I genuinely don't believe the pre-OT albums actually exist.

[rodox_head]

Is there really anything that solidifies their existence other than the scant word of BoC in a couple interviews? The bocpages page for Acid Memories even calls this out when pointing out that BoC hadn't begun using that as their official name until 1994, leaving Catalog 3, Acid Memories, and Closes Vol.1 up in the air with that. When did the existence of these albums officially come into light? Was it before or after the Old Tunes albums leaked?

I just really need something to work with here if it still manages to be brought up in a serious manner after all these years. A lone cover art and a track listing isn't all that much to work with because well... I do the same thing in my spare time

[Echelon]

I got your back Rodox! As I said, my discovery on the copyright site of the unreleased albums/songs not being copyrighted while the Old Tunes stuff is makes me believe they don't exist.

Not even Duffy, Circle and Would You Like To Be Free are and we have samples of them. Someone could easily steal those if they wanted to. Would You Like to Be Free especially is one hell of a banger and I'm sure someone would like to work off that and create a masterpiece for their own album.

But this is my thoughts and YMMV

[Jango9]

http://web.archive.org/web/200003010213 ... ounds.html
http://web.archive.org/web/200106062205 ... cords.html

The infamous three samples were hosted at the top link on the earliest version of the BoC site (back when it was a subdirectory of The Cosmic Crofter's "EHX" page circa 2000) and the five albums that caused all this hullabaloo were listed on the pre-Geogaddi but post-Beautiful Place BoC site which you can see at the second link. All of this was well before the Old Tunes leaks, which happened after Geogaddi. So yeah, believe what you want but the bros themselves are the ones who brought them up in the first place. They weren't just some random fan fabrication.

The bocpages page for Acid Memories even calls this out when pointing out that BoC hadn't begun using that as their official name until 1994

I'm pretty sure that line on bocpages is totally erroneous, it's got no source attached to it and I've never seen this brought up anywhere else. The word "official" is weird in this context too, it implies that they might have used it unofficially earlier or maybe had other aliases before switching to BoC exclusively.

Also when you consider that they started making music circa 1987 but didn't really go public until 1996 that leaves them plenty of time to have made those five albums in addition to the Old Tunes roster. Shit, I've only been making music for 7 years and already I've got around that many albums that haven't really escaped my personal circle yet. If anything I think there's actually quite a bit more that they've made but don't talk about

If you need any more convincing, check out this interview quote from 2005:

[SamuraiDrifter]

Well, we know:

- BOC have made up fake band/album titles before (Orphel Binuswade, Jupiter Corn, etc.)
- BOC didn't start using their name until 1994, and yet all the pre-Twoism album art, all the way back to the 80s, shows the band name as "Boards of Canada"
-The old EHX site said that 50-100 copies were pressed of the albums. And yet none of them have leaked.

We know for sure they have a bunch of unreleased music (R35TT for example) but the evidence does seem to point to, at the very least, the albums not existing in the form and numbers the EHX website claimed.

[Jango9]

BOC have made up fake band/album titles before (Orphel Binuswade, Jupiter Corn, etc.)

The only known time they did that was the time CMJ New Music Report asked them to name their "top 10 albums" and they decided to troll the magazine and readers by turning in mostly non-existent names. Lying about their "favorite albums" to mess with a magazine is different to lying about their own discography on their own official sites.

-BOC didn't start using their name until 1994, and yet all the pre-Twoism album art, all the way back to the 80s, shows the band name as "Boards of Canada"

Again, I'm reasonably certain the "they weren't BoC until 1994" thing is totally bogus. All the official biographies say they started using that name in the late '80s and the line on BoCPages that says it was 1994 has no source attached to it. Also according to mdg the original cassettes had no artwork, so yes the art from the old website was almost certainly made later (probably in '97 around the time of the Catalog 3 & Closes CD reissues).

-The old EHX site said that 50-100 copies were pressed of the albums. And yet none of them have leaked.

