We've started up! Join us as we explore Boards of Canada's earliest and most enigmatic works - the Old Tunes and mysterious lost albums.
We've started up! Join us as we explore Boards of Canada's earliest and most enigmatic works - the Old Tunes and mysterious lost albums.
[sampled audio]
The royal family should be left in peace!
...like having an upright. In the palm of your hand!
The devil is lightweight, devil powerful, devil has a wider thing, devil
with a revolving brush. Get a devil!
[end sampled audio]
Hello and welcome BOC-heads (BOC-heads? Boards? Whatever BOC fans are called) to this week’s episode of Turquoise Hexagon podcast, a For Tune Telling series. Each season of For Tune Telling will conduct a deep dive into a particular musician or band, and our first series focuses on the renowned electronic music duo Boards of Canada. Today, we’ll be going back into what you might think of as the group’s dark ages - before the widespread success of their Warp debut Music Has the Right to Children, when you were most likely to find them playing their tunes around bonfires in Scotland’s Pentland Hills, or passing around informal compilation tapes to their friends; before even Twoism was available through IDM mailing lists. Today, we will be looking at Boards of Canada’s Old Tunes.
The presence of rare, unobtainable recordings always contributes to a band’s legend - the Beach Boys had Smile, for Godspeed You! Black Emperor it was the now-leaked “All Lights Fucked On the Hairy Amp Drooling,” and then there’s the Wu-Tang Clan’s single-copy holy grail “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.” Boards of Canada, however, are unique for the sheer number of lost albums they lay claim to - at least 5 records that they have referenced as part of their discography have never seen wide distribution and remain unavailable even on the net, with the existence of thousands of other unreleased, archived tracks suggested, and a number of other compilations that have eventually trickled out to filesharing networks without ever seeing official release. But, let’s start at the beginning.
Much of what’s known about the band’s very first recordings comes from their old website. These days, boardsofcanada.com just redirects to their Bleep store where you can buy albums and t-shirts, but back in the late 90s and early 2000s, it was a treasure trove of information, audio clips, and interactive art. Snippets of music would play on loops, some from songs that had been or would be officially released, others that never appeared anywhere else. One area of the website resembled a flight simulator, where you could soar over a rudimentary landscape of mountains and islands to a pulsing beat (eventually re-used in the song Seven Forty Seven). Elsewhere, you could control distorted images using your mouse to a BOC soundtrack.
Tucked away under the “discography” section was a listing of all of the BOC releases up to that point in time (the latest being 2000’s IABPOITC), and it is here that we find the first official mention of the now legendary collector’s items that comprise the band’s earliest recordings. In chronological order, they were Catalog 3 (1987), Acid Memories (1989), Closes Vol. 1 (1992), Play By Numbers (1994), and Hooper Bay (1994). For each release a track listing, cover, and catalog number was provided. In several cases the number of copies and the media type was included, too - the site claims, for instance, that there were 100 copies of Closes vol. 1 on cassette and 30 on CD, 200 copies of Hooper Bay, and that Catalog 3, initially released on cassette, was repressed on CD in 1997.
None of these albums are known to have been heard by the general public, with the exception of three snippets posted on the EHX website. The clips were a 30-second cut of “Duffy,” the opening track of Acid Memories, a clip from the Hooper Bay track “Circle,” and a roughly minute-long excerpt of Play By Numbers’ “Wouldn’t You Like To Be Free?”
Nevertheless, some descriptions of these records’ content have filtered out to the world at large, with the best example being probably an article that appeared in the December 2000 issue of British music magazine Jockey Slut. The article was titled “Boards of the Underground” and contained an in-depth interview with Michael and Marcus, a list of their likes and dislikes, a set of their tips on starting bonfires, and, most notably, a near-complete discography of their work up to that point, including three of the unreleased pre-Twoism albums
Author Richard Southern describes the albums as follows:
Absurdly rare, cassette-only release from the barely teen Boards, then six-strong. Guitars meet electronics in embryonic but recognisably Boards-ian melodicism.
Five-track CD from what was now a trio, boasting a My Bloody Valentine influence in places, shifting further into electronics in others.
Closer still: the use of kids' voices was a hint of what was to come. People pay small fortunes for copies.
The source of these descriptions is left ambiguous. Did Southern collect them second-hand from BOC? Or did he actually hear the music himself?
As for the brothers themselves, they’ve only mentioned these early releases directly once, in a 2005 interview with Go Magazine (originally in Spanish).
Mike said:
“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.”
Marcus added:
“In all these years, 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.”
Beyond these tapes, there are also three other compilations of early, leaked BOC material that weren’t listed on the website. The first two, A Few Old Tunes and Old Tunes vol. 2, were created by the band themselves and passed out to friends, family, and prospective record labels in the mid to late 90s. These were leaked onto Soulseek in the early 2000s. Images of the hand-written covers and liner notes would reveal the tracks were “mostly recorded between 1991 and 1995,” and would also make reference to several of the band’s early collaborators in the Hexagon Sun collective (notably Simon Yuill, Peter Iain Campbell, and Chris Horne, aka “Christ.”)
