Boards of Canada - Astral pieces from Scotland

Among the large squadron of disciples of the German electronic school of Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, a place of real distinction is earned by Scotland's Boards Of Canada, standard-bearers, alongside Autechre and Aphex Twin, of the “synthetic” revival championed by Warp Records. The evolution of the band's line-up is a curious one: born as a commune of artists and musicians in Scotland in the mid-eighties, it progressively whittled down to a trio, and finally a duo; the survivors of this “diaspora” are two electronic musicians, Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin. More drawn to the allure of old ephemera than to futurism, Boards Of Canada take their inspiration (even their name) from old audiovisual documentaries about Canada, those Super 8 films accompanied by synthesizer soundtracks. Starting from these premises, their path stretches out over the years until it embraces the most advanced outposts of today's electronic music.

Their early output, recorded almost entirely at home, is collected on a series of cassettes cut between 1987 and 1993. The Scottish instrumentalists then, alongside their work as remixers, devoted themselves to producing a long string of assorted EPs and mini-CDs: Catalogue 3, Acid Memories, Closes Volume 1 (this time with no fewer than seventeen short compositions) and Play By Numbers, bolstered by the long suite “Infinite Lines Of Colourful Sevens”. Across these works, the band's goal gradually comes into focus: to establish a new “ambient” and “relaxed” standard for electronic music, through evocative mini-symphonies that combine simple, minimal melodies with elaborate rhythmic patterns.

A style further refined on the 1994 EP Hooper Bay and even more so across the twenty ambient pieces of Boc Maxima (1995), crowned by the poignant “Everything You Do Is A Balloon”. Increasingly well-regarded on the British underground club circuit, the pair nonetheless had to wait until 1996 to release (vinyl only, limited to 100 copies) the EP Twoism, featuring eight self-produced tracks (the record would later be reissued by Warp in 2002). Meanwhile, the band's growing reputation in avant-garde electronic circles saw them supporting Autechre and Panasonic (today Pan Sonic) on their respective tours in the summer of '96. The symbolic end of their apprenticeship came with Hi Scores, an anthology of the Scottish outfit's early work, released by Skam Records.

Their live activity intensified, and their performances took on the air of multimedia events, built in part around self-produced video projections. Boards of Canada remixed Autechre and played alongside them at the 1997 Phoenix Festival. It was the prelude to their Warp debut, which arrived the following year with the album Music Has The Right To Children: 71 minutes of top-class digital electronica, poised between slow-burning atmospheres and dreamlike melodies, galactic hisses and ceaseless rhythmic invention.

Their debt to Autechre's ambient-techno is plain to see, but Boards Of Canada show a distinctive bent for irregular rhythmic patterns, making heavy use of midtempo hip-hop beats, psychedelic percussion and mechanical noise. Less minimalist and more “muffled” than their labelmates, the Scottish duo manage to humanise their sonic textures, infusing them with warm pulses, as in the “intelligent dance” of “Aquarius”, which veers toward a surreal funk. The tracks flow with remarkable fluidity, to the point that it's hard to tell where one ends and the next begins. The delicate spatial score of “An Eagle in Your Mind” teems with drones and syncopated beats. Hypnotic vibrations punctuate the galactic excursion of “Roygbiv”, while the mood grows ever hazier and more ethereal on the slow pieces “Turquoise Hexagon Sun” and “Happy Cycling”.

The effect is a state of cosmic relaxation bordering on trance. With Music Has The Right To Children, Boards Of Canada coin a compelling new model for ambient music, scattered here and there with jungle and psychedelic quirks.

The EP In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country (2000) gathers four new excursions into their electronic universe. The settings are notably serene and bucolic, and the tracks unfold along sonic coordinates only slightly less abstract and dilated than those that mark the work of America's Labradford. The title track is the most bizarre episode, a close encounter between children's laughter and an alien voice run through a vocoder.