50-100 copies is a much smaller number than you might think. Godspeed You Black Emperor's "All Lights Fucked On The Hairy Amp Drooling" had 33 copies made and that still took nearly 30 years to leak in its entirety earlier this year (also according to Efrim some of them got sold to random people at a live show which BoC never did with these old tapes). 100 copies of something might seem like a lot when they're all in a room with you but really that whole crate of records could only possibly end up with about 0.0000000125% of the earth's population. Add in the fact that BoC have apparently specifically told the people that have them not to release them under any circumstances and I still think it's entirely possible that they do indeed exist.

We know for sure they have a bunch of unreleased music (R35TT for example) but the evidence does seem to point to, at the very least, the albums not existing in the form and numbers the EHX website claimed.

Okay, I'll give you the point about form and numbers at least

[Orbited insanitarium]

^^^ If only I could state, link and recall all of that information. Bejeezus Jango! Props! Do you have a permanent browser open on bocpages?

And thinking about that figure. N'aww. That means the 9.9999999875% that don't have em will be missing out on possibly great tunes. Unlucky bleeders.

[Jango9]

^^^ If only I could state, link and recall all of that information. Bejeezus Jango! Props! Do you have a permanent browser open on bocpages?

Aye, thanks! I don't have bocpages open 24/7 but it is in my bookmarks bar for easy access lmao. If only BoC would give the public more of that sweet sweet music to pore over then I'd have something else to dedicate my attention to besides old interview quotes and biographies and whatnot. At least this background-digging has lead to me finding out about all kinds of excellent music they've either recommended or just mentioned offhand before!

And thinking about that figure. N'aww. That means the 9.9999999875% that don't have em will be missing out on possibly great tunes. Unlucky bleeders.

Yeah, I've always been of the opinion that BoC is one of those bands where even what they deem their "lesser" efforts are still extremely compelling listening. Although the Old Tunes/R35TT stuff isn't quite as dense as their newer stuff composition-wise they've clearly always had a good sense of how to make music that's just very pleasing to the ear. I don't care if the unreleased albums sound more like Nitzer Ebb or Killing Joke or MBV than the BoC we know, as long as they've brought their usual sense of rhythm and melody to the table I'd gladly listen to that too

[rodox_head]

-The old EHX site said that 50-100 copies were pressed of the albums. And yet none of them have leaked.

50-100 copies is a much smaller number than you might think. Godspeed You Black Emperor's "All Lights Fucked On The Hairy Amp Drooling" had 33 copies made and that still took nearly 30 years to leak in its entirety earlier this year (also according to Efrim some of them got sold to random people at a live show which BoC never did with these old tapes). 100 copies of something might seem like a lot when they're all in a room with you but really that whole crate of records could only possibly end up with about 0.0000000125% of the earth's population. Add in the fact that BoC have apparently specifically told the people that have them not to release them under any circumstances and I still think it's entirely possible that they do indeed exist.

If these albums that they were hinting to be part of the BoC canon were that limited, then I can only infer that AFOT, OTV2, and R35TT were limited even less since they were never acknowledged by them before they leaked (R35TT being without artwork completely), yet they still managed to get to the public in less than a decade. I don't doubt that some, if not all, of the songs named on those albums are taken from their actual backlog, but that the albums as we know them are just a fabrication.

Something else to note is that according to the old site, Catalog 3 and Closes Vol.1 were re-pressed to CD in 1997, yet strangely not Acid Memories. Hooper Bay apparently made it to a Vinyl pressing. The recorded amounts they have are pretty scanty as well:

Catalog 3:?? (this one was recently re-pressed, mind you)
Acid Memories:??
Closes Vol.1: 100 mc, 30, cd (oddly specific)
Play By Numbers: 100
Hooper Bay: 200 (more than Twoism)

[In Technicolor]

Everything I've researched has led me to the same conclusion. I posted this in the controversial BOC opinions thread:

Controversial opinion?

Maybe this was stated by someone else earlier in the thread, I don't believe the early albums even exist. I believe what we hear on Old Tunes, Random 35 Track Tape, Boc Maxima and Twoism are it. BOC have stated themselves they started recording under the moniker in 94' and all evidence, even by others who claimed to have gone to school with them in Cullen, points to them being in other bands prior to that.

