courtesy of the BoC yahoo group...
IN AN NME EXCLUSIVE, THE MOST MYSTERIOUS AND REVERED MEN IN ELECTRONICA GIVE
THEIR FIRST EVER INTERVIEW
TEXT: JOHN MULVEY
From the Pentland Hills, just south of Edinburgh, it's possible to examine
the world at a different angle. Nature becomes reduced to a pattern of
hexagons. Melodies sound better in reverse. Bonfires make for better nights
out than clubs. And the colour of the universe is, unequivocally, turquoise.
This is where Boards Of Canada, Britain's most exceptional and reclusive
electronica group, see things from. Or, at least, how they may see things.
In comparison, the Aphex Twin is an open book, as straightforward in art and
life as Fran Healy. A trawl of the internet for facts about the Boards duo
of Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin turns up a proliferation of witchy
rumours but precious few hard facts. They record in a disused nuclear
bunker, it's suggested. They belong to some defiantly obscure
art-collective-cum-cult named Turquoise Hexagon Sun. They fill their music
with backwards messages, alternately sinister and playful, that range from
invocations to a "horned god" (one old side project was named Hell
Interface) to samples of ELO's Jeff Lynne.
In the Boards of Canada section of the Warp Records website, alongside cover
images and a few scant details about release dates, is a link to a Guardian
news story which offers conclusive proof the average colour of the universe
is "A greenish hue halfway between aquamarine and turquoise" when all
visible light is mixed together.
All very intriguing, of course. But when BOC have made one of the most
anxiously anticipated albums in years, hardly satisfying. To date, Sandison
and Eoin have made a tremendous amount of music, most of which has neither
ever been released or else is long unavailable; their 1996 debut EP for the
Skam label, "Twoism", is currently available for a tidy ?710 on eBay. For
most people, their reputation rests on 'Music Has The Right To Children',
the 1998 album that mixed spectral, quasi-ambient melodies and dulled
hip-hop beats with the constant chatter of infants, hovering tantalisingly
beyond comprehension. Deceptively simplistic, there was something about the
way the melodies twisted backwards and forwards around each other, about the
tangibly creepy atmosphere that pervaded it, that made for an extraordinary
debut.
By the time 'In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country' an uncommonly
beautiful EP, was released at the end of 2000, the band enjoyed a near-holy
status among electronica fans - not to mention artists, plenty of whom had
diligently adapted BOC's spooked, rustic kindergarten vibes for themselves.
And when the long-promised second album, 'Geogaddi', unexpectedly appeared
on release schedules a month ago, the grassroots hype became phenomenal.
Knowing that part of the band's allure is their inaccessibility, Warp
embarked on a campaign to make hearing 'Geogaddi' as difficult as possible.
Virtually no new music made it onto the internet: download apparently new
tracks from Audiogalaxy and you're as likely to discover an ambient fake,
four minutes of looped speech samples or an old Brian Eno tune. The track
titles, meanwhile, could only be located on HMV's Japanese site.
Eventually, 'Geogaddi' was premiered in six churches around the world - in
London, New York, Edinburgh, Tokyo, Berlin and Paris. Slides of children
playing, of sunsets where the sky is bent into a hexagon, were projected
above the altars. Small turquoise hexagons took the place of hymn books.
And then there was the album: 66 minutes and six seconds of music that is
both soothing and disorienting, lushly beautiful yet creaky and unnerving.
One track, 'Opening The Mouth', sounds like a heavy-breathing call from a
banshee. Another, the truly horrible 'The Devil Is In The Details',
alternates between the instructions on a relaxation tape and a desperately
crying child. There are ghostly organs and distant tablas, warnings of
volcanic explosions, an ecstatic vocal about "1969 in the sunshine" and an
overall feeling that this heady, saturated music is how My Bloody Valentine
might've sounded had they released anything after 1991's 'Loveless'.
Honestly, it's that good.
"We take that as a real compliment," accepts Sandison. "We love the sound of
music that seems to be barely under control. We love music that's out of
tune in a beautiful way, or dissonant, or damaged. We tried to make the
record work as a giddy, swirling soundtrack. It's okay to be imperfect - in
fact the imperfections are where the magic is. To us, perfect music sounds
sterile and dead. The tunes we write are imperfect, the sounds are
imperfect, even the artwork. I can't listen to perfect music, it bores me.
We actually put a lot of effort into making things rough and difficult and
noisy, even more so on this than on the last album. 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."
Early February 2002, and boards Of Canada have consented to a rare interview
with NME, on the understanding it runs after the album's release. To
preserve their privacy, it's to be conducted by email, but the resulting
answers still shed a little light on the world of Sandison and Eoin, without
ever completely dismantling their mystique.
To begin, their name derives from the National Film Board Of Canada, whose
nature documentaries enraptured the Scottish-born pair when they spent some
time living in Calgary as children. "My parents worked in the construction
industry out there," writes Sandison. "My memory of Calgary is a picture of
boxy 1970s office blocks dumped in the middle of nowhere against a permanent
sunset."
They started making tapes around 1982 or '83, when they were still children.
At their Hexagon Sun studio, there's an archive of 20 years of music. "We're
a bit anal about this," admits Eoin, "and I guess one year we might hunt
through it all and release some of it. Though we've actually already got the
next album half-finished, which will surprise some people to hear. There's a
lot of music."
Though the paucity of their released might suggest otherwise, Sandison and
Eoin are anything but lazy. "A typical day for us," writes Eoin, "is
something like 15 hours thumping the shit out of drums and synthesizers and
samplers, with frequent breaks for coffee or a beer." Expectations and
pressures from the outside world hardly make an impact, either.
"We're too busy to give a shit," reckons Sandison. "Either working in our
studio or being out in the fresh air with our friends somewhere. We put
pressure on ourselves more than anything. Marcus and myself are pretty
ruthless to one another, musically. That's the toughest criticism we get,
which is another reason the album took a long time."
Why is it so much better to live in the country rather than the city?
Mike: "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 where we live, or
being squashed in a London tube with some suit's elbow in my face, it's an
easy choice to make."
What's the significance of hexagons to you?
Marcus: "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."
The turquoise hexagon sun idea, the ring of people on the 'Geogaddi' cover,
and that slightly eerie bucolic feel there is in a lot of your music,
suggests something cultish, vaguely pagan.
Mike: "That's 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. We're
interested in symbols. I don't know, we never just make a pleasant tune and
leave it at that, it would be pointless. 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."
What's the fascination with children's voices? Is it to do with a nostalgia
for childhood?
Mike: "It's 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 that 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."
You've talked in the past about subliminal messages, hidden ideas, bombs
planted in your tunes. What's the fascination, and what form do these take?
Marcus: "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? '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."
One thing Boards Of Canada are emphatic about, for all the talk of bonfires
and rural retreats, is that they're not hippies. We ask if they're a
psychedelic band, and Marcus replies: "If you mean psychedelic in a
scientific way, then, yeah, that's probably fair. But if you mean it in a
lifestyle way, you know, hippy-large floppy hat, patchouli oil and colourful
trousers way, then nothing could be further from who we are."
Further from what, though? Tempt BOC into the open for a few moments and
still, you can only make out the faintest of outlines. And ask them,
finally, how important mystery and a lack of information is to their music,
and they'll prove it by sidestepping the question. "We just try to keep
ourselves to ourselves," concludes Marcus Eoin. "The music is what is
important." Of course.
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