When I heard Boards of Canada had a new album coming out I got my pre-order in from Warp Records. I remember the first time hearing Boards of Canada: University Avenue, Belfast, summer 1998. I was staying with 3 English men who kept threatening to throw me out for supporting the England football team’s opponents in the France World Cup that was going on at the time.
One of the guys, Weird Steve, had been sent a blue CD called Music Has The Right To Children by a friend who worked in a record shop back in England. It had just come out. We sat in the living room and listened to it. Then I insisted on playing it again. By week two, Steve was coming into the living room finding me, usually with a cup of tea and a joint, staring vacantly out the window, transfixed by the music on the Hi-Fi.
“You’re becoming dangerously obsessed with that CD”, said Steve.
Since then, I’ve collected every EP and LP Boards of Canada ever did. Common to every release, be it Twoism, Hi Scores, their debut on cult Manchester label Skam, or Geogaddi, the difficult second album, is an unmistakable Boards of Canada-ness. It’s melancholic, compelling, haunted, uplifting, creepy.
It’s Mark Fisher. It’s half-remembered TV from 1983. And in a world of a thousand downtempo electronica acts, they are instantly recognisable. They don’t try to revoultionise their sound by making some over-produced, envelope-pushing, beat-science record, or their version of Trout Mask Replica. They got it right the first time, and they’ve been getting it right ever since, and that’s all they need to do.
While waiting for my new Boards of Canada record to arrive, I made the mistake of reading a review of it in the Guardian by someone who had apparently listened to the record in its entirety with his head stuck clean up his hole. He objected to the album’s silly references to religion, the occult and such like. He didn’t like the “pedestrian” beats. BOC have always been creepy, and the themes on Inferno just make it a modern stone cold classic in the canon of British folk horror as well as electronica.
The beats are “pedestrian”? The beats do what works with the music. Either you like BOC or you don’t. I can tell the Guardian journalist does like them but just feels the need to give Inferno 2/5 because it’s more of the same. But what’s wrong with that? It’s a straight-up 5/5, just like their other releases. They’ve all been 5/5. They’re Boards of Canada, for chrissakes. Reason number 367 for hating the Guardian.
Moo Kid 