Boards Of Canada - Twoism

Music70/Warp Records: 1995/2002

I have difficulty thinking of Twoism as part of the official Boards Of Canada long-player lexicon, for no better reason than it initially wasn’t. After the rousing success of Music Has The Right To Children, it wasn't long befor legions of new fans with melted youthful hearts were digging for anything else from the Scottish duo. Savvy heads already knew of their initial EP on Skam, Hi Scores, but word soon spread of a treasure trove of older, ultra-rare material lurking in the shadows of obscurest realms. Some of these are so rare, their very existence is continuously called into question - considering a lack of bootlegs or credible internet uploads, not an unfounded notion. The web always finds a way of unearthing music, always.

For a brief time, Twoism was among these mythical artifacts. Story goes the early Boards recordings were limited to tapes circulated among family and friends, but Twoism received a slightly larger distribution via vinyl. Mind, this was still self-released on their Music70 print, with a mere one-hundred copies pressed, but at least there were confirmed physical records out there, exchanging collector’s hands for pounds of quid (that the saying, right? Help me out, Brits!). Well, these Boards Of Canada were having none of that – why should the trader’s market profit from something they themselves could make bank off? Thus, Twoism saw a proper re-issue on Warp Records, sending those who took out mortgages to own the original wax weeping into the English moors. Or not, those initial pressings undoubtedly still commanding ridiculous sums from the discerning collector. Still, how nice us plebs get to enjoy this music too.

Given the near-cultish fanbase Boards Of Canada developed, it’s no surprise this was a highly sought record. Fortunately, such digging efforts were rewarded with an album that captures the Boards spirit as capably as any of their other LPs. For sure it’s more simplistic compared to what came after, most of their beats the barest of hip-hop rhythms. Meanwhile, the melodies stick to basic, lengthy loops of layered synth and timbre, with very little songcraft exhibited beyond what’s established early in a track. Still, those synth tones… every bit as warm, fuzzy, charming, nostalgic, day-glowy, and other descriptors you’ve read countless times in a BoC review. I could probably eat up my entire self-imposed word-count rattling them all off.

A couple things differentiates Twoism from their later work though, most notably the tracks Iced Cooly and Basefree. Both harkens to IDM’s earlier years, the former a bouncy electro jaunt, the latter an abrasive drill-beat number that sounds unlike anything in the Boards’ official canon. Still finding their way, clearly the lads from Hexagon Sun are. Also, the sound quality of their productions is rougher here, but that’s expected of an early album.

That’s all I have to say about Twoism. It was an album deemed ‘must-have’ back when it was rare as unicorn shit, and thanks to the Warp reissue, everyone can have it. Yay!

Boards Of Canada - Trans Canada Highway (Original TC Review)

Warp Records: 2006

(2016 Update:
Another first-time review of a major act, another review with redundant information now that I've long since reviewed many more albums from said act. At least I didn't get too heavy into it with this EP, providing an obligatory (if flakey) backstory, with a thrown in theory to boot. It's a good theory, my thoughts on the Boards' popularity, but one that had already been floating around, namely that of 'hauntology'. A rather obscure term, Simon Reynolds really explored it in describing the aesthetic of acts like Boards Of Canada (among others like Burial and label Ghost Box). Not that I had any realization of that in here, a decade ago, but yeah, totally reiterating concepts with far more studies into them by people who get paid for such things.

Left Side Drive just might be my favorite Boards tune, though you wouldn't know from this review. Seems every time I hear it again, it draws me ever deeper into that warm bass and distant dub, losing my headspace in reflections of traversing British Columbian wilderness. It's like Silent Season distilled into five minutes of sonic bliss, and so worth repeated plays of this pleasant little EP. Hey, remember when we thought this might be the last thing Boards would ever release? Fun times!)


IN BRIEF: Traveling in Canada.

I’ve seen few fanbases grow as quickly, as widespread, and as fanatical as for the enigmatic group Boards Of Canada. Appearing seemingly out of nowhere when Warp released their album Music Has The Right To Children, they gave an ailing intelligent techno scene (or IDM, if you will) a much needed boost in the late 90s when many producers had either tried and failed at commercial success (‘electronica’) or plummeted into incomprehensible experimentation. BoC provided the antidote: interesting sonic experiments, but without abandoning digestible rhythms and melodies.

