music. So this time we really wanted to try and break out. We're
not trying to be an IDM band and we're not trying to be a Warp band or
anything.
Pitchfork: But Warp Records have changed a lot too, if you think about
bands like Max•mo Park, Broadcast etc.
Marcus: Definately. And I think it would have been harder for us to
release a record with guitar sounds if that hadn't been the case.
Heiko Hoffmann is the editor of the Berlin-based Groove magazine and the
owner of Mobilé Records. He can be reached at heiko@groove.de.
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