oor interview

Everything related to our favorite Scottish duo.

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

Status: Offline
hGc wrote:Maybe I'll translate the full interview later on. But it'll take a long long time...



That's the reason i'm not doing it. :wink:

User avatar
Sherbet Head
Status: Offline
Posts: 779
Joined: 9 Dec 2005
Location: on the farm
Yeah I agree this the best interview i've read so far. Very candid and honest. I think sometimes they're reluctance to talk about certain issues adds to those false ideas about the band, but I guess they are aware of it and perhaps that is why they are being more open. I grew up in the mid to late 70's and lived through all the same stuff that influences them. I never realized how much the cold war still lingers in my psych. Such a messed up time and I hear that in Geogaddi for sure. Its really cool for me to hear someone talk about those old soundtracks, because I know they influenced me alot. I'm new here, but plan on checking in alot. I'm Steve by the way.

Posts Quantity
Status: Offline
Posts: 186
Joined: 28 Oct 2008
Marcus continues: .... I felt this fear again, the fear of the
nuclear bomb I had as a child.



possible reference to the new BoC logo on the warpsite?

User avatar
Sherbet Head
Status: Offline
Posts: 871
Joined: 15 May 2006
Location: Chicago, IL
It'd be great to put these interview scans and text up on the wiki, just link from the [wiki]interviews[/wiki] page. I've been meaning to myself but haven't had the time...

User avatar
Happy Cycler
Status: Offline
Posts: 4933
Joined: 1 Dec 2005
mechanismj wrote:That part about 9/11 is indeed very interesting. Things weren't going so swimingly for me that year either. The reasons they said they make music were just great! You can tell that's what they're shooting for! An escape from the dredges of this retarded life we all lead as adults. A harkening back to the inncence of childhood.

Quite a superb interview. Thanks for translating.


Hey! My first post!

User avatar
Eagle Minded
Status: Offline
Posts: 343
Joined: 11 Jun 2005
In case someone missed it, I'll repost my translation of the HUMO interview here (I think there are a few mistakes, but it is readable):

BOARDS OF CANADA - cross out the inappropriate
‘Today’s youth has no respect anymore for A) Music, B) Acne, and C) Yesterday’s youth’

With their new album ‘The Campfire Headphase’, Boards of Canada – the Scottish electronic duo Marcus Eoin and Michael Sandison – bid farewell to the cult status they achieved after ‘Music Has The Right To Children’ and foremost ‘Geogaddi’. On ‘Campfire’, we didn’t hear any layered, discomforting ambient littered with obscure references, but instead ten surprisingly straightforward sounding tracks full of weathered easy listening, and the melancholy of bruised Fisher Price-toys.

According to the legend, Eoin and Sandison are unworldly hermits living in a Scottish rural community, but the lads we drink cappuccino with right now in the incredibly hip student quarters of Glasgow are dead normal guys in their thirties who – just like us – grew up during the late seventies and early eighties. Read: too young for the first punk wave, drenched with dry new-wave melancholy, heavily brainwashed by trashy American televison series. If you’re still in doubt: Having watched all ‘A-Team’ episodes creates a bond.
MARCUS EOIN (enthousiastic) "Did you hear that on ‘Campfire’, I played a small part that resembles the jingle of Stephen J. Cannell Productions – you know, the producer of ‘The A-Team’?"
HUMO Oops, no.
MARCUS “The closing jingle of ‘The A-Team’? No? You see someone using a typewriter while there’s a ‘tum-tum-tum-tu-dum’ melody playing in the background. It took me a damn day to recreate it perfectly, that’s why I’m happy as a lark when someone tells me he did recognize it (laughs).”
HUMO ‘The Campfire Headphase’ sounds like the tapes have leavened in a humid cellar for twenty years: dead-gorgeous but half vanished. And the cover looks like a used beer mat: the pictures are totally bleached.
MICHAEL SANDISON “You hit the nail on the head. It had to look like the album had been lying on the dashboard of our car since 1980.”
MARCUS “We want to react against the sterile, soulless, gleaming junk that is dominating record stores.”
MICHAEL “I love to browse in my boxes with old cassettes. All those dirty cases I have written on with a marker, the noise between the tracks… absolutely charming!
“In the nineties, producers sometimes mixed the crackling of old vinyl LPs in their tracks to let them sound more authentically. We go much farther: we mutilate our sounds consciously. We don’t have to try really hard, though: a lot of our studio equipment is garbage anyway (laughs).”

