Boards of Canada — Toby Flaux

Photo via London Sinfonietta

Uplifting and with a rich, ethereal beauty in places and faintly haunting in others, Boards of Canada are not by any stretch of the imagination an average electronica duo. Comprising two Scots, Marcus Eoin and Michael Sandison, they are some of the most prominent artists within the IDM and ambient techno community, and particularly influenced by the early work of Autechre. Their soothing sophisticated, almost ‘broken-sounding’ compositions feature, amongst other things, the scratchings of short wave radio and television of the 1970s. Their music is rich in subliminal and cryptic messaging, with an alluding power that is difficult to resist. Their use of reversed messages within tracks (inserting vocals played backwards to hide lyrics) is recurrent, and the wealth of information and allusions within those lyrics is vast.

They are influenced by the 1970s nature films of the National Film Board of Canada (from which they take their name), and I feel that nature is evidently very important to them and runs through their work. However, it is their interest in childhood and one’s formative years that is most scintillating and ever-present in their work. The use of children’s voices and singing and the enchanting, fairytale atmosphere, aura and timelessness their music has evokes intense nostalgia, individual to every listener. They also have very firm views on censorship, and the dangers of it.

They have a particular interest in the occult, most notably in the Branch Davidians, a Seventh Day Adventist Christian sect, whose ‘messianic’ leader David Koresh lead his Davidians in an armed standoff with the FBI in 1993 at their compound in Waco, Texas. Their gorgeous song, In a beautiful place out in the country, includes the lyrics ‘come out and live in a religious community in a beautiful place out in the country’, a catchphrase the Davidians used in recruitment videos to describe their compound at Waco. Reference is also made to Amo Bishop Roden, wife of former Davidian leader George Roden.

That said, Boards of Canada lay huge importance on the music itself and the beauty of their art form. They would still be making music even if they had not come to prominence, as they were in the decade and a half before. The hidden meanings within their music are intended to be serious in some cases, but are also a feature of their style and something they revel in doing. It is easy to become embroiled and enthralled in the interpretations of others and not allow oneself to form views of one’s own. The hidden meanings and significance of particular sounds are more abundant within their genre because the music is made up of pieces of musical detail, everyday sounds, lyrics, radio transmissions, monologues added to their own compositions, shifted and repeated in varying combinations, speeds and forms. The material they choose to use has its own significance to them and, as a result, to the listener.

They are members of the Hexagon Sun collective of musicians, whose isolated studio is on the northern coast of Scotland, and where some of their few public concerts have taken place. They are distinctly reluctant to be interviewed, preferring to live the quiet rural life that Scotland affords them.

With almost as many early records unreleased to the general public as general releases, and probably a wealth of totally unreleased music private to them, the demand for their rare and early work is great; so great that small fortunes are paid for copies, and fake mp3’s circulate purporting to be sections of early tracks that have probably never been heard by anyone other than their close friends and family, and probably never will be. It seems that their early work is so personal to them that they have told their friends and family they do not wish for anyone other than them to hear their most original and raw work. It is difficult for the Boards' fan base to accept this, and accept that they do not have an ‘automatic’ right to it.

They remain a group who do not fail to interest and to bring great pleasure to the listener. See their official site www.boardsofcanada.com and the vast www.davidac.fsworld.co.uk/boc.htm to whose author I am indebted as a source.

Toby Flaux