boc the the metro

Everything related to our favorite Scottish duo.

Moderators: mdg, Mexicola, 2020k, Fredd-E, Aesthetics

User avatar
Dayvan Cowboy
Status: Offline
Posts: 1280
Joined: 21 Mar 2005
Location: Dublin, Ireland.
posted on the yahoo newsgroup earlier today:

There's a free newspaper distributed about city centres in the UK
called Metro. In todays Metro Life section there's an interview with
BOC. And it's pretty damn good!

There's a picture of Marcus and Mike stood next to a sort of steel
container or buidling at the edge of a field. Marcus is wearing a Mush
Records Tee and Mike has a green Tee with a black design of what looks
like a picture of a surfer.

Splendid Isolation

Tune in to the other-worldly sound of Boards Of Canada

Musicians often boast they're removed from the hub and froth of media-
piloted trends. Yet few do so with as much conviction as Scots duo
Boards Of Canada. Located in the rural Scottish Highlands, brothers
Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin (they are both called Sandison but Marcus
uses his middle name) firmly believe that separation from civilisation
is mandatory. 'We go into a "studio lockdown",' explains Marcus, 'where
the only umbilical cord we have to current culture is satellite TV or
the internet. It's something that allows us to switch off for long
periods and create an alternative universe where our music exists.'

The ends fully justify the means. Since breaking through in 1998 with
their landmark full length debut, Music Has the Right To Children,
Boards Of Canada have taken analogue electronica on a solar expedition.
Sparse yet eerily expansive signatures sound cut loose from Earth's
gravity, yet the effect is altogether more human and emotional than
that description might suggest.

After 2002's dense and symmetrical samples on Geogaddi, new album The
Campfire Headphase is a deliberate return to the weird evocations of
grainy Super-8s and Sesame Street heard on MHTRTC. Even the sleeve
looks similar.
'Yeah, exactly,' says Mike 'we've come full circle. With Geogaddi it
went pretty surreal and dark, and this record is like coming back into
the fresh air again.'
Yet TCH isn't the sound of the duo standing thematically or musically
still. 'In itself, the new album has a theme,' continues Mike. 'It's
based on one man's head trip, a kind of vintage American road trip
that's basically just a hallucination. We were going for that kind of
dry, laid-back, wide-open sound.'

The American refernces are appropriate. As children, the brothers
obsessed over American TV programmes such as the Six Million Doallar
Man and dystopian sci-fi films The Andromeda Strain, Logan's Run and
Silent Running. Such wonky soundtracks helped map out the Boards'
wobbly, fluttering sound.

Yet the guitars are only incedental - it's still the Boards'
unmistakable brand of analogue psychedelia and it still sounds
streteched and warped, magical and other-worldly. How do they do
it? 'We just don't like clean sounds,' says Mike. 'We've always loved
making electronic music that doesn't sound typically perfect. I've
always felt that recorded music seems to have something special when
it's worn and damaged.'

In 2005, no one comes close to replicating or bettering the Boards'
imperfect purity. Electronica as a genre may have ceased to be exciting
or beguiling years ago, but can TCH kick-start a fresh reappraisal?
Don't expect any answers from Mike and Marcus. 'We avoid reading all
reviews,' says Mike firmly, 'so we don't know what the world thinks of
our music anyway.' Somehow, you kind of believe him.

Brothers' gonna work it out...

On the new album:
Mike: 'We'd been writing throughout 2003 but the serious work on the
new record began mid-2004. We'd both been travelling quite a bit and
I'd been sketching tracks out in New Zealand where I was living for a
while. We wanted to make a really catchy, spaced-out record.'

On Electronica:
Mike: 'We're not huge fans of electronica specifically. The technology
has made it so easy for anyone to get into producing music, especially
electronic music, that the whole electronica scene has been diluted.
It's allowing a lot of mediocre music to be released.'

On maths:
Marcus:'It's a whole world of amazing patterns and coincidences. The
more you apply maths to the world as we perceive it, the more
fascinating it gets. And it has connections with the way the world is
revealed when you strip half your head away with psychedelics.'

On being 'telepathic':
Mike: 'We're pretty much both on the same wavelength all the time. We
usually don't even have to use complete sentences to convey ideas to
each other. We have a kind of shorthand musical languagethat would
sound like total gobbledygook to anyone else.'

User avatar
Eagle Minded
Status: Offline
Posts: 314
Joined: 23 Sep 2005
Location: Toronto
Oohhh I like that haha, quite ironic that it's called "Metro Life" wouldn't you say?

The whole American road trip hallucination thing goes REALLY well with the sound of the album I think

User avatar
Moderator
Status: Online
Posts: 4241
Joined: 28 Nov 2004
Location: Belgium
Image

Return to Boards of Canada

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 20 guests