from the promosheet
BOARDS OF CANADA
A good knowledge of North American TV shows of the late seventies helps
in an understanding of the ideas and sounds of Boards of Canada. As
children, Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin taught themselves to play
various musical instruments whilst soaking up the American cathode-tube
culture of the likes of 'The Six million Dollar Man' and 'Sesame
Street', as well as the bleak vision of movies like 'The Andromeda
Strain', 'Logan's Run' and 'Silent Running'. The duo was also picking up
influences from the more synthetic exponents of new-wave pop of the
time, in particular Devote and The Human League. For a few years Mike
focused on creating a band, to keep himself anchored whilst his family
relocated several times between northern Scotland, London in England and
Alberta in Canada. By the age of ten, now based back in Scotland, Mike
was making his own home recordings on old worn-out BASF cassettes.
The sci-fi paranoia and flawed TV soundtracks of that era were a big
influence on the duo, as were the early arcade videogames of the time.
At the beginning of the 1980's Mike and Marcus had begun writing tracks
that imitated the warbling, damaged sounding music found on the
soundtracks of 16mm educational documentaries made by the National Film
Board of Canada, and they later named their band as a nod to this early
influence.
The band spent the early eighties near the beaches of north-east
Scotland making crude multi-track recordings with friends, using
borrowed tape machines, analogue synths and live drums. Around 1981 they
had begun producing home-made movies on Super-8 cine film, and were
creating the films' soundtracks by themselves. By 1984, aged thirteen,
Mike was already visiting a local recording studio and making rough
demos. Mike and Marcus were by now producing more structured songs with
any instruments they could lay their hands on, as well as completely
abstract tape collages of found sounds from radio and TV.
In the mid-eighties, now based near Edinburgh in Scotland, Mike
recruited a few friends to form the first of several incarnations of a
'proper' band. Marcus Eoin was drafted in, initially as a bass player,
but he soon emerged as co-writer and co-conspirator for what the band
was later to become. At this point the band had a fairly traditional
live set-up; guitars, bass, keyboards, drummer and occasional vocals,
but the emphasis was on minimal, atonal electronic songs, a sound that
easily stood out amongst the abundance of traditional rock and
hair-metal bands the audiences in their local area were used to. The
line-up of the group changed frequently, and Marcus was later quoted as
saying that they had gone through at least fourteen other musicians
during this period, a statistic Mark E. Smith would be proud of.
During the late 1980's whilst working on a series of film and
photographic projects, the group decided to create a studio of their
own. Unrewarding day-jobs funded the purchase of audio gear and a
variety of exotic acoustic musical instruments, and with the acquisition
of samplers the band began producing do-it-yourself garage demos on
their own label 'Muis70' which they distributed mainly amongst friends.
Soon the band was producing cassette EP's and even entire albums of demo
material, some of which have since gone on to become legendary
collectors' items. It was during this period that the name 'Boards of
Canada', initially an EP project title, became the name of the band.
Around 1990 Mike and Marcus, frustrated by the traditional line-up and
the lack of commitment of other band members, started to mould the
band's performances into something altogether more bizarre. Every summer
Mike and Marcus collaborated with friends under the name 'Hexagon Sun'
to throw late-night outdoor parties in the countryside near their studio
in Scotland, where bonfires were accompanied by electronic music,
processed television themes, films, projections and reversed speech
tapes to create an exciting, if slightly threatening, atmosphere. These
nights, which the band still occasionally organise to this day, became
known as 'Redmoon' nights after an early event which was dramatically
backdropped by a blood-red full moon.
In the summer of 1995 Boards of Canada recorded and self-financed a
vinyl-only limited-edition album called 'Twoism'. It was essentially a
well-produced demo, and the intention was to mail it out to record
companies and artists that the group were listening to at that point.
The album was a breath of fresh air to those who had grown tired of the
frantic and polished sci-fi studio acrobatics of jungle and drum&bass
which were the predominant trends in electronic music of the time.
'Twoism' was a collection of spacious, gnarled and glacial tones and
dissonant, melancholy melodies over sparse hip-hop beats, but with a
curiously deliberate 'broken-ness' to the production. Every melody had
been created to wobble and flutter slightly, like damaged music from an
old worn-out cassette. In an era of clean, digital music, and with
compact discs having largely replaced vinyl as the primary format for
commercial music, this nostalgic, imperfect sound was to earn Boards of
Canada huge respect as innovators in subsequent years.
At the beginning of 1996 a copy of 'Twoism' arrived at the headquarters
of Skam Records in Manchester, England, and within a day of hearing it,
Autechre's Sean Booth had contacted Boards of Canada. Mike and Marcus
recorded the 'Hi Scores' EP for Skam and it was released later that
year. A string of live dates followed, notably including an appearance
at the 1997 Phoenix Festival, where BOC brought their anachronistic
sounds and Super-8 visuals to play alongside various luminaries of the
electronic music scene.
In February 1998, amid much speculation, the announcement came that
Boards of Canada had signed to Warp Records, and after a few remixes and
single appearances, the band completed the album 'Music Has the Right to
Children' which was jointly released between Warp Records and Skam
Records in April 1998.