It was more than that though. BoC’s music contains an undeniable nostalgic tinge to it. Many have tried to explain how they do it but none have managed to come up with a concrete theory; which, along with a scarce back catalogue, has added to their mystique.

I won’t claim to have that answer either, but I will offer my own theory: Boards Of Canada create the music of memories. Not yours, or mine, or anyone’s in particular, but of memories itself; or rather, how we hear music in our own memories. Despite our best efforts, when music plays back in our minds it is never quite accurate, and clings at the edge of our consciousness, fading over time. BoC’s lo-fi production seems to replicate this remarkably well, and when warm, pleasing synth tones are used, childhood memories are instinctively thought of. With such universal appeal, its little wonder even indie rockers melt at hearing a Boards Of Canada melody.

Of course, BoC shouldn’t be restrained by single musical ideas, but this is where their main appeal lies. After delving into organic instrumentation on last year’s The Campfire Headphase, many of their fans were very happy to hear a return to the sound of Children on this release, Trans Canada Highway. But despite being less a single for Dayvan Cowboy (of which two versions bookend this) and more of a mini-album, there’s still very little new material that’ll satisfy their rabid fans.

For casual fans though, two tracks should interest them: Left Side Drive and Skyliner. Unlike Dayvan, which willfully makes use of orchestral arrangements and acoustic guitars along with various electronic trickery, these two are quite vintage in their production. Left Side Drive lets lazy, dubby rhythms stroll along while warm, hazy pads float in the background. And Skyliner makes a more immediate presence with quicker scattering rhythms and leading synths. While perhaps simple in their presentation, especially compared to Dayvan, both should satisfy if you crave BoC’s older style. The other two are merely ambient interludes, which are common in many of their albums. Pleasant enough, but hardly essential.

As for the remix of Dayvan, Odd Nosdam does the drone ambient thing, seemingly playing up the ‘memory’ aspect of BoC’s music with one of their own tracks. Between stretches of white noise interludes, bits of Dayvan crop up, then fades away before returning to droning sounds. An interesting listen but, like the other ambient parts of Trans Canada Highway, that is all.

Ultimately, this EP is a sparse, lonely listen, which makes sense given the title. As anyone that has driven the Trans Canada Highway can attest to, or any highway in lightly populated areas of Canada for that matter, it can be a lonesome experience (great scenery though). Having grown up in parts of the country where significant towns are often up to three hours apart, I’d travel long stretches of winding, single-lane roads snaking across mountain-sides and through forests, the only company being those in your car and the intermittent vehicle passing by. Trans Canada Highway, when listened to as a whole, uncannily replicates such a trip... or maybe that’s just that memory thing again. Still, for a Scottish duo, they are quite good at capturing aspects of Canadiana along with incredibly nostalgic music.

Written by Sykonee for TranceCritic.com, 2006. © All rights reserved.

Boards Of Canada - Tomorrow's Harvest

Warp Records: 2013

Probably the most Boards Of Canada sounding album that Boards Of Canada have released. “But wait,” you cry after flipping your TV dinner tray and knocking over a lamp with that flowery canopy and tassels hanging like a droopy hippie, “how can that be? Music Has The Right To Children is their best album for all eternity!” Hey, I ain’t taking that away, though I’m certain a number of folks figure The Campfire Headphase a better album than Musical Children. Hell, there’s probably a few odd sorts that rank Geogaddi’s ultra-cryptic nonsense concept as Most Essential Boards. Almost nowhere does Tomorrow’s Harvest enter this discussion, though its relative newness hasn’t afforded it much gestation time compared to most BoC.