I don't know what motivation they or anybody else would have had to post the information to the EHX website back in the 90's other than it very VERY successfully created a spectacle 20+ years in the making and did a fantastic job creating an enigmatic air around an already enigmatic artist. It was probably done for the same reason that RDJ claims he won a contest in the early 80's making noise on a Sinclair ZX81 when it now has been proven it was clearly another bloke.

I think the band knew about the very real demand for their album Twoism before the 2002 repress and maybe posted it either as a joke and just to see where it may have lead.

I do believe there is a wealth of early material and otherwise (eg all the other tracks that didn't make the cut on Geogaddi) that has never seen the light of day and I believe 'Wouldn't You Like to be Free', 'Duffy' and 'Circle' are snippets of other unreleased BOC recordings from before they were famous.

Two quotes come to mind here. "No man is an Island" by John Donne & "Two people can only keep a secret if one of them is dead" by Mark Twain. There is just no way that no other audio snippet, no photo, no small irrefutable evidence of any kind has come out in more than twenty years despite an overwhelming demand for even the slightest clue among the fanbase.

It is one of those things where it is more fun to buy into and love overwhelms logic, once upon a time even for me, for a while actually.

I just really need something to work with here if it still manages to be brought up in a serious manner after all these years. A lone cover art and a track listing isn't all that much to work with because well... I do the same thing in my spare time

There was a site a while back called What.CD, it was a private music tracker where everyone was going crazy trying to get upload data, you could offer any amount of your extra upload data for a specific desired item and people could grab it by posting bounties. A lot of crazy things originally got released on there because users posted bounties.

JD Salinger's prequel to Catcher in the Rye first got uploaded there of all places because the bounty was so high, even with hundreds of thousands of other people trying to get their hands on it. The only copy was supposedly locked in a vault, but somehow someone on WHAT.cd managed to get ahold of a copy. The first time ever it was released to the public.

Microsoft COFEE was originally leaked there to, only being accessible to the FBI beforehand.

However, the top bounties on the whole site were reserved for BOC's Closes Vol 1, even above Salinger and COFEE... nobody ever claimed that bounty... for ten years.

If people were able to get a JD Salinger book from a vault and an FBI only forensic tool for lower bounties, but NOBODY could fill the higher bid for the BOC albums, that tells you something.

[TheStatPow]

Nothing about the whole Pre-Twoism thing plays in our favor.

I have talked of "The Big Lie" several time. I was mostly laughed at for just thinking about what people here consider just standard BoC knowledge.

People don't question the grid this fanbase as built. Snicker all you want at me dramatising things as I always do but fact of the matter is that despite the Pre-twoism material "being out there in a tenfold quantity" it has not surfaced or came to us other than by the potentially lying source which by the way has lied to us several times. (not that it's wrong, I lie all the time and so should you, this isn't a post about morality but more like ... wake the fuck up)

Yet! still everything else that could leak has leaked except that material supposedly out there in a much bigger quantity.

There is only collateral damage in us believing it and looking for it because we will not find it if it exists or it simply does not exist and when you start looking at who benefits from this whole lie you discover that it is the very same establishment which has created it, nurtured and shaped it ..... The fanbase.

"They have given it to friends and family only I do not know about you but I trust my family and friends" Great, lucky you jack off to your fortune but riddle me this: not even a single picture out there?

Where am I? On Twoism.
What do you want? Information.
Who's side are you on? That would be telling.
We want information ... information ... you won't get it!!
By hook or by crook, we will.
Who are you? Who is the liar.
You are, Twoism.

[Echelon]

One thing I gotta admit from a writer perspective is if BOC made all this up, it's high quality self made fanfiction that stimulated a couple generations of people and kept us talking about BOC while it takes them years to make their next masterpiece.

Let's face it, this was marketing genius and made BOC come off a lot cooler than some of their contemporaries. Fake or real, it was pretty crafty on their part to post these albums on their old site.

[vapordracula]

The Acid Memories argument is silly.
Is it not possible for them to have made the tracks before they started using the BOC name and then they were like "Hey you know what, these tracks go really nice together, what if we compiled them into an album cos they are pretty much Boards of Canada tracks" ?

