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.

[magrathea_ultima]

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.

Oh with the tools and AI today, you can pretty much make it undistinguishable with minimal effort, at least back in the day, to forge, you had to actually know what you were doing.

may I interest you in master forgerer Tony Tetro's story, using aged canvases to repaint so that they would match the forged work's era, aging the paint used, the provenance of said paints, oils, etc, faking the smoke and crackling it was quite involved. Quite a fun story to read tho, look it up.

[harpoon dodger]

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.

Was it this site you were thinking of? It doesn't really have a full "review" of the early stuff but does mention each one. The way it's written implies they heard it...but maybe they were just listening to fakes? Either way, it does seem to be Italian in origin.

https://www.scaruffi.com/vol6/boardsof.html

FWIW, I stumbled onto this site a couple month back digging for pre-Twoism info. Not sure if others are aware of it. These tracks definitely make one wonder tho....

[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.

Was it this site you were thinking of? It doesn't really have a full "review" of the early stuff but does mention each one. The way it's written implies they heard it...but maybe they were just listening to fakes? Either way, it does seem to be Italian in origin.

https://www.scaruffi.com/vol6/boardsof.html

FWIW, I stumbled onto this site a couple month back digging for pre-Twoism info. Not sure if others are aware of it. These tracks definitely make one wonder tho....

Oh man, I TOTALLY forgot about this page (Outhudd, the origin was Italian after all!) It must be at least two decades old. I'm as puzzled now as I was then by how much inside knowledge this writer seems to have.

Does anyone know much about the person who wrote this?

For preservation and posterity, here's everything in the writeup linked above up to the paragraph that covers the release of MHTRTC:

When they formed in the mid 1980s, Boards Of Canada were originally a commune of Scottish artists and musicians, but they quickly thinned down to a trio and then eventually to the duo of electronic musicians Michael Sanderson and Marcus Eoin. They released four cassettes between 1987 and 1993. Catalogue 3 (Music70, 1987 - Music70, 1997) has three lengthy tracks of rather uneventful ambient electronica (Line Two, Breach Tones, Visual Drone 12) and two shorter tracks. Their mellow, disjointed electronica was not particularly revolutionary. Acid Memories (Music70, 1989) is even less imposing, as are the 17 short pieces of Closes Volume 1 (Music70, 1993 - Music70, 1997), but Play By Numbers (Music 70, 1994), with the 9-minute Infinite Lines Of Colourful Sevens, showcased a more creative approach.

The EP Hooper Bay (MUsic 70, 1994), whose extended compositions are Seward Leaf, Noatak and Point Hope, heralded their mature phase, which yielded the 20 ambient tracks of the album Boc Maxima (MUsic 70, 1995), particularly the melancholy Everything You Do Is A Balloon and their early masterpiece Turquoise Hexagon Sun.

After the EP Twoism (Music 70, 1996 - Warp, 2002), the best tracks of the early years were reprised on Hi Scores (Skam, 1996) and revealed the duo to a broader audience. More doors were opened in 1998 by a fantastic single that coupled Telephasic Workshop (a mechanical ballet and vocal barbeque), and Roygbiv (a catchy lullaby that could have been on Tonto's Expanding Head Band's first album).

[EnforcedNo]

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.

If this is a fake I have to imagine that it's a fake that was created recently. To my ears, the bits we've heard before are altered or expanded upon enough that this obviously isn't just somebody looping what was already out there at the time. So if it's a more complicated forgery, it seems complicated enough that somebody would've had to be pretty dedicated to have put this all together in the early 2000s. That + composing the last track, which is thematically consistent with the previous two.

IDK maybe I've been dormant long enough to get my naiveté back but I'm inclined to think they're legit. I went ahead and dropped a friendly comment for our mystery uploader on track B2 asking him to take another look around for that missing A side. Either way I like the tracks