 |
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
 |
|||||||||
|
|
Scottish duo and real-life brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin are Boards Of Canada, among the most revered and certainly most original sounding exponents of ambient techno in the world today. While some ambient electronica takes you to exotic, alien or idealised worlds with polished lushness and rich textures, Boards Of Canada's instrumentals are intentionally imperfect. The duo's unique take on psychedelia is to create a tantilising distance between you and the destination by passing one or more elements through lo-fidelity filters and generally degrading the sound. Like winemakers, they create tracks and then spend extended periods aging them. The result is striking to the ears. A bit scratchy, a bit blurred, often with a wobbling pitch that makes their tones sound slightly out of tune. Most importantly its emotionally complex and ambiguous, very much open to your own interpretations. Of the extraordinary child-like quality of Boards Of Canada's music Popmatters.com observed: "Their music is not an attempt to re-live or revive the golden years of toddler-esque innocence or teenage rebellion. Their project centers more on preservation, continuing to enjoy the wide-eyed wonderment of childhood. The emotional charge...is not so much exhilaration or ecstasy, but a hypnotic calm, the Zen-like trance of a ten-year old as he stares at wispy clouds passing overhead". Or at foreboding grey skies from a lonely bedroom window, as the case may be. The two brothers started making music together at a very young age, issuing many obscure cassette releases under other names in the 80's and early 90's. The earliest Boards Of Canada CD releases are the album Twoism (1995) and the e.p. Hi Scores (1997). Both of them are dissonant, fairly rough and incohesive but clearly the work of two musicians inhabiting their own sonic universe. These releases are a logical precursor to Music Has The Right Children, the band's first release on pioneering electronica imprint Warp Records which upon release sent massive ripples through the electronic underground. Tune-wise it's less tonal than later works but as an album it delivers the kind of cohesive statement that eluded them on previous releases. It's a distinctly uneasy listening experience. "An Eagle In Your Mind" has a snaking, disembodied synth progression that's plain eerie. The crunching percussive loops, varispeed effects and ricocheting vocal fragments of "Telephasic Workshop" and "Sixtyten" literally growl with menace. Light pokes through the darkness only occasionally, like the strange and lovely machine funk of "Aquarius" which is the closest early BOC ever gets to lounge music. The album's impact at the time of its release is undeniable; there was nothing else quite like it on the planet, even if now it sounds somewhat less impressive alongside the BOC releases that were to follow. The stunning e.p. A Beautiful Place Out In The Country is where Boards Of Canada's melodic writing and layering is given at least equal status with the beats. The result is breathtaking and some of the most profound music in all of ambient techno. "Kid For Today" is their brand of childlike innocence captured to perfection with a fractured click pattern carrying a shimmering, wind-swept, slightly pulsing synth line. All four tracks are as sadly beautiful, imperfect and nakedly human as any music, electronic or otherwise, all miniature masterpieces of mood, layered textures and bittersweet harmony. If you are yet to experience Boards Of Canada this is a wonderful place to begin. By the time the long-awaited Geogaddi appeared in 2002 the band's following amongst a broad cross-section of electronica and indie rock listeners had well and truly reached cult status. The obsessiveness of some fans was fed not just by the mystery of music itself but by the vacuum created around a pair of artists so reclusive that very little was known about them personally, their methods or their philosophies. Consequently the album met with hysterical reactions from some quarters of the music press. Much of this was positive but some critical, too, as if the band was some kind of myth that deserved debunking. The benefit of hindsight reveals Geogaddi for what it is; the duo's most mature full-length album up to that point and in many ways an improvement on Music Has The Right To Children. "Music Is Math" and "Sunshine Recorder" exemplify this evolution. The familiar lo-fi surrealism, de-tuned tones and looping beats now benefit from meatier and more detailed arrangements. The album traverses a more varied landscape overall and melodically is far richer than Children, as weird and fractured as those melodies often are. The band's sonic trademarks are still there, of course. The disembodied voices of children are scattered throughout, and the bright layered drones of "Gyroscope Z" are as good example as any of the duo's love for primitive toy-like keyboard sounds. This strange retro quality which pervades much of their work is often traced back to the Canadian Film Board nature doco soundtracks which so fascinated the pair as kids. Perfectly accurate, but there is possibly a debt here also to early Brian Eno circa Another Green World (1973) and Music For Films (1978). Not a duo ever known to be in a hurry, three years separates Geogaddi and the hotly debated Campfire Headphase. Into what is still a recognizable BOC framework the duo drops some totally new elements, namely live drums and a myraid of guitar sounds all played and re-sampled by the duo themselves. Its their warmest and happiest sounding release to date and - the protests of guitar-phobes and electronic purists notwithstanding - a great Boards Of Canada album. The lo-fi, soft focus textures remain and those child-like melodies still don't go quite where you expect them to on the first few listens. To simply retread the ground covered on previous albums would have been easy. With The Campfire Headphase Sandison and Eion stick to their guns by doing what they have always done: following their own muse and hoping an audience will do the same. |