'Music Has the Right to Children' combined beautiful sparse melodies
with off-pitch analogue synths and moments of unsettling fragmented
speech, all produced with the band's trademark 'damaged' sound. The
record closes with the very wry anti-censorship message 'One Very
Important Thought', which pastiches the messages usually found at the
end of 1980's porno videos: a very 'BOC' moment.
'Music Has the Right to Children' received rave reviews in the
international music press, and after landing a licensing deal with
Matador Records in the USA it went on to become one of the most highly
acclaimed records of 1998 and received multiple end-of-year awards.
"Album of the Issue" - Jockey Slut, April/May 1998, "Album of the Month"
- Wax magazine, May 1998. "No.16" - NME Albums of the Year 198, "No.3" -
Jockey Slut Albums of the Year 1998, "No.5" - The Wire Albums of the
Year 1998, "No.8" - DJ Magazine Albums of the Year 1998, "No.19" - Muzik
Albums of the Year 1998.
Boards of Canada recorded an exclusive session for the John Peel Show on
the UK's Radio 1 in June 1998, and performed live on the show during the
recording of the session. Peel described it on air as an "excellent
session." Warp later released the session as a single.
'Music Has the Right to Children' returned to the UK Independent Chart
top 20 in February 1999, and after staying around for three weeks it
peaked at number 7. Simultaneously the Peel Session single hung around
the Top 10 of the Independent Singles Chart for several weeks. Boards of
Canada soon found themselves in demand for remix work and obliged with a
handful of mixes for various artists, including the hugely influential
Meat Beat Manifesto.
In May 1999 NME included Boards of Canada in its "Top Ten Nu-Psychedelic
Bands," alongside Mercury Rev & The Beta Band. In the same issue NME
ranked Boards of Canada's debut album 'Music Has the Right to Children'
in its "Top 25 Psychedelic Records of All Time".
From 1999 onward various tracks from the BOC back-catalogue were being
licensed for compilation albums, TV synchronisation and film soundtracks
all over the world. In the summer of 1999 Boards of Canada commenced
work on their second full-length album for Warp Records. Meanwhile they
contributed two exclusive tracks to Warp's 10th birthday celebration
albums which were released later that year.
In November 2000, after a few more live dates in the UK, the band
released a four-track EP called 'In a Beautiful Place Out in the
Country'. It was a deceptively optimistic title for a collection of
beautifully sad, melancholy tunes, especially as closer inspection
revealed references in the artwork and titles to the 1993 killings by
FBI agents of David Koresh's Branch Davidian cult at Waco in Texas
In april 2001 BOC headlined at All Tomorrow's Parties, a festival on the
south coast of England with an esoteric line-up including Lambchop,
Television, Yo La Tengo, Tortoise, Broadcast, Sun Ra Arkestra, and many
others.
In February 2002 Boards of Canada released 'Geogaddi', the long-awaited
follow-up to 'Music Has the Right to Children'. Described as a darker
partner to the previous album, with its swirling psychedelic melodies
and layers of dense ephemeral detail, it managed to be both beautiful
and disturbing. 'Geogaddi' immediately entered the Top 20 Album Chart
and stayed there for several weeks. In interviews, Mike and Marcus
revealed that the album had included many so-called 'easter eggs', and
that some of the music had been developed using number theory and
equations such as the Fibonacci Ratio. This led to some of the band's
fans setting up entire websites devoted to decryption of the
'back-masking' and other hidden details on the record. Ultimately, BOC's
true intentions were written there clearly all along; in typical
sardonic style they had even included a track on the album entitled 'The
Devil is in the Details', as a kind of knowing wink to the astute listener.
In September 2002 Boards of Canada produced a lush remix of US artist
Boom Bip's track 'Last Walk around Mirror Lake' for a single taken from
his 'Seed to Sun' LP, and in February 2004 BOC created a giddy
reworking of the song 'Dead Dogs Two' by US band cLOUDDEAD from Oakland.
The BOC version brought in the whole gamut of retro psychedelic elements
including reversed guitars, flutes, sitars and strings, and culminated
in a wigged-out Beatles-esque climax reminiscent of 'A Day In The Life'.
In the summer of 2004 Mike became a father. His daughter was born during
the writing sessions of the band's forthcoming third studio album for Warp.
At the end of 2004 US artist Beck asked Boards of Canada to remix a song
from his upcoming album 'Guero'. BOC took the vocal lines of his
beautifully wistful track 'Broken Drum' and created a whole new melody
around them, with an epic, heavily layered crescendo. In an interview
with Clash magazine in the spring of 2005, Beck described the remix as
"my favourite remix I've ever had done, they brought out something that
was there but then they just added a whole new dimension. I guess it's
quite an emotional song and they brought out something bittersweet in it
that was kinda hippyish, but it doesn't maim you with saccharin. It
kinda gets you right in the chest."
In summer 2005 Boards of Canada completed work on their third album for
Warp Records. 'The Campfire Headphase' is set for worldwide release in
October 2005.
Biographical details by PIC, S. Goderich & A. Wilson, summer 2005.
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