Hey I never doubted the existence of tapes, other tracks, etc.
BoC appear to have intense quality control. They don't like most of their
tracks getting out, the reason that seems to come up is they don't think
they're good enough, but who knows. See "XYZ" on the Peel Session - instead
of getting any new tracks we get three retreads of old tracks (and the
relatively new "Happy Cycling"). The Skam EP consists of one new track and
five from Maxima. The album consists about 50% of stuff from Maxima, the Skam
EP, Twoism, etc. Even Twoism had a bunch of tracks put onto Maxima. So while
I'd imagine they have a good hundred tracks, maybe more, that we haven't
heard it appears we aren't going to be given a lot of the old stuff at any
point if even the newer stuff isn't up to par. Personally I'd just like to
hear it, but I can understand where they're coming from. Even if Warp owns
their back catalog BoC still has to okay a release, don't they, which means
you won't hear it all. But you've never heard it all from Ae or AFX either.
Ae just doesn't advertise lots of music they don't want you hearing.
However -
"Hooper Bay" has got to be fake or recently released.
It just sort of slipped onto the EHX discography a couple months ago, nobody
ever mentioned it, I've heard no confirmation/report of it anywhere else
before or since - 200 copies is a pretty sizable run, you're telling me Skam,
Autechre, Warp, Matador, these people well involved with BoC, even they
didn't know? So where would the copies go? Friends/family. Okay. None of them
are on this mailing list? And yet they appreciate IDM nonetheless. This is a
12", not a tape. That requires significant costs, and a run of 200 would be
expensive (the cost, as people who put out records can tell you, isn't in the
number of copies but in the mastering/plating/set-up/etc. which is why under
500 costs about as much as 500). And it has twice as many copies as their 12"
that they sent to labels? Bizarre.
The moral of the story is no matter how obscure a 12" could be, somebody in
the know would know about it. Even the guy who runs EHX, isn't he a close
friend of the Boards? They never bothered to tell their official website guy
about a self-released 12"? They never told their labels to put it into their
bio/discog? "No, Twoism is our first record." They didn't try to promote it
anywhere? They just threw (presumably) $1000 into a print run and forgot
about it? Even being from a remote country and having that isolated,
hermetic, distrustful IDM temperment all the greats must have doesn't really
explain that away.
The story on Q-Chastic being ten copies for Aphex's friends is believable,
that would explain why nobody's ever really seen or heard it. But 200 copies
is a lot of friends, and somebody's bound to know.
Too weird.
But I'm a loony IDM conspiracy theorist, and this topic really is getting
old, so let's take the wonders of Internet communication and a shared love of
music elsewhere.
B.