walking upstream…
Boards of Canada
photo: pudstah (flickr); uploaded by angular · cc by 2.0 ↗Boards of Canada
sourcesWikipedia · The Guardian, 6 June 2013
In 1979, eight-year-old Mike Sandison moved with his family to Calgary, where his father worked construction; by the time they returned to Scotland a year later, he and his younger brother Marcus Eoin had absorbed a vocabulary of grainy, wobbly educational-documentary soundtracks from the National Film Board of Canada, the source of their eventual name. Recording together since childhood from a home studio in Edinburgh's Pentland Hills, the brothers turned 1998's Music Has the Right to Children and 2002's Geogaddi into landmarks of what critics later called hauntology: pitch-bent analog synths, tape hiss, and half-legible children's voices standing in for a childhood they kept circling back to. The Campfire Headphase (2005) and Tomorrow's Harvest (2013) extended the catalogue while the pair stayed reclusive, giving almost no interviews since. Their music sounds nostalgic less for a decade than for the act of remembering itself.
the sound in question
1998
RoygbivBoards of Canada
walk the tributaries ↓
My Bloody Valentine1980s–90s · Shoegaze / Noise pop / Alternative rock
When a Pitchfork writer told Mike Sandison that 2005's The Campfire Headphase reminded him of Loveless, Sandison didn't deflect it. "Of course we are massive fans of My Bloody Valentine," he said. "Loveless is probably one of my top five favorite albums of all time... there's a connection in terms of the approach to the music." It's a claim about method, not genre: guitars smeared past focus for Kevin Shields, tape-warped synths for Boards of Canada, both treating blur as the point rather than a flaw to fix.
listen: upstream & heresource: fredd-e.narfum.org (via Wayback Machine) ↗
1990
2005
Dayvan CowboyBoards of Canada
listen forSet "Soon" against "Dayvan Cowboy," the guitar-forward highlight of the album Sandison was describing when he named My Bloody Valentine. Both bury a plain, almost hummable melodic idea under a wash of bent, detuned tone, guitar strings smeared into a single blurred texture rather than picked out as separate notes. Neither song lets you cleanly identify an instrument; the pleasure is in not quite being able to, the pitch seeming to breathe and drift rather than hold steady under the tune.
Aphex Twin1990s-2000s · IDM / Ambient / Acid techno / Electronic / Experimental
Asked in 1999 which record from their new label had influenced them most, Boards of Canada didn't hedge: "Polygon Window (Aphex Twin) — Surfing on Sine Waves. I first heard it at a bonfire in the hills — friends used to make us tapes before we knew what it was," they told Jockey Slut. "We were Warp pirates — we probably did them out a lot of money before we started making money for them." The record, Richard D. James's own detour under the Polygon Window alias, gave them an early template: a plain, childlike melody riding a drum pattern that keeps stumbling underneath it.
listen: upstream & heresource: bocpages.org (via Wayback Machine) ↗
1993
QuothAphex Twin
1998
Telephasic WorkshopBoards of Canada
listen forCompare Polygon Window's "Quoth" with "Telephasic Workshop": both hang a bright, simple synth figure, almost a nursery-rhyme shape, over a break that keeps glitching, stuttering, and righting itself in real time. The melody stays disarmingly calm while the rhythm underneath sounds like it's tripping over its own feet, the same mismatch of innocent tune and unstable beat Boards of Canada carried into their own early tracks.
Wendy Carlos1960s–70s · Electronic / Classical / Film score
Boards of Canada's reputation rests on a vague "library music" story: half-remembered educational films, no names attached. Mike Sandison supplied one of the few real names in 1999, telling URB magazine they'd "also been inspired by composers of feature film music like [Wendy] Carlos," pointing to the latitude documentary composers get to write "bizarre music." Fourteen years later, discussing Tomorrow's Harvest with the Guardian, he named her again among the "grim 70s and 80s movie soundtrack" composers behind the record. Carlos's analog-synth scores gave them a working example of dread built from cold, detuned tone rather than orchestral strings.
listen: upstream & heresource: fredd-e.narfum.org (via Wayback Machine) ↗
1980
Rocky MountainsWendy Carlos
2013
Cold EarthBoards of Canada
listen forSet Carlos's "Rocky Mountains," from her score for The Shining, against "Cold Earth," from the album where Sandison named her directly. Both play a plain, almost nursery-simple melodic figure through a thin, pitch-bent synth tone that drains the warmth out of it, the same trick of making a simple tune sound cold rather than comforting, dread built from timbre rather than harmony.