The cinematic, visionary quality of Boards of Canada's music emerges even more strongly on the monumental Geogaddi (2002), which to this day stands as their crowning achievement: 23 tracks, 23 electronic alchemies waiting to be decoded. A marvellous balance of melodic skill and avant-garde experimentation, the record is an exercise in inner geophysics, a sonic journey to hypothetical remote planets that, as in the best tradition of kosmische musik, turns into an entirely inward path, laced with clearly psychedelic touches. Abstract electronica, then, but also “humanised” through the extensive use of filtered voices, deliberate discord and an overall analogue timbre. Musically, the sheer number of styles absorbed or “quoted”, even in passing, is countless: from ambient to new age, from glitch to hip-hop, from lounge to psychedelia. The tracks are almost all short and disconnected from one another, yet ideally bound together by a subtle sonic cartilage. Lo-fi samples and vaguely sixties psychedelic keyboards combine with decidedly cutting-edge electronic instrumentation. The impression is of living through one long dream, suspended amid constant sonic fluctuations and vibrations. Yet, despite the sweet, relaxed atmosphere on the surface, an undercurrent of unease creeps through, amid suspended notes, reversed little voices, background choirs and tribal rhythms.

Ethereal textures pervade “Alpha and Omega”, embellished with Eastern-tinged percussion and an exotic flute, and “Dawn Chorus”, a kind of invocation of the rising sun built on the interlocking of a sinister melody and vocal samples with sounds – this time “genuine” ones – of percussion. The surreal sampling in “Sunshine Recorder” (a child exclaiming: “A beautiful place”) is unsettled by an insinuating melody that leads into a pressing beat. An “algebraic” poetics inspires pieces like “Music is Math” (almost a post-modern anthem for an internet generation on the verge of information-overload collapse, with Eastern spices, drones, distortions, syncopated beats and psychedelic melodic touches) as well as “A Is To B As B Is To C” and “The Smallest Weird Number”. The romantic, spacey wink of “Julie and Candy”, with its vocal interplay and its faint melody just barely “soiled” by some distortion, is the flip side of the sensual softness of “1969”, its vocoder echoing Air in a less retro, more psychedelic guise. But there's also the risk of being hypnotised amid the fluctuations of “Gyroscope”, or of being left spellbound listening to the narrating voice of Leslie Nielsen (!) in educational documentaries (“Dandelion”), or of dozing off in front of some imaginary screen broadcasting footage about extraterrestrials (“The Beach at Redpoint”). And, to close out the enigma of Geogaddi, the final track, “Magic Window”: 106 seconds of pure, uncontaminated silence.

So end the 66 minutes and 6 seconds (a detail that is probably no accident, given the group's obsession with numbers…) of an album that leaves the listener gazing into the future, yet with a creeping melancholy in their heart, a close cousin of nostalgia. Absorbing the lessons of masters past (Kraftwerk above all) and present (Orb, Autechre, Aphex Twin), Boards Of Canada confirm themselves among the most inspired exponents of that electronic new wave so skilfully steered from the offices of Warp Records.

In 2005, however, The Campfire Headphase disappointed expectations. The novelty lay in extensive use of live instrumentation, in this case guitar. And it wasn't a welcome surprise. Does raw, unadorned guitar really serve the building of atmospheres? Is this really the only path for electronica meant for “classic” listening? And yet Sandison and Eoin, luckily for them and for us, have class to spare. So even the less noble material of a song like “Hey Saturday Sun”, or the bleep-single “Dayvan Cowboy”, still manages to retain some of the suspended charm of the old Boards Of Canada.

When things click into place, as on "'84 Pontiac Dream" or "Oscar See Through Red Eye" (probably the best track here), it's because we're in the territory of a mannered rehash of the elements that make up the duo's uniquely recognizable sound: backwards tape, oblique melodies, sustained background notes stretched out for ages. "Chromakey Dreamcoat", though pure formula, still manages to soothe and unsettle at once: guitar loops, ambient sounds and little birds lost in the mix. The bed of synths isn't enough, however, to make "Satellite Anthem Icarus" a "major" track. Even the trademark little interludes of just over a minute feel less effective this time. Another glaring, unjustified absence is that of the evocative rhythmic inventions that used to seduce and capture the listener with the same force as their unusual, far-off melodies. Confirmation that something isn't quite right comes with the closing "Farewell Fire", over eight minutes of ambient sound at an extremely low volume that slowly fades into silence.