[Jango9]

If these albums that they were hinting to be part of the BoC canon were that limited, then I can only infer that AFOT, OTV2, and R35TT were limited even less since they were never acknowledged by them before they leaked (R35TT being without artwork completely), yet they still managed to get to the public in less than a decade. I don't doubt that some, if not all, of the songs named on those albums are taken from their actual backlog, but that the albums as we know them are just a fabrication.

It's less about the actual numbers and more about who exactly they were given to. Twoism, Maxima, and the Old Tunes cassettes are all known to have been distributed to people outside Hexagon Sun, for instance the guys from Autechre:

Spoiler: show

Not saying they did the leaking obviously, just goes to show how those particular tapes had a much wider reach. Again I think back to Godspeed's ALFOTHAD, which also went "public" in similar quantities yet still took almost three decades to actually leak. Also there's still a bunch of early Jeff Mangum/NMH cassettes which have been known to exist for about as long and yet also still haven't leaked yet.

R35TT's origins are a lot more nebulous and to this day nobody's 100% sure who put it together, not even Hexagon Sun themselves if these posts by mdg are any indication. The fact that it's full of weird cuts and songs that sound like they're ripped from different sources (different amounts of tape fuzz, some songs have cd skipping artifacts while others don't) leads me to believe it's a bootleg put together by someone with access to more unreleased tapes than we've ever seen.

I do believe there is a wealth of early material and otherwise (eg all the other tracks that didn't make the cut on Geogaddi) that has never seen the light of day and I believe 'Wouldn't You Like to be Free', 'Duffy' and 'Circle' are snippets of other unreleased BOC recordings from before they were famous.

If you're already willing to believe this much then why stop just short of believing that those particular five tapes might actually exist? It just doesn't make much sense to me why anyone would lie about having a certain set of unreleased music when they have such a "wealth" (as you put it) of actual unreleased material lmao

If people were able to get a JD Salinger book from a vault and an FBI only forensic tool for lower bounties, but NOBODY could fill the higher bid for the BOC albums, that tells you something.

An underpaid government worker leaking some of their tools for a bounty of what.cd data? Sounds entirely plausible to me lmao. Also the vault of which you speak wasn't actually a vault, it was the Princeton university library. According to them this is how it went down:

"The story is probably an unauthorized version transcribed longhand in our reading room," said Martin Mbugua, a Princeton spokesman. "It's also possible that it came from photocopies of the typescript probably made before the mid-1980s when we decided that we would no longer allow photo-duplication for any work by Salinger."

The difference between those two cases and the early BoC tapes is that the people involved apparently have more incentive to not betray their close friends and/or family (BoC) by leaking the tapes than random members of the public would to not go against the wishes of random university and/or government employees.

Yet! still everything else that could leak has leaked except that material supposedly out there in a much bigger quantity.

There is only collateral damage in us believing it and looking for it because we will not find it if it exists or it simply does not exist and when you start looking at who benefits from this whole lie you discover that it is the very same establishment which has created it, nurtured and shaped it ..... The fanbase.

If you scroll up a bit and read my earlier post in this very thread you'll see that the fanbase weren't the ones who brought this information into the world in the first place, it was the bros and their close associates. Also where exactly do you get the idea that "everything else that could leak has leaked"? In my opinion there's probably actually a lot more than those five tapes which weren't even listed on the old websites (the weird non-sequential catalog numbers would certainly imply as much too).

"They have given it to friends and family only I do not know about you but I trust my family and friends" Great, lucky you jack off to your fortune but riddle me this: not even a single picture out there?

It's not just that lmao, when the Old Tunes tapes leaked they "went weird and cut a load of people off" according to one of the Autechre guys (see the quote from them earlier in this post) so it's safe to assume the reaction to finding out anyone leaked those tapes would be equally hostile. I often joke about people getting their kneecaps broken for leaking old BoC tapes, but that wasn't just made up from nothing either. Check out this quote from the very same magazine that described 3/5 of the unreleased tapes:


But hey, if believing that they don't actually exist helps you sleep at night easier than accepting that there *might* be more BoC tapes in the world that you haven't heard yet then I won't stop ya

[TheStatPow]

If these albums that they were hinting to be part of the BoC canon were that limited, then I can only infer that AFOT, OTV2, and R35TT were limited even less since they were never acknowledged by them before they leaked (R35TT being without artwork completely), yet they still managed to get to the public in less than a decade. I don't doubt that some, if not all, of the songs named on those albums are taken from their actual backlog, but that the albums as we know them are just a fabrication.