“Did you ever hear ‘The Disintegration Loops’ from William Basinski? Basinski, an American producer, wanted to convert his twenty-year-old cassettes to a digital format, but because they had been at the bottom of a drawer for so long, fragments of the magnetic tape came off. But instead of stopping the process to save the tapes, he went on with it and got the dying sounds digitalized and on cd. The results are ancient soundscapes sounding fantastic as well as tragic: you can really hear them pass away. When I read that story, I thought: hey, that’s what we’ve been doing for years: writing tracks using sounds that soak off a feeling of melancholy.
“It bothers me that the kids of today have no respect for music anymore: they quickly listen to a few fragments on the internet and then they decide whether they’ll buy the cd or not. When Marcus and I were young, we treated all of our vinyls with equal respect: even when it was total garbage, we still tried to listen to it as much as possible, sometimes just to deny the fact that we had invested our hard-earned pocket money on a shitty record (laughs). And, more importantly: we went to clubs to see artists live at work, we watched and listened to music on TV and radio, together with our friends we all listened to crappy cassette decks… Music truly was our life, but nowadays it is for a lot of people no more than a leaking tap: everyone, in the office and in the living room, constantly hears sounds coming from their computers, but no-one takes the effort anymore to actually listen to it.
MARCUS “Music has become an occupation for autists: ‘Me and my iPod, and just leave me alone’ – that’s how an ordinary morning in a train is like.”
HUMO (couldn’t translate this one very accurately, it means something like: “you both are talking like two old nostalgic guys!” – someone coming up with a better translation? I can always edit it)
MICHAEL (laughs loudly) “It it stronger than ourselves, but we have nostalgia to our early teen years, when discovering music was an almost mystical experience.”
MARCUS “Mid-seventies until the early eighties: those were the golden years.”
HUMO Try to say that to someone older than forty: you’ll get a rant about ‘those shitty eighties’, that’s for sure.
MICHAEL “They are wrong. The nineties, those sucked (laughs).”
“The eighties were a magical period for us: we were enchanted by music for the first time, smoked our first cigarette, had our first girlfriend. As a young teenager, you’re a blank sheet of photo paper, ready to get exposed to flashes of light: everything that happens to you in these years has an everlasting impact on you life.”
MARCUS “And with our music, we try to translate that nostalgic feeling in sounds. We don’t – like heaps of rock-and electronic bands of today – revert to what is considered the archetypal music of the late seventies and early eighties: we put our experience of that age – with our films, our TV-shows and our music’ – into sounds.”

The fifth chord
HUMO ‘Campfire’ is a great deal more accessible than its predecessor. Didn’t you finally want to – don’t laugh – get access to a wider public?

MARCUS “Superstars at last (laughs)!”
MICHAEL “We’re still proud of ‘Geogaddi’, but let’s get things straight: it was a record for the fans – guys of whom we knew they would have the patience to listen to it attentively anyway, and who would make it a sport to pick out the obscure winks to politics and Satanism. ‘Campfire’ is more of a warning directed to the fans: you better watch out, the next record could perhaps differ even more radically from our earlier work.
“Boards of Canada is a unique project that got a bit out of hand. We wanted to make only one record on which we would pour the dreams of our youth in sounds, but right now we are at album number four already and the end is still not in sight (laugh). But we did once and for all away with a few of our tics: those deformed, eerie voices, those complex and repetitive song structures, and so on. We wanted full-fledged songs, complete with intros, hinges, refrains and bridges. A bit like a rock band, actually. ‘Campfire’, my dear, is officially our first pop record.”
MARCUS “In fact, ‘Geogaddi’ was also pop, albeit of the most hor-rib-ly difficult kind (laughs).”
HUMO A lot of your colleagues would rather keep hanging around in the same strait instead of admitting that you can’t keep being innovative – moreover, it is no crime to make accessible music.
MARCUS (to Michael) “Oh no, I think he means we’re starting to look like Phil Collins
MICHAEL “I know what you mean: many of the artists that were exciting in the past – even Genesis – changed after years in obese forty-year-olds, listening more to their accountant than to each other. But I’m already glad that you don’t insinuate that we’re holding a clearance sale. You wouldn’t be the first: one of your colleagues asked if maybe after ‘Campfire’ we would make - dammit – real pop music.”
HUMO Don’t worry: I’m allergic to people who regard ‘pop’ as a filthy word.
MICHAEL “I’m pleased to hear that, because I don’t understand what some people have against pop music. Take something like Goldfrapp: brilliant band, consisting for three quarters of bits of electronic music and poppy as hell. You can’t possibly be against such a thing, right?”
MARCUS “In the eighties and nineties there existed a strict separation between ‘pop’ – the fastfood from the hit lists – and ‘alternative’ – music for connoisseurs. This division has fortunately disappeared. For me, every artist that is good in what he is doing is ‘pop’ – anything between, let’s say, the Foo Fighters and Missy Elliot. So why wouldn’t Boards of Canada be pop music?”
MICHAEL “With this difference: we let hear a shrill tone at the right moment – in our terminology: the magical fifth chord. If you do something the listener doesn’t expect on the crucial moment, his ear will pay extra attention there the next time he listens: this way, you keep music fascinating.”