Shortly thereafter, another set of tracks surfaced on file-sharing platforms, under the name “Boards of Canada - Random 35 tracks tape (not old tunes vol. 1 or vol. 2).” The titular 35 tracks were all untitled, and most had never been heard by the public before (with the exception of several songs from the Old Tunes tapes and a reversed version of The Smallest Weird Number, which eventually wound up on Geogaddi). The file names reflect the compilation’s apparent origin as a tape, with the first 15 tracks labeled “Audiotrack A01, A02,” etc, while the final 20 are listed as Side B.
One of the earliest known online mentions of the Random 35 Tracks Tape was in September 2004 on the Livejournal account of a BOC fan going by the name “snowblinded,” who suggested it may have been Closes vol. 2 (a reference to the unreleased “Closes vol. 1” album). Snowblinded wrote:
“I wanted to let everybody know that there are some mysterious boc tracks floating around soulseek. Its not oranges and flowers, 106, a few old tunes, or any of the old material. It first surfaced about 2-3 weeks ago. It sounds like an old promo/album to me. And it’s been ripped from cassette tape. As far as I can tell there are 13 songs. The quality is low with the common tape hiss. The interesting part is the actual mixing of tracks sounds more professional than a few old tunes. It sounds like it comes from the twoism era or a little before. Maybe it's Closes Volume 2? To find the release on slsk, search for ‘boards of canada demo’ or ‘boards of canada tape.’ I am a huge boc fan and I'm interested to see what people think? My slsk handle: alpinaluna, feel free to DL it, if I'm online.”
Although the post mentions only 13 tracks, the comments confirm that the Random 35 Tracks Tape is the subject of the discussion - one user mentions that the set includes “House of Abin’adab” from A Few Old Tunes, and The Smallest Weird Number from Geogaddi in reverse, both of which appear on the 35 track tape, while another directly states that the 13 tracks mentioned in the original post were taken from a longer collection with a total of 35.
There was debate over the collection’s authenticity until September 2009, when Hexagon Sun member MDG confirmed on the Twoism message board that the tracks were legitimate, but that it was unknown who had compiled them. This has led to speculation that the Random 35 Tracks Tape was a custom-made “best of” mix put together by someone with access to a large amount of unreleased Boards of Canada material, and conjecture that some of the untitled songs contained on it actually originate from the “lost” albums, such as Play By Numbers and Hooper Bay.
There’s some circumstantial evidence to support this possibility. For example, Track A14 from the Random 35 Tracks Tape was floating around on Soulseek labeled “Godever (closes vol. 1)” It’s 1:46 long with a fade-out, only 5 seconds off from Godever’s listed 1:51 time.
Indeed, many of the tracks fade in and out, or are edited together with crossfades, leaving uncertainty as to which songs are complete, and whether track lengths are even useful as a way of matching tracks up to pre-Twoism releases. Nevertheless, we can still speculate about which of the Random 35 Track Tape songs might be from BOC’s lost albums. Some possibilities include:
-Audiotrack A04. At just 50 seconds long, this short interlude track, mixing distorted acoustic guitars with incomprehensible radio noise and vocal samples, is an exact track-length match with “Close1” from Closes vol. 1.
-Audiotrack A06. This song contains a spooky, ethereal sample that would later be used on the track Seven Forty Seven, released on the “Warp 20 Unheard” compilation. BOC’s official YouTube video playlist includes a fan video for this song that titles it “5D” - track 5 from Closes vol. 1 - which could be seen as a quiet confirmation that this is indeed another lost Closes track.
-Audiotrack A08. Some have suggested this could be “Infinite Lines of Colorful Sevens” from Play By Numbers, but personally I don’t see any evidence for this at all. Infinite Lines is over 9 minutes long, whereas A08 is under 7, and there’s no trace of the shoegaze influence supposedly present on Play By Numbers.
-Audiotrack B01 is 1:29 long, an almost exact match to the 1:28 seconds of “Focus On The Spiral” from Closes Vol. 1. The song also reminds me of a spiral, for whatever that’s worth, which is not much.
-Audiotrack B04, containing a strummed acoustic guitar with an electronic beat that builds throughout the song, has a similar track-length to “Numerator” from 1994’s Play By Numbers. Something about the guitar part also strikes me as reminiscent of My Bloody Valentine - particularly the chord progression - but I can’t quite put my finger on what. Other fans believe this track more likely comes from 1989’s Acid Memories, particularly because of Southern’s description of “guitars meeting electronics.”
-Audiotrack B14 is 3:15 long, compared to the 3:19 of Closes Vol. 1’s “Trillions,” leading to speculation that they could be the same track.
At the end of the day, though, it’s all speculation. Track times are a highly unreliable way of identifying these songs, especially considering the editing of the tape; on top of that, we’re working from vague second or third hand descriptions of what the albums actually even sound like.
There is another angle to take with the supposed “lost albums” as well, which is the question of whether or not they even exist. Over the years, some fans have grown skeptical, with the reasoning that if there were indeed hundreds of copies of these records out there - between the dozens of cassettes, vinyl prints, and CD represses of each of the five albums - it’s pretty hard to believe that not one of them would have made its way onto the internet after three decades. Not a single track from them has leaked. There’s not even a single verified picture of any of the releases’ sleeves, cases, or liner notes. The only evidence of their existence comes from their listing in the discography section of BOC’s old website, the three short excerpts that were posted on EHX, and Richard