I can have a go at the Trax if no-ones really done it. Not sure of my translation in a couple of places but it should be pretty close
The splendid Geogaddi marks the grand return of the cult Boards of Canada, the most mysterious group in the electronic sphere and uncontested masters of warm and nostalgic electronica.
Finally. Almost 4 years we've waited for this moment. Since the release in April 1998 of the sublime album "Music Has The Right To Children", the multifaceted electronica of the Scottish duo Boards of canada hasn't ceased haunting our record player and our souls. Certainly, it was a year and a half since the four tracks of the EP A Beautiful Place Out In The Country provided an interlude of sorts, just to disappoint the expectations of the growing tribe of lovers of the naive and nostalgic compositions of Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin. And then suddenly the release of Geogaddi, constantly pushed back, was announced just as we could no longer believe it. No promo discs sent out in the press, zero sensational statements: practically a strategy of absence, in the end not surprising for a group which have always cultivated if not the sense of secret, at least that of absolute discretion.
Preferring to express themselves through the grace, the melody, and the mystery emanating from their compositions, the two accomplices refuse most of the time to meet journalists. Or on the internet this rare interview, sometimes cryptic, whose concretization is apparent only after a obstacle course: no photo shoots, questions transmitted by email, a label which loses track of them... But only the result counts and since having left the last time legions of imitators in a well cluttered electronica scene, there is still place for the originals.
Why so much mystery around your personalities?
Mike: I like to believe that the music speaks for us. We never had the intention of becoming pop stars. We aren't interested by the fact of becoming famous people. We think that that kind of desire affects the music. Or, it's the music which has to be important. We have never wanted to become a cult group. We try just to keep to ourselves, but sometimes things escape out of our control. In the absence of information about our personalities, people started to go crazy. From the beginning, we decided to stay back and not have our heads on the covers of magazines. But we couldn't have foreseen how this attitude would make people even more curious!
Boards of Canada is often hailed as the best electronica group...
Marcus: What a huge compliment! I don't know if we deserve that. Its a bit strange because we have a hard time imagining there are people who listen to our music. We are locked away on our own, in our little world, and we thought we were the only people listening to our music.
What do you think of your imitators?
Marcus: Sometimes, I hear the compositions of other groups and I get the impression that our sound influenced them. But where I see more similarity is with the music used by advertising in cinema or on the television. It's funny because one of our biggest sources of inspiration was exactly the sound of jingles and TV commercials. So the loop is closed, if we in turn influenced those who actually compose for TV.
Classic is certainly the most used adjective your music evokes...
Mike: We effectively try to compose music capable of resisting the ravages of time. Its for that reason that we avoid putting together pieces which relate to a particular musical style. We'd rather that people who listen to our records in 20 years always find something special there outside of other music.
What was your mindset during the planning of Geogaddi?
Marcus: We realised it over a long period, almost two years. So our mindset was really fluctuating. We had highs and lows in our personal lives, which were probably reflected in the hills and valleys of our music.
Is Geogaddi a concept album?
Mike: Its a collection of ideas we wanted to put into practice. We had nothing planned, we were in a certain mindset and we tried to write as many pieces as possible. In the end we could have come up with another album which would have been completely different with all the pieces we had to leave aside. All the same, Geogaddi has a sort of theme around brainwashing and recovered memories.
What is the meaning of Geogaddi?
Marcus: That's for the listener to find! For us it's a combination of words that hide all the influences behind the album. If the listener can detect those influences they understand the meaning of Geogaddi.
Naive, psychedelic and melancolic: do these descriptions correspond to this album?
Marcus: Yes, but its even more than that. Certain words can be too cliché where our music is described. If certain titles sound too naive or simple it's because we know what we're doing, we meant them to sound that way.
What word best corresponds to how you feel when you're composing: suffering, joy, liberation?
Mike: All three at once. Suffering, because of the amount of work we put into each song and the time we take out from our real life just to create the music. Joy of creating a work which finally satisfies us, and which goes beyond the meeting of several sounds together. And liberation, because of the time when you've finished a piece or an album, the process of completely escaping and you can make new plans.
Geogaddi uses a lot of voice...
Mike: We like the sound of voices. You don't need to understand the meaning of the words, sometimes it's enough to hear a voice or a certain word. We like that idea of suggesing certain words or phrases. In the future, we'd like to do something entirely vocal. Elsewhere we already recorded pieces in that style.
The last track is completely silent. Is that the quarter hour of humour in the album?
Mike: All depends if you think that it's silence or not... We put it there because it seemed to us that the track before, "Corsair" is so beautiful that it could only be followed with silence, a sort of meditative parenthesis. We just didn't want the atmosphere of the last track to be wasted by the sound of the CD finishing or the turntable going "cling clang".
What is your secret to making technologic music sound so organic?
Marcus: I don't think there is a secret. Just using a certain number of possible techniques to find warm sounds. We prefer the sound of the sixties and the seventies because it was analog, and it's that which a number of current productions are missing. Since we came out with Twoism in 1994 the electronic scene has become enormous. It's inevitable that with the development of technology it's become easy to compose with a minimum of equipment, a computer and some software. The electronic artists which I respect remember that the music is something else than complex beats programmed with software. Cornelius for example uses an enormous amount of technologiy but makes it very warm, very human. Today its very easy to make something clean and very well produced, completely "in tune". But that forgets a bit quickly that it's the imperfections of old recordings which gives them their character. By working hard, it's possible to recreate those defects. Anyway, we don't often listen to electronic music.
You attatch a lot of importance to visuals...
Mike: With the sleeves, we try to create a graphic style that completes the sound. We work all the time on the visual aspect: for example we create shorts in Super 8 to accompany our concerts... We don't consider that as just an accesory because when we compose we often imagine a sountrack for a film or a visual work. After, when we give a concert or when we decide the graphics of a sleve, we like that these ideas are underlying.
How do you relax?
Mike: We go out with our friends, we have parties, campfires. We try to always be outside, to spend time at the beach with our friends. I drive a lot in my car. Sometimes I bring my girlfriend to France. And we spend days listening to records which they send us. Marcus always spends his free time snowboarding in France. We also conduct survival courses.
Last edited by
Negamuse on Sun Sep 08, 2013 9:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.