Hooper Bay Tracks?

[Helios]

I really like B3 to be honest. Also, I wish I still had all of the random BoC stuff I downloaded from Soulseek wayyyy back in the day, I definitely remember stuff like this.

[outhudd]

Does anyone have that link handy to the reviews of some of the earlier stuff? From an Italian website I think it was?

Also, I just suspended disbelief for 20 mins, told myself these are real, and enjoyed. It was nice.

[Redd Panderson]

Does anyone have that link handy to the reviews of some of the earlier stuff? From an Italian website I think it was?

Also, I just suspended disbelief for 20 mins, told myself these are real, and enjoyed. It was nice.

Here, I was just reading it! It's English actually. It was Jockey Slut. These are the only three it mentioned that haven't been heard:

DISCOGRAPHY

Acid Memories (Music 70, 1989)
Absurdly rare, cassette-only release from the barely teen Boards, then six-strong. Guitars meet electronics in embryonic but recognisably Boards-ian melodicism.
Play by Numbers (Music 70, 1994)
Five-track CD from what was now a trio, boasting a My Bloody Valentine influence in places, shifting further into electronics in others.
Hooper Bay (Music 70, 1994)
Closer still:: the use of kids' voices was a hint of what was to come. People pay small fortunes for copies.

Source: https://bocpages.org/wiki/Boards_of_The_Underground

Unless you were thinking of this Spanish interview where the brothers merely claim that they do, in fact, exist. There's no review of them: https://bocpages.org/wiki/La_Materia_De ... ue%C3%B1os

The relevant passage:

Was there ever something titled "Closes volume 1", or "Hooper bay", or the so evocatively-titled "Acid Memories"?
They do exist,
maintains Sandison.
In their first incarnation they were cassette tapes, and we re-recorded some of them on CD, but the releases were very limited and they only circulated among our friends. We took great care to give them to the right people, in whose hands they would be safe; we never gave anything to people unless we knew them very well. If some of those releases have leaked on the Internet it's because we placed too much trust in someone, or because we distributed more copies than we needed to, there are twenty, thirty copies of some releases, but up to a hundred copies of others.
In all these years,
continues Eoin,
only 'BoC maxima' and the two compilations of 'old tunes' have circulated widely on the Internet. But it wouldn't surprise me if, this coming year, we started seeing the complete 'Acid memories' appear out there. In any case, the fact that our tapes remain unreleased is a miracle; when we made them, we had no idea that anyone would invent this thing called MP3.
Now, some consolation for the fans: aside from an EP for 2006, Boards of Canada's most ambitious plan for the future is to release a box set with a wide selection of material covering the period 1987 to 1995. "Maybe we will do it with Warp". Yes, please!

[outhudd]

It was Jockey Slut.

Thank you. So that "use of kid's voices" bit in the review does tie in with this "Point Hope", but also of course if there was a very determined faker he/she would throw those in to match the review.

Something that does seems like a very detailed touch (if this is by a faker) is the MP3 encoding settings used.

These are 32kbps bitrate, 22050Hz, mono, and MPEG-2 Layer III. There was a lot of mp3s floating around in 2002 with these settings.

And there's no LAME version tag in the mp3 metadata, LAME usually embeds the version number of the encoder. (LAME didn't become dominant until later than 2002)

The very old pre-LAME mp3 encoders like FhG and Xing didn't include any "encoded by" information, and then I remembered there was a tool called EncSpot that would try to guess what MP3 encoder was used based on some other tell-tale signs in the mp3 encoding.

I just installed the latest version of it (from 2005), and it guesses these are encoded by "FhG (ACM or producer pro)".

The files really looks like something a simple late-90s/early-2000s encoder produced, FhG's mp3enc and "Producer Pro") are from 1998–2000 era, and 32 kbps / mono / 22050 Hz were typical settings for it. Cool Edit Pro from 2002 used that FhG encoder as well.

If I was making a fake, I don't think I'd go to these lengths to get an mp3 encoder from 25 years ago to make them.

[Waterbagel]

outhudd, you've got me intrigued now, at least!

[Omikron]

If I was making a fake, I don't think I'd go to these lengths to get an mp3 encoder from 25 years ago to make them.

It may well have been done 25 years ago, but people still made fakes back then.