It's less about the actual numbers and more about who exactly they were given to. Twoism, Maxima, and the Old Tunes cassettes are all known to have been distributed to people outside Hexagon Sun, for instance the guys from Autechre:

Spoiler: show

Not saying they did the leaking obviously, just goes to show how those particular tapes had a much wider reach. Again I think back to Godspeed's ALFOTHAD, which also went "public" in similar quantities yet still took almost three decades to actually leak. Also there's still a bunch of early Jeff Mangum/NMH cassettes which have been known to exist for about as long and yet also still haven't leaked yet.

R35TT's origins are a lot more nebulous and to this day nobody's 100% sure who put it together, not even Hexagon Sun themselves if these posts by mdg are any indication. The fact that it's full of weird cuts and songs that sound like they're ripped from different sources (different amounts of tape fuzz, some songs have cd skipping artifacts while others don't) leads me to believe it's a bootleg put together by someone with access to more unreleased tapes than we've ever seen.

I do believe there is a wealth of early material and otherwise (eg all the other tracks that didn't make the cut on Geogaddi) that has never seen the light of day and I believe 'Wouldn't You Like to be Free', 'Duffy' and 'Circle' are snippets of other unreleased BOC recordings from before they were famous.

If you're already willing to believe this much then why stop just short of believing that those particular five tapes might actually exist? It just doesn't make much sense to me why anyone would lie about having a certain set of unreleased music when they have such a "wealth" (as you put it) of actual unreleased material lmao

If people were able to get a JD Salinger book from a vault and an FBI only forensic tool for lower bounties, but NOBODY could fill the higher bid for the BOC albums, that tells you something.

An underpaid government worker leaking some of their tools for a bounty of what.cd data? Sounds entirely plausible to me lmao. Also the vault of which you speak wasn't actually a vault, it was the Princeton university library. According to them this is how it went down:

"The story is probably an unauthorized version transcribed longhand in our reading room," said Martin Mbugua, a Princeton spokesman. "It's also possible that it came from photocopies of the typescript probably made before the mid-1980s when we decided that we would no longer allow photo-duplication for any work by Salinger."

The difference between those two cases and the early BoC tapes is that the people involved apparently have more incentive to not betray their close friends and/or family (BoC) by leaking the tapes than random members of the public would to not go against the wishes of random university and/or government employees.

Yet! still everything else that could leak has leaked except that material supposedly out there in a much bigger quantity.

There is only collateral damage in us believing it and looking for it because we will not find it if it exists or it simply does not exist and when you start looking at who benefits from this whole lie you discover that it is the very same establishment which has created it, nurtured and shaped it ..... The fanbase.

If you scroll up a bit and read my earlier post in this very thread you'll see that the fanbase weren't the ones who brought this information into the world in the first place, it was the bros and their close associates. Also where exactly do you get the idea that "everything else that could leak has leaked"? In my opinion there's probably actually a lot more than those five tapes which weren't even listed on the old websites (the weird non-sequential catalog numbers would certainly imply as much too).

"They have given it to friends and family only I do not know about you but I trust my family and friends" Great, lucky you jack off to your fortune but riddle me this: not even a single picture out there?

It's not just that lmao, when the Old Tunes tapes leaked they "went weird and cut a load of people off" according to one of the Autechre guys (see the quote from them earlier in this post) so it's safe to assume the reaction to finding out anyone leaked those tapes would be equally hostile. I often joke about people getting their kneecaps broken for leaking old BoC tapes, but that wasn't just made up from nothing either. Check out this quote from the very same magazine that described 3/5 of the unreleased tapes:


But hey, if believing that they don't actually exist helps you sleep at night easier than accepting that there *might* be more BoC tapes in the world that you haven't heard yet then I won't stop ya

I'm just being dramatic because I'm bored. You're reading way too far into it.