Thing about the Big Three of Boards Of Canada’s discography is they each had their own, distinct sound. For sure there’s the BoC sonic markers you’ll hear in every one of their records (trip-hop beats, analog synth tones, ‘70s fuzz), but one can still instantly tell which album’s playing: Musical Children has the nostalgic playful innocence, Geogaddi the harsh experimentation, and Campfire Headphase the acoustic shoegaze pieces. Tomorrow’s Harvest has no such signifiers of instant identification; in fact, one could claim its lack of a recognizable theme is this album’s primary theme, but that’s rather stupid. Misters Sandison and Eoin most definitely had a theme in mind for this album, one that still paid homage to the ‘70s sounds they grew up listening to. For having relived the children’s documentaries and trips out to the countryside, Boards Of Canada felt time to grow up and explore the desolate futures so many sci-fi films of the era dealt with. Cold War babies didn’t have much hope for our present times, did they?

The start of Tomorrow’s Harvest certainly sells this premise, opener Gemini and third track White Cyclosa the sort of music a Berlin School composer might write for such a film. Lodged between them, Reach For The Dead brings in the Boards’ style of crackly beatcraft and warm synth timbre while adding wide-screen grandeur to their palette, a more cinematic approach to their vintage style. And that’s essentially the bulk of music you’ll find on Tomorrow’s Harvest, tunes less concerned with hauntology than presenting a narrative fitting its theme. There are a few scattered ambient doodles (Uritual, Telepath, Transmisiones Ferox, Collapse), and a couple ‘childhood recollection’ pieces poke their heads out (Nothing Is Real, Cold Earth). For the most part though, Tomorrow’s Harvest sounds like Boards Of Canada stripped down to their raw essence, their music as stark as the barren futurescape that encapsulates their would-be film.

Many who spent years dissecting their other albums were flustered with Tomorrow’s Harvest, unsure what to make of such a modest concept LP. The long gap between albums didn’t help matters, fans filled with much hype and thrill for BoC’s return. Yet it’s almost forgotten now, seldom talked up as folks keep referring back to older records. Guess some remain fixed in the past.

Boards Of Canada - In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country

Warp Records: 2000

Between the critical nostalgia-soaked darling Music Has The Right To Children and the patchy schizophrenic outing Geogaddi, Boards Of Canada released this unassuming EP titled In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country. Okay, using the word ‘unassuming’ with regards to anything Misters Eoin and Sandison did at that point in their career isn’t quite right – they couldn’t sneeze without legions of fans proclaiming it a new masterpiece. It doesn’t get mentioned as often as their LP efforts though, mostly due to the fact the Boards aren’t typically thought of as an EP act. There’s been a few singles from the albums, but short-form players containing exclusive material comes in small supply from the Scottish duo. A shame really, as I’ve found some of their best material is found in these concise collections of music.

For instance, Amo Bishop Roden is Boards at their best: dusty, warped synth pads playing a charming, warm melody, riding along simple downtempo rhythms. Okay, it’s also sort of Boards at their most predictable, but more often than not Amo Bishop Roden is the type of sound most identify with them and look forward to. Kid For Today offers the other side of vintage BoC, what with lazy, hazy trip-hop beats, mellow organ tones, and field recording ambience. Truthfully, they sound like leftovers from the Musical Children sessions, but didn’t quite fit the overall tone of that album. Praise to the B-sides industry!

Or the “We Got A New Sound We’d Like To Try Out, So Here’s A Sample Track With A Couple Older Left-Overs” industry, if you’re the cynical sort. Yeah, for as nice and classic Boards as the opening two tunes are, the titular cut is something else entirely, and given it’s the name of the EP, odds are high this is what BoC wanted our attention focused on. If anything, it hints at where they’d go next with Geogaddi, exploring an uneasy vibe with lyrics fed through a vocoder and disconcerting laughter of children. A promising look, though I’m not sure if many even suspected that was the track’s intent. Hell, maybe it wasn’t at all, but the Boards must have liked the results enough to indulge further for their following LP. Lastly, final track Zoetrope forgoes any suggestiveness of their ‘70s synth inspirations, a spritely bit of ambience that would find a comfortable home on the records of that era’s classicist-leaning composers.