Boards Of Canada's awakening is like a cover depicting a blurred city on the horizon at dawn. Pastel colours and a tangible sense of peace set the tone. It took a long time, perhaps too long, to see the two Scotsmen again. Can we really say that Tomorrow's Harvest (2013) is a retro record, tied to stylistic markers and musical boundaries from a distant past? Absolutely not. In its purest essence, it's projected into the near future. Many will object that it's really just the same old Boards Of Canada formula. Yet while it's obvious that the roots which made Geogaddi and Music Has The Right To Children into cornerstones are preserved, the line of continuity projected forward comes through clearly and unmistakably. Starting with the title and the cover art, as mentioned, there's a constant, recurring reference to tomorrow's dawn.

To that harvest, to a new era of prosperity. Or, conversely, that the harvest they're referring to is actually the fruit of the earth of the society symbolized by the cover. In their landscapes, Boards Of Canada depict lightness like few others could. And in sensing this weightlessness in perspective, one simultaneously feels the heaviness of roots and of being anchored to the present. It's precisely within this dialectical tension that the album's humus plays out.

Just to give an idea: could they ever have written "Split Of Infinities" ten years earlier? These alien pads for sun-scorched lands, this mournful solitude born of post-atomic disasters in a third millennium marked by bombings and wars, weren't there on The Campfire Headphase.

The dreamy velvet wrinkles in the face of analogue synths. There's no looking back here — "Reach For The Dead" itself is a lunar journey, an escape from something. And forget the word "retro-futurism", because here the gaze is fixed only on what's to come. The wonder of "Jacquard Causeway" matters little, because it's "Cold Earth" that sets the pace. The simmering heat of "Come To Dust" or the stop&go moments of "Nothing Is Real" shape an Earth that's no longer Earth.

"Sick Times", an already telling title, opens airily with an accelerating beat and sky-blue backdrops, only to gradually darken and almost suddenly close in on itself into nothingness. And on the journey toward other worlds ("White Cyclosa", "Transmission Ferox", "Uritual") you can feel the perfect counterpoint between earthly deflagration and post- landscapes. The electronic imagery drawn from the nineties/Warp/Leftfield lineage is actually preserved, but with careful touches and a production that shift the temporal coordinates into a future within reach.

Intergalactic sci-fi imagery, Lustmord and Carpenter all make an appearance, but what's striking is that this album reinforces rather than diminishes the imagery the Scottish brothers have built up over the years. The beat, as ever in their tradition, is never constant, but it works either to dismantle or, conversely, to erect subtle textures. "New Seeds" and "Come To Dust" are the journey back after destruction, while the closing "Serena Mertvykh" is nothing other than the landscape that lies ahead. Curtains of drones, haze and little else. Is that a new dawn, or the prospect of a civilization swallowed and destroyed by its own hands? The duo's crypticism, here more than ever, is taken to its furthest extreme. Tomorrow's Harvest is a necessary, painful tabula rasa, one that nonetheless imagines carrying the world into a new dimension. Of peace, perhaps.

Thirteen years after Tomorrow's Harvest, Boards of Canada return with Inferno, eighteen tracks built around religious, post-apocalyptic imagery that samples Crowley, the Children of God and Islamic philosophers. Sonically it's the sharpest record of their career, more physical than its predecessor, with guitars, drones and drum programming that brush up against rock without belonging to it. The approach is surgical and political: just days before release, the White House used "Deep Time" without permission in a propaganda video, and the song dismantled its claims better than any commentary could. The emotional horizon here isn't outrage: it's the lucid resignation of someone who already knows how it all ends.

Contributions by Nicola Minucci ("The Campfire Headphase"), Alberto Asquini ("Tomorrow's Harvest"), Giuliano Delli Paoli and Alessandro Giustiniano ("Inferno")

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google