Maxima through minima
I was introduced to Boards of Canada in 1998 by my friend Michael (who has introduced me to many of the things I write about). He lent me the group’s first LP, the then-recently-released Music Has the Right to Children. On first listen I took an immediate dislike to what I heard. Large swathes of the album were given over to listless hiphop instrumentals, which I found dreary. Other tracks were given over to syrupy synths. More than this I disliked how the music was navel-gazing and backward-looking. Given I’m prone to both these traits that might seem a bit rich, but at that time I liked my contemporary electronica shiny and futuristic, for I still believed in the future. Music Has the Right to Children, a bit like Air’s Moon Safari, which came out the same year, found inspiration in the past.
(These days, all we really have is the past - or perhaps an eternal present - where all styles and options are continuously with us, giving no sense of change. This used to be something that bothered me a lot, but eventually my irritation began to annoy me more than the phenomenon I was irritated at, and in that way I got over it.)
While I was having nothing to do with the brothers Sandison in 1998, Boards of Canada were critically feted, and three years later, in a more conciliatory mood, I listened to the album again. This time I found a handful of songs - Roygbiv, Aquarius, Olson - to be pretty good. I was still a bit leery of it, though; and conflicted about that.
But Boards of Canada has a way of seeping into you. On the day of my grandfather’s funeral I had the bittersweet tune Olson stuck in my head. It wasn’t the sort of thing to really associate with Granddad at all (he would have preferred a bit of Vaughn Williams), but it stuck with me. The trap was starting to close…
A few months later I heard some music in a cafe and was intrigued enough to I ask what it was. “The new Boards of Canada album,” was the reply. When I eventually got my hands on this new record, Geogaddi, I found that while again there were a handleful of tracks that had the right mood for me (my favourite is The Beach at Red Point), I felt the album as a whole was overly long and turgid, though I’ll grant that an interlude featuring Leslie Neilsen is pretty good. Overall though, my relationship with Boards of Canada was still at an impasse.
The years tumbled on. In 2005 The Campfire Head Phase came out, and I didn’t really like this one at all. The only one I can remember offhand is Dayvan Cowboy, which was way too sappy and raucous for my liking. To date there’s no tracks on that disc that I particularly enjoy.
Though I didn’t hear it until much later, the “Random 35 tracks tape” came out (well, got released anonymously, to great fanfare at the mystery over whether it was BoC or not). To my mind, the first track is absolutely beautiful, and the rest completely forgettable (lucky they didn’t sequence the good track last, or I might never have heard it).
Back to my original timeline… By the late 2000s I’d given BoC a fair go, but in truth I liked five tracks from three albums, and that’s a pretty meagre return. And yet, those five tracks were pretty compelling (more on this later). What finally tipped me from being a conflicted appreciator to genuine fan was discovering, on my then-employer’s highly dubious music server, a BoC collection called Maxima. It was another casette demo from the mid 90s, later immortalised on mp3. The collection featured tracks that would (mostly) feature “officially” on later EPs and Music has the Right to Children, along with a few others, some of which appeared on other releases, and one or two never properly released.
What’s odd about Maxima is that although it features many of the same listless, dull tracks from MHTRTC, somehow the sequencing works more to their benefit on the demo. It helps too that there are a few tracks with more momentum (such as Niagara and Red Moss) which help things along. All up, after a decade of vacillation, Maxima made me into a genuine BoC fan. I guess all I needed was a cohesive long player to latch on to, and BoC’s official releases never provided that to me.
Around the same time I also discovered the 2000 EP A Beautiful Place in the Country, which I enjoyed, and, revisiting MHTRTC again, I found I appreciated the tracks Eagle in Your Mind, Telephasic Workshop, and Pete Standing Alone. I even felt more patience with the dull tracks, and understood them. Helps to be typing code while you listen to them, I think. Nevertheless I still don’t listen to Geogaddi and Campfire Headphase very often.
2009 through 2012 was the peak of my obsession with Boards of Canada. Obviously I had an in-built appreciation of the group’s 70s sound, but I came to increasingly associate BoC with memories of my own early childhood. I’ve read of other fans experiencing this same phenomenon, with BoC recalling their often miserable 70s and 80s youths. My formative years were pretty benign, but BoC brought to mind experiences of scratched and worn educational media on film reels or cassettes. BoC transported me to playing in playgrounds made of left over reinforced concrete stormwater piping, or block painting with wedges of potato. Of wearing home-knit jumpers, mud on knees, all that. BoC’s use of National Film Board of Canada and PBS films in their tracks obviously helped with this nostalgia (there was a lot of “quality” North American and UK series on telly when I was a youngster, a far cry from the high-fructose content of children’s entertainment in recent decades). The Sandison brothers are four years older than me, and it seems this relatively small age gap I’m able to “get” their points of reference.
I think part of all this, going into my mid thirties my own childhood had become remote and mysterious to me. It’s perhaps not coincidental that during this period I was also into the media-analysis/comedy of Charlie Brooker, who is the same age as the Sandersons, and has a similar preoccupation with the 1970s and 80s TV, esp creepy old shows like Quatermass, or Children of the Stones, or Threads.
It’s tempting to wonder if there’s something about Gen X or the 70s and 80s that’s susceptible to this sort of nostalgia. I guess retro artefacts like Sha Na Na or (if you want to go back a touch further) Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” suggest otherwise. My viewpoint on this is so biased I really don’t feel justified in arguing for it too hard, but it’s tempting to make up a narrative of the Sandisons providing a last hurrah for analogue media before our culture became consumed by the eternal digital now.
Although I was into BoC heavily at the time, I didn’t catch up with the group’s 2013 album, Tomorrow’s Harvest, until three years later. (Their infrequent release schedule had conditioned me not to expect anything new, and I’m insufficiently interested in new music to keep tabs on what’s happening generally.) The album was worth the wait though; I think Tomorrow’s Harvest is BoC’s bleak, miserable masterpiece, compelling from beginning to end.
I knew the album owed much to dystopian SF soundtracks, but I didn’t understand just how much until I watched George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead (1985) and heard a music cue that made me think (putting the horse before the cart), “that sounds like Boards of Canada”.
The group hasn’t put out any new music for a decade now and you have to wonder how the Sandison brothers feed themselves. Four albums in 25 years shows admirable restraint, I suppose. In a world that contains far too much music, I feel like we have exactly as much BoC as we ought to. And yet, if they were to release more albums, I’d be interested in hearing them. (It’s a bit like their label-mates Plaid, a band that has been releasing the same album every 2-3 years for quarter of a century, yet it’s still great to hear new variations on their tracks.)
What of the nostalgia spell that BoC weaved on me in my mid 30s? Well, it’s worn off in recent years. The cause? Amusingly, becoming a father has allowed me to experience another childhood, and observing it through an adult’s eyes I can see that the mysterious and privileged viewpoint I felt I had when I was a youngster is actually just the weirdness of childhood memories being so much more vivid than adult ones. Intellectually I always knew this had to be true, but in terms of feelings, I guess I just enjoyed a good nostalgic wallow. In any event, now that the spell has broken, I listen to BoC less, but sometimes I feel a funny second order nostalgia for when I listened to BoC more. (That’s a bit of recursiveness I think the BoC boys would enjoy.)
My relationship with Boards of Canada is the most complicated that I’ve had with any artists. Even now I still feel a tiny amount of mistrust of them, that there’s a certain preciousness about their work that doesn’t sit well with me. Yet I can’t deny that they’ve moved me. So well done them, I guess??