And that’s about it for In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country. Considering its chronological placement within Boards Of Canada’s discography, it’s not surprising this EP goes overlooked most of the time, completely overtaken by the overbearing shadows Music Has The Right To Children and Geogaddi cast in that era. I honestly only gave it a purchase because Lord Discogs keeps recommending it, no matter what sort of downtempo IDM I may be browsing about for at the time. That and Autechre’s Amber. Shit, now I have to start an Autechre collection, don’t I?

Boards Of Canada - Geogaddi

Warp Records: 2002

Geogaddi came out about the time the Cult Of BoC was at its insufferable worst, ridiculous amounts of love and praise gushing in on any and all music scene message forums you’d happen to frequent. It wasn’t just the ravers slobbering over the Scottish duo either, but the indie kids who never gave ‘techno’ much pause were citing Music Has The Right To Children as the best electronic album ever. Okay, enjoy your stay here; there’s more than enough Boards to go around. For the love of God though, please cease the idolization and trumped-up mythology surrounding these guys - they just make charming music for the after-hours.

Whatever you thought about their PR and fanbase, you couldn’t fault the music, much of which remained quite exceptional for its time. Unfortunately, with all the garrulous hype surrounding them, some backlash against the Boards was inevitable. To take the mighty Boards Of Canada down a peg though, you’d need an album that proved these nostalgic-glazed chill-out Emperors were lacking in bell-bottomed accoutrements. Geogaddi was that album.

Already tasked with the impossibility of following upon Music Has The Right To Children, Sandison and Eoin tried going deeply conceptual with Geogaddi, offering tons of sonic Easter Eggs and numerological nonsense for the true believers to dig and discover with repeated play-throughs. For the rest of us, it’s just a rather dull record. For one thing, despite a track list detailing twenty-three cuts, less than half of those are fully-formed pieces of music, some of which are ridiculously tedious experimental loops. Gyroscope in particular is hopelessly annoying and inane with clunky percussion and muffled child dialog that probably has some cool secret that you’d only understand if you were a real fan of the Boards. Or how about the effects wankery of The Devil Is In The Details, barely a piece of music save the gentle echoing synth pulse underneath garble noises like an evil being of demonic origin contrasted with wisps of ethereal pads and, of course, children laughing. No, wait, how about Magic Window, literally one-minute forty-five seconds of silence, just to reach an album runtime of sixty-six minutes and six seconds (though my player reads 66:04, hah!). Gads, see how pretentious this comes off?

Boards Of Canada’s strength is their seemingly effortless approach to song craft – no matter the depth in execution, the final result is simple and class. Geogaddi, on the other hand, sounds like the Scottish duo pushed and strained themselves in creating cleverness for its own sake, forgetting to write decent music in the process. There’s a flat, sterility to so much of Geogaddi, it’s small wonder it remains their most divisive LP.

That said, it’s the Boards we’re dealing with, and a few mint numbers do find their way in. I don’t doubt some fans will snicker at my inability to decipher all the codes hidden within Geogaddi, but I listen to Boards Of Canada for fuzzy, dayglow chill times, not to solve puzzled bollocks.

Boards Of Canada - The Campfire Headphase

Warp Records: 2005

Also known as that Boards Of Canada album with all the guitars. Fuzzy guitars, acoustic guitars, distorted guitars, folksy guitars, and, most definitely, nostalgic guitars. It can't be a Boards album review without that word getting in, so may as well do it post-haste. It also was the Scottish duo's last LP for a significant amount of time, some wondering whether it would be their final one period. If it had, The Campfire Headcase - sorry, Headphase - would have been a rather limp conclusion to the Boards saga, almost an afterthought of an album where their genre indulgences sidetracked them from whatever future-classics could come hither. Tomorrow's Harvest saved us from that fate. Now, instead of treating this album like a disappointing denouement to an adored career, we can enjoy it based on its own merits, just like these Boards Of Canada undoubtedly wanted anyway.

And as a self-contained album, separate from artist narrative, how is The Campfire Headcase - dammit, PHase? Sure, it’s good – I mean, would you expect any less? Boards, if nothing else, are experts at crafting warm, charming music on the trip-hop tip. Whenever they get too cute with their concepts, over-indulge in numerological Easter eggs, or waste potentially great tunes with pointless doodles, that’s where our intrepid non-Canadian Canadas stumble. Just give us music, mang, songs that we can hazily drift along with.