Stinking druids
HUMO I’m very disappointed that you guys are – unlike the myth about Boards of Canada – no unworldly druids stinking out of their mouths. You even look suspiciously ordinary.
MARCUS
(laughs) “You’re not the only one who is surprised at that: last years we have given interviews only sporadically, and mostly via e-mail, and since then we read everywhere that we are a bunch of paranoid hermits.”
MICHAEL “We have experienced that journalists make up a story themselves to accompany your music, if need be. In our case: that we live in a community far from the civilized world, renouncing every form of civilization and sacrificing humans. Why it took us so long to be aware of that, is because whe have better things to do than to sift out the professional press.”
MARCUS English music press lives on music groups that don’t exactly make (cautious) special, particular music, but still they’re with their mug on the cover, week after week. We absolutely don’t want that.
MICHAEL “You hear it: the principal reason why we have been sitting here talking to you, is to set the record straight. Boards of Canada are two simple guys who, by chance, make intriguing music.”
HUMO Keep up the good work! And thank you.

Kristoff Tilkin

User avatar
Moderator
Status: Offline
Posts: 4240
Joined: 28 Nov 2004
Location: Belgium
Moebius wrote:It'd be great to put these interview scans and text up on the wiki, just link from the [wiki]interviews[/wiki] page. I've been meaning to myself but haven't had the time...


hGc wrote:In case someone missed it, I'll repost my translation of the HUMO interview here (I think there are a few mistakes, but it is readable)


I've uploaded the scans and a basic template for some interviews which were missing, behold:

But all of them need a transcription inserted.

HELP NEEDED! 8)

User avatar
Friendly Stranger
Status: Offline
Posts: 21
Joined: 25 May 2009
Location: West Yorkshire, UK
Quality interview, thanks a lot for putting it up! :D

User avatar
Dayvan Cowboy
Status: Offline
Posts: 1118
Joined: 25 Feb 2006
Location: Texas
I can't remember, did anyone figure out where on the album the A-Team jingle was?

User avatar
Happy Cycler
Status: Offline
Posts: 4933
Joined: 1 Dec 2005
ryetronics wrote:I can't remember, did anyone figure out where on the album the A-Team jingle was?


I always thought it was in the song 84 Pontiac Dream but I could be wrong.

User avatar
Sherbet Head
Status: Offline
Posts: 738
Joined: 29 Sep 2005
mechanismj wrote:
ryetronics wrote:I can't remember, did anyone figure out where on the album the A-Team jingle was?


I always thought it was in the song 84 Pontiac Dream but I could be wrong.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvncv4xkHzQ

everything you do is a balloone

User avatar
Happy Cycler
Status: Offline
Posts: 4720
Joined: 7 Jun 2007
Location: the system
This is definitely a great interview to read. Especially since it does something I don't often get to do with an experience that started out as mysterious and personal (think: the first time I ever heard MhtRtC, alone with my feelings, after the worst breakup of my life). The secret originators of the "experience" talk -back- to you, about that first experience. It's as if you meet the old gypsy woman who changed your life when you were 5 again when you're 40, and she reveals she was just working at a carnival to feed her kids. I don't say this as a bad thing. But it's sobering and very realistic. And I realized something else - I'm nothing like BoC themselves. I loved the 90s. I disagree with just about every 2nd or 3rd thing they said in this interview! And each time I do it gives me heart and makes me happy, because I know for sure that my music will definitely be my own, and that I'm not attached to them or their music in some way that's stunting my growth.

