12 Days of Aniblogging 2024, Day 6I promised a more sketched-out music post this year, and while I got into a ton of artists in 2024, there was only one where my listening experience was a narrative that practically writes itself. That would of course be the Boards of Canada, those elusive Scots.Every once in a while, an electronic musician will write an objectively perfect song. I’m talking about the kind of instrumental that you listen to once and can immediately imagine living inside. To me, the genres of ambient and IDM are the study of making such songs. Every musician in that sphere worth their salt will stumble onto one eventually. Rhubarb by Aphex Twin is a particularly iconic example amongst the Selected Ambientheads. Autuchre’s Slip is perhaps the earliest of their Perfect Songs, of which they have many. And then there’s the works of Eno and Squarepusher and Plaid…. there’s just something about the United Kingdom that births a lot of these guys for whatever reason. Anyways, after going through Boards of Canada’s discography, I can safely add Roygbiv to that hypothetical list of Perfect Songs.I’m not the best at describing sonics, so I’m just gonna post the song. It’s only two and a half minutes, but could have just as easily been ten.While Roygbiv is the obvious standout track on their first album, Music Has the Right to Children, the whole thing operates on this wavelength. Samples from 70’s public-access television combined with addictive downtempo beats and impressively warm synths, swapping off between long, hypnotic tracks and shorter soundscape-y interludes. All of these songs have the potential to just get stuck in your brain for days. The production doesn’t feel like it’s aged one bit since 1998, which is a byproduct of how it’s invoking the unique feeling of decontextualized memories from someone else’s childhood. Nostalgia, but for what? There’s a sense of comfort, but everything’s just a bit hazy and on edge as well. Like there’s someone watching from the other room, even if it’s probably just your mom and dinner is soon.Their second album, Geogaddi, uses similar production techniques but fully leans into the discomfort. It’s quite the unsettling album! Songs like Gyroscope have percussion that’s mixed to feel uncomfortably close to the listener, which interplays perfectly with the warbling binaural voices to create a bad time. Even the “brighter” songs like Sunshine Recorder and Julie And Candy have an creepy side to them borne out of reversed samples and synths, like the whole soundscape could descend into horror at any time. And then everything after that is a descent into horror. The interlude songs start getting freaky, then Alpha and Omega doesn’t help things at all. It’s seven minutes of a surprisingly catchy synth progression that never quite resolves, just looping back into itself while feeling like it’s rising in tension forever and ever. It’s like the Mario 64 endless staircase music but for dancing around a fire after sunset. In this case though, the background ambience is actually getting more suffocating as the song goes on, until it eventually chokes out the lead. Meanwhile, The Devil Is In The Details seems practically engineered for freakouts, with its impossibly wet ambience, ominous melody, and vocals that sound like someone is gargling water. It’s like being in a bog at night as a disembodied voice whispers into your ear. I Do Not Like It! Things start to lighten up after that, but there’s still plenty of spooky samples and stomach-churning auditory textures before the album reaches a haunting and beautiful end in Corsair.As I’ve been detailing, the production alone is enough to make this album creepy as hell. But then you get curious and start checking the wikis and learn that Geogaddi is full of subliminal messaging and references to the Branch Davidians and numerology and Satanism and some truly nasty child abuse. It’s borderline childish, the way that a teenager might get into the occult for the sake of being a contrarian edgelord. Like sure, Boards of Canada set out to create a comically evil album, so they made sure to stuff it with whatever subliminal spookies they could think of. Unfortunately though, even when you rationally understand it as a prank, you still can’t wash away the knowledge of what it’s trying to invoke. Remember how I said that these guys are great at creating songs that get wedged into the back of your brain for days? That’s still true for Geogaddi, but this time around the songs are creepy as shit!!. Normally I can wash out earworms by just listening to something else, but something about Boards of Canada leaves me fully unable to. And let me tell you, you do not want The Devil Is In The Details lodged in your brain while you’re alone at night.So what’s a girl to do but fight fire with fire? I decided to listen to more Boards of Canada to try and steer my mind elsewhere, since other music clearly wasn’t doing it. The Campfire Headphase didn’t really leave much of an impression, so I moved on to their fourth and final album, Tomorrow’s Harvest. This was not a good decision!You see, Tomorrow’s Harvest is a difficult listen for reasons completely orthogonal to Geogaddi’s. It’s their film score for the apocalypse. Released in 2013 after a long hiatus, Tomorrow’s Harvest is strongly inspired by Cold War disaster movies about the Earth becoming nigh uninhabitable due to some combination of famine, plague, climate change, and nuclear strikes. The vibes are bleak. Plenty of ominous synth pieces giving way to percussive tracks that manage to sound downright mournful. Jacquard Causeway is like the doomed mirror to Roygbiv – it’s built on this lurching mechanical sample, with an entire world gradually building up through the background ambience before the machine gives out and everything fades away. The back half of Tomorrow’s Harvest is noticeably less devastating, taking some moments to reflect on hubris and religion and renewal if the song titles and samples can be trusted. But the final track ends the thing on an even more dour note than it started on.With its on-the-nose theming and its cover art of a ghostly San Francisco skyline, Tomorrow’s Harvest was clearly colored by anxieties over humanity’s future. The thing is, the members of BoC have been deliberately cagey about this in interviews, instead stating that “it’s not post-apocalyptic so much as it is about an inevitable stage that lies in front of us.” Hell of an artist’s statement! It’s a far more upsetting answer than just saying that your album was inspired by climate concerns or whatever. I respect the take, but it haunts me just like the rest of this album haunts me. Geogaddi is scary in a fairly juvenile way, but Tomorrow’s Harvest was like a pit in my stomach.So that’s the context for how I had a multi-day freakout fueled by getting into Boards of Canada. I assume this kind of thing happens regularly to people with more magical outlooks than mine, and also those who really like drugs, but it was a fairly novel experience for me! Wouldn’t want it to happen again, but I think it speaks to the power of Boards of Canada to create such impactful music, even if it did cause Problems for a bit. I’ve made my peace with these troublesome albums, through both time and recontextualization. I put on individual songs from both occasionally when the mood feels right, and it turns out that a lot of these tracks make for great TTRPG scoring!Like any electronic band, Boards of Canada have a lot of EPs and bootlegs and demos lying around. Of particular interest are some early Geogaddi outtakes from before they decided to make it evil, which are collected in a 2000 EP titled In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country. With the clarity of hindsight, this would have actually been the thing to calm me down. It’s good downtempo stuff that feels like a perfect blend of the approaches on their first and second albums, a four-track EP where I like all four songs! There’s still a ton of Branch Davidian references, but like, it’s chill about it.
Dec 19, 2024 • Subscribe
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