Strange Soup/The Thrift Store Tape Discussion

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Friendly Stranger
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Also! While I remember, I wasn’t sure what to make of the fact that when you listen to the last two mixes whenever there’s a recognisable BOC song, like Oirectine or Redmoss for example, it just says untitled on the tracklist. They’re just being a massive tease.
Thinking about it, they probably made all these during the COVID lockdown.

I agree with Sky and Trails about these being the old BOC pre SKAM recordings. They’ve tried hard to supress these old recordings but this would be a good way to assert control over their release.

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Eagle Minded
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Electronaldmcdonald2 wrote:Also! While I remember, I wasn’t sure what to make of the fact that when you listen to the last two mixes whenever there’s a recognisable BOC song, like Oirectine or Redmoss for example, it just says untitled on the tracklist. They’re just being a massive tease.
Thinking about it, they probably made all these during the COVID lockdown.

I agree with Sky and Trails about these being the old BOC pre SKAM recordings. They’ve tried hard to supress these old recordings but this would be a good way to assert control over their release.



I totally agree!

And I think you nailed it - lockdown boredom.
I feel like the girlfriend of an emotionally unavailable guy when he finally mutters, "Yeah, I guess I love you, too."
All it took was a pandemic! :)

I didn't realize the titles were left off the most recognizable tunes. Smooth move!
Sirens calling out catastrophe, waves of mourning rippling through hillsides, an exodus for us all

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Sky and Trails wrote:I still agree with you that this is a lot of work for someone just screwing around. Too much work for that, honestly. This isn't trolling but it's something. Maybe this is BoC dangling the world's biggest carrot and they know how to play this game well.

Why do people keep assuming all this (events since March 2022) is the work of just one person?
I think all of this is:
- the work of a group of fans in some kind of Discord server coordinating all this (or similar)
- lots of the new Twoism members, operating primarily in this topic, are part of the scheme
- this strange soup definitely is no prime audio soup, if you catch my drift :D

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Boqurant
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Is there a chronology of the events and videos so far somewhere, maybe on a wiki?

Friendly Stranger
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I always wondered if this person (Prohibited Broadcasting) a channel on youtube was behind the thrift store tape. This channel emerged back in august of 2020 when there was all this hype about speculation of a new BoC album. This was posted and some of us were slightly convinced this was a lost tape until, of course other videos were posted. Then became less convinced. They did a BoC cover on the channel and it was clearly fan-made. The music is interesting non the less. Slightly sounds like it could've fit in BoC's earlier stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQdlvMy3CkE&t=1418s

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Friendly Stranger
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@eliotsworld1985 that sounds pretty good. I like the atonal synth solo at the end of Man is The Beast.

I think the thrift store tapes etc are a lot more melodic. But thats only my opinion. It’s just good to find more enjoyable music out there isn't it. BOC or not

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@karpeggi I haven’t seen a chronology and it feels like it was so diffuse and random I can barely remember the order of events now!
Trawling through the 35+ pages of this thread might give you some insight. But it would probably feel rather tedious too

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Boqurant
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Did anyone happen to grab a copy of the original randomstranger random tunes video? I've seen Magic Orange's compilation (which is excellent) but I'm also looking for a dump of the original video and ideally description text to archive

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karpeggi wrote:Did anyone happen to grab a copy of the original randomstranger random tunes video? I've seen Magic Orange's compilation (which is excellent) but I'm also looking for a dump of the original video and ideally description text to archive

Found it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnW90kSGd5k

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I re-read a load of the interviews on BOCpages recently and pulled out a few choice quotes. They're more or less chronological. I didn't bothered with attribution, you can search the text on the website if you like. Obviously it proves nothing, but it adds context. It's BOC/ or someone who did their homework properly.

"We were both about 10, something like that. We had started playing instruments even younger, and very soon we were playing around with recordings on cassettes and magnetic tapes, making audio collages. We began writing and playing music in a more serious way at some point around 1987”

“(Michael) When i was around ten years old, i got an old mono cassette recorder and started recording piano pieces with it. I started borrowing instruments from my friends afterwards, things like electric organs. The first time that I played a synthesiser was around 1983, when my music teacher bought a Juno 60. I got addicted to that thing. When he heard some of my home recordings he arranged a way for me to play for a studio. I created a few tracks, this is in 1983, when I was 12 years old, and from there I started forming many bands, all of them different from each other, but always with some electronic instruments"

“We started in the late 80s playing together in a guitar band but using a technological environment like samplers or synths, in the same way as Killing Joke, Nitzer Ebb or My Bloody Valentine”

"We sounded a lot more Gothic, much closer to experimental rock”

“We've been making music since school in the 1980s and no one will ever listen to it. Our friends and families are the only ones who hear everything we write and that's what we really matters”

“We've always been quite prolific and back then all that mattered to us was to give all our friends copies of our music, so we started making up tapes and packaging them, and circulating them. It was just for the love of it so we never asked anyone to pay for them.