[Jango9]

I'm just being dramatic because I'm bored. You're reading way too far into it.

You're being dramatic because you're bored, I'm being overly analytical because I'm bored. It all balances out!

In any case, I won't rest until the rest of this forum is haunted by those forbidden tapes just the same as I am.

[rodox_head]

The Acid Memories argument is silly.
Is it not possible for them to have made the tracks before they started using the BOC name and then they were like "Hey you know what, these tracks go really nice together, what if we compiled them into an album cos they are pretty much Boards of Canada tracks" ?

I stated that just a few posts prior. The tracks themselves may have been in their backlog, but there was no "Acid Memories" from 1987 when Boards of Canada may or may not have existed as we know them. The ALBUMS don't exist is what I'm getting at, not the songs.

I do believe there is a wealth of early material and otherwise (eg all the other tracks that didn't make the cut on Geogaddi) that has never seen the light of day and I believe 'Wouldn't You Like to be Free', 'Duffy' and 'Circle' are snippets of other unreleased BOC recordings from before they were famous.

If you're already willing to believe this much then why stop just short of believing that those particular five tapes might actually exist? It just doesn't make much sense to me why anyone would lie about having a certain set of unreleased music when they have such a "wealth" (as you put it) of actual unreleased material lmao

Because all there is in favor of their existence is a shitty jpeg scan. This is the same fallacy Bigfoot believers use: "There's no proof it doesn't exist, therefore it must exist"

But hey, if believing that they don't actually exist helps you sleep at night easier than accepting that there *might* be more BoC tapes in the world that you haven't heard yet then I won't stop ya

Sorry for going against the grain here, I'm clearly nuts. I'll shut up now.

[breachtones]

my theory is that they do exist but were only given proper artwork and a "release" by the mid-1990s. feels like boc started to become more legit then, twoism was probably being recorded and produced at the time of hooper bay and play by number's release, and hi scores had already been released by the time the 1997 CD represses were leaked.

i imagine despite the high number of copies for the 97 CD represses, only a few of them were given out, the rest are probably gathering dust in hexsun, perhaps it was some sort of promo for future "boc-set" ideas?

given that almost every pre-twoism album was repressed, one has to wonder what was the reasoning behind not doing anything with acid memories..

[Orbited insanitarium]

If this is what occurs when you're all bored, I'd hate to see you when you are interested!

[outhudd]

Don't forget there are also Hell Interface tapes.

Sean Booth has some of these.

[Negamuse]

It's all the question of "what is an album?" especially before stuff like Bandcamp, back when it was all physical media. They'd been making music, finding their sound, putting things on tape (and some of that has leaked with OT and R35) and handing it out to friends. Then it comes to the time they make the website and they're doing actual releases, and it occurs to them to say "actually we've been making for a lot longer than this", and they think of those tapes and put the info up.

This is what I'm getting at, like totally conceptually as a musician that's one way of thinking of it, you know, the fact that Hi Scores and whatnot are getting released as physical objects made by a company that's buying into the idea and saying "we'll put this out", but its a bit of an arbitrary line to draw, the MUSIC from before then still exists, you can look back on earlier stuff and still think of it as a concept. So it's not like they're lying in saying these things exist, I bet they do, in that sense.

But it's also a bit of a semantic thing, cos by listing them on the website, with artwork even, like that it kinda gives them the same importance as the stuff that ended up getting officially released. It makes them seem more real, like they are a tangible physical thing that if you looked in the right place, you might find. I don't think that they exist in that form, at best they're gonna be a handful of C90s run off on a tape machine. Maybe later, as part of an archiving thing once they had some success they think "better get these onto a digital format so they don't rot" and then there's a CDR version on their shelf or whatever. Maybe even with the artwork we've seen.

So yeah... I reckon they exist... but only kinda. They're a thing that, looking back from whenever BoC mentioned them, they thought of as a concept but they're not albums as we as music consumers think of them.