For all the lasting impression the guitar work imparted on this album, The Campfire Headcase - arggh, PHASE - maybe a third of the tracks actually utilize the six-stringers. Not that I blame listeners remembering it as such, so front-loaded on here as they are. It also doesn’t hurt tracks like Chromakey Dreamcoat, Satelite Anthem Icarus, and Dayvan Cowboy (which was also tapped for single duty on Trans Canada Highway) worm their way into the noggin as only ‘Boards Of Canada goes shoegaze’ music can. The other half of this album is Boards being Boards as per usual. Detuned, crackly synths, gorgeous ambience, functional rhythms, and a total lack of quirky skits.

Wait, that’s something new! You mean to tell me The Campfase Headphire (*sigh*... I’ll dyslexia a cure this for...) doesn’t feature any weird-for-weird-sake bits of children dialog, clips of National Film Boards documentaries, or whatever else that made Music Has The Right To Children and Geogaddi the distinctive albums they were? There are still ambient interludes, but even they typically run lengthier compared to prior LPs’ doodles, most breaching well over the one-minute mark (I forgive A Moment Of Clarity for being under, since making it any longer wouldn’t make it a moment). And man, those last few tracks - Slow This Bird Down, Tears From The Compound Eye, and Farewell Fire - my heart bleeds, it does.

While I wouldn’t recommend The Campfire Headphase (yes!) as your diving off point with Boards Of Canada, it’s a worthy addition to your collection if Musical Children has tempted you for more. Although, I’m only preaching to the converted, aren’t I?

Boards Of Canada - Music Has The Right To Children

Warp Records: 1998/2004

What is it about Music Has The Right To Children that's allowed it to endure as a classic album within electronic music's long history? Is it the positive impact it had on the IDM market, rescuing that scene from ever-deepening navel gazing experimentation? Is it how it lured in a tonne of proto-hipster kids after Boards Of Canada were NME and Pitchfork Approved, one of the first electronic albums made so during the net-‘zine's early years? Might it be the perfect timing of this LP's release, capturing the attention of an ageing raving demographic that found itself wistfully longing for the innocence of their youth? Will this paragraph have at least one sentence that isn't in the form of a question?

The answer to all but the last of these is “yes”. In a broader sense, Music Has The Right To Children was one of the few electronic albums of the ‘90s that had wide appeal no matter your background, surprising many with its charming tone. Just take an impossibly geeky style of electronic music like ‘70s analog synth work, and pair it with an impossibly cool style of electronic music, in this case trip-hop. It’s such a simple idea, one wonders why no one thought of it before Boards Of Canada. Who could have guessed that the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Ninja Tune getting sexed up was something folks longed for.

Much has been said about the nostalgic nature of Musically Right-Handed Children, many theories out there why this album touches folks the way it does. The playful bounce of Roygbiv and quirky sampling of Aquarius certainly plays a part in recalling those days of childlike whimsy, yet as we age, a warped sense of cynicism creeps in too. The off-kilter “love”s in The Color Of The Fire, disconcerting synth tones of Sixtyten, or rhythmically-chopped vocals of Telephasic Workshop suggest the world we grew up in wasn’t so perfect after all.

Still, it’s all theory, and for all we know, Boards Of Canada just enjoy toying with different emotions in their music. Ultimately, what wormed its way into the minds and hearts of countless fans were simple, catchy moments. The aforementioned Aquarius is a perfect example, no one able to mention BoC and the word “orange” without saying it in the goofy way that it does in that track. This album’s filled with such quirks, often tucked away in brief sonic doodles throughout. I’d wager the duo’s at their best when they focus less on song craft and simply indulge themselves, but the few fully-formed tracks they do provide remains some of their most enduring work.

Music Has The Right To Children has one drawback though: those trip-hop rhythms. They sounded great in the late ‘90s, but over a decade of glitch rhythms since, I’m not sure newer audiences would dig them quite so much. Then again, the synths Boards Of Canada use sound older than time itself, and that’s never stopped folks from enjoying this album.