“We've got all these tapes and discs going back 15 years or so”

“Every so often we rummage through old tapes and if we discover a melody that makes us feel something, that makes us nostalgic, we rework it”

"We might use a video we taped ten years ago, that we listen to like that, and we take one word from it. We let ourselves rediscover things by chance.

“Two weeks ago we got back to work on a song that we had not touched for two years. For us, music is never finished”

“We even sometimes recover a melody from some of our older music and go look for the rhythm on another”

“Sometimes we dig out an older melody which we wrote maybe ten years ago, and we re-work it, such as 'Turquoise Hexagon Sun' on this album. Usually we let the rhythms fall into place on the melodies”

“I guess one year we might hunt through it all and release some of it”

“Mike: We still play live instruments all the time… We record music like this a lot, though we just haven't released any of it on the scale that we are releasing the Boards of Canada tracks. But one day we will

Eoin: We both play piano as our first instrument, and we both play guitar. Mike's a good drummer, and you can hear bits of that in there, too. We record a lot of stuff that doesn't make it onto BoC records because, stylistically, it doesn't fit. Maybe one day, we'll put that stuff out somehow.

"A couple of years ago we decided to start collating and cataloging all our early recordings, just for ourselves really, to know that we could tidy it all up and hand it on to our kids someday, but there are literally thousands of tracks going way back into the ’80s. It’s a huge task, and this just seemed to eat up time. We’ve been working on new music all the time throughout this, so we have a lot of material to wade through."

"We kept surprising ourselves, finding old things we’d completely forgotten about. We have cases full of tapes. The thing I notice about the really early stuff is how empty and abstract a lot of it is, so that reminded me of my love for a kind of “distance” in the music.”

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@Electronaldmcdonald2:

This is my first time reading these particular interviews. After reading all that, I think I'm more convinced all this- from the thrift store tape, all the arg stuff and the "Random Tunes", has to be their early recordings,,,without a doubt.

I believe that this was all done by design. They knew no one would ever believe that there's a discovered VHS tape containing their music, so they or someone involved staged a YT channel. I mean,, c'mon, it's so clever. Why not get someone in the states to go under cover and pick a place to pretend where they supposedly found the tape? They knew this would be swept under the rug as a fake. Then again I could be wrong, but in my mind this is what's really taking place.

It's the "Home Recording" of them playing piano and guitar at the end of Random Tunes that really stood out to me.
They used the same melodic structure or fragments. You can also hear a Scottish voice for a split second at the beginning of the recording.

EDIT: Track 17 Live rehearsal 1988 - You can clearly hear the actual synth that was used in the track Skimming Stones from the Old Tunes album. You can clearly hear it is also the same melodic structure as well. I believe this to be where. that track originated from before it evolved into Skimming Stones.

Maybe I'm just losing my mind :D

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I’m with you. What stands out as odd to me is the year long lead up of the thrift store tape, which never overtly mentioned boards of canada, people just heard it and had an uncanny feeling.

But recently the randomstranger youtube channel dropped “Last” and “Random Tunes” which to me is a strong suggestion that a) the uploader wants it to be attributed to boc, and b) the thrift store tape videos are linked.

Plus (for instance, there are many examples) “random tunes” starts off with a very similar rhythm section to 1969. it could be from an early demo, it could be modern audio stem splitting software. I like to think its the former, like the interview says they revisit old tapes and pull the pieces they like into new works. I hope what we are hearing in random tunes is the demo that eventually became 1969. Hope to know for sure someday.

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New Seed
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On the Random Tunes Track 10 [@ ca 22:52] = is the same Melody pitched down on Boc Maxima Red Moss
...and to my ears if this would be a fake those fakers are Geneticists who got hold of some of the brothers DNA :wink:

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Friendly Stranger
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It was this quote that reminded me of their closing statement last year, when they got rightfully p*ssed off with people trying to copyright and monetise the mixes, before they closed all their youtube accounts.

“We've always been quite prolific and back then all that mattered to us was to give all our friends copies of our music, so we started making up tapes and packaging them, and circulating them. It was just for the love of it so we never asked anyone to pay for them”

“Although the thrift store tape and the other tapes out there are not copyrighted, the music was never intended for commercial or financial gain…. The only purpose ever intended for this music was for the small niche audience that appreciates it”

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Gosh! Just stumbled on that "Sir Prancelot Brainfire" sitar version = L.O.V.E

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@compound candy
what was the "Sir Prancelot Brainfire" sitar version on? Sounds great

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New Seed
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The RandomPoster69 account that supposedly had the back cover of the random tunes video isn't on archive.org, does anyone have any archives of the tumblr account?

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SunkenStudios wrote:The RandomPoster69 account that supposedly had the back cover of the random tunes video isn't on archive.org, does anyone have any archives of the tumblr account?


I saved all of the photos that were on the RandomPoster69 Tumblr account. One of them directed to a Soundcloud account if I remember correctly.

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New Seed
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Thank you so much!

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New Seed
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The QR Code oddly enough takes you to a deleted SoundCloud track.

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