A lot of times on Twoism people cheer and applaud BoC's personal views they give in interviews, and I had never thought deeply about this behavior, but now after a little reflection I can say I'm proud I'm not them - I belong to a totally different camp, I'm a different batch, a child of 86 and living in another world. I can rest assured the music I make will, as long as I take the loving and thoughtful and self-reflective approach to my music I have so far, be a new thing and a different thing that sets people back on their heels in a way DIFFERENT from how BoC does to people.
another silo full / another dark dawn / bending the air / love is so small

returnal \ you've never left \ you've been here the whole time

User avatar
Dayvan Cowboy
Status: Offline
Posts: 1279
Joined: 24 Aug 2007
turquoise70 wrote:And I realized something else - I'm nothing like BoC themselves. I loved the 90s. I disagree with just about every 2nd or 3rd thing they said in this interview! And each time I do it gives me heart and makes me happy, because I know for sure that my music will definitely be my own, and that I'm not attached to them or their music in some way that's stunting my growth.


I had the same exact thoughts reading this interview. It's really sorta satisfying to be able to finally admit that. I'm a sucker for lo-fi electronic music goodness, but recording onto old tape cassettes is not really for me.

I do agree with their stance on music listening though. It depresses me to how lightly kids today are into music, jumping onto whatever new music hits the charts, whatever MTV puts on their station. Even kids who make music today seem to have no experimentation. At least that's how it is around where I live.

Telepath
Status: Offline
Posts: 9999
Joined: 19 Nov 2005
Shadowshocker wrote:I do agree with their stance on music listening though. It depresses me to how lightly kids today are into music, jumping onto whatever new music hits the charts, whatever MTV puts on their station. Even kids who make music today seem to have no experimentation. At least that's how it is around where I live.


I agree to some extent. Even though some amazing ideas come from the most unexpected kind of musicians.

User avatar
Sherbet Head
Status: Offline
Posts: 977
Joined: 23 Apr 2009
wonderful! purveyors of the fifth chord. god knows i've failed finding that one

User avatar
Sherbet Head
Status: Offline
Posts: 738
Joined: 29 Sep 2005
[quote="turquoise70"][/quote]

Sooo when, regarding your presence, will you drop the PBS arpeggio/wobbly TV nostalgia/wildlife analysis/Boards of Canada/acid stare baby blanket? Conceptually, what are you doing?

User avatar
Dayvan Cowboy
Status: Offline
Posts: 2305
Joined: 20 Jun 2006
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
dave i disagree with the premise of that comment
i feel cole's music is something in the same genre, rather than a clone of, that type of music...
i think to say that the music is in a baby blanket is a bit obtuse to be honest,
and if you still disagree
when are you dropping the scales and modes and tuning baby blanket?

User avatar
Happy Cycler
Status: Offline
Posts: 4720
Joined: 7 Jun 2007
Location: the system
meh, everyone's entitled to their opinion :D IMO every death metal band sounds exactly identical, but my doom friends would crucify me if I tried to say they were all biting each others' style and should shoot off in another musical direction purely for the sake of not sounding similar to the bands that inspired them.
another silo full / another dark dawn / bending the air / love is so small

returnal \ you've never left \ you've been here the whole time

User avatar
Sherbet Head
Status: Offline
Posts: 738
Joined: 29 Sep 2005
Techboy wrote:dave i disagree with the premise of that comment
i feel cole's music is something in the same genre, rather than a clone of, that type of music...
i think to say that the music is in a baby blanket is a bit obtuse to be honest,
and if you still disagree
when are you dropping the scales and modes and tuning baby blanket?


I like BN lots... The blanket is the ephemera... I mean the tunes are awesome, but that's such a specific course, even if the concept grew up organically, without premise, its too close and too late. The decision was not made to steer away. BOC's particular gravity should be avoided to prevent artistic suffocation. There isn't a genre! Just their style and for everyone else a genre. Dissapointing if you think you came up with it, but just gotta keep walking.

Can you rephrase the last question? I can read it a few ways so I have two barrel anwsers. It was a playful lampoon specific to guerilla advertising the yahoo BOC blog (c.1998!) and not to be taken seriously. I don't! Its dead now and BOC blew up so who cares.

User avatar
Happy Cycler
Status: Offline
Posts: 4720
Joined: 7 Jun 2007
Location: the system
as i said you're totally welcome to your opinion, although my perspective is just that i never really set out to revolutionize art here, to be honest i am a really sophomoric and easily amused kind of guy, so i just wanted to make some music i thought sounded cool and use said music to speak from the heart using some ideas i'd heard and some i'd made up. the idea was really that crude and that dumb. basement stuff. but i don't think it's too close to boc. then again, i'll drink any beer you hand me.
another silo full / another dark dawn / bending the air / love is so small

returnal \ you've never left \ you've been here the whole time

PreviousNext

Return to Boards of Canada

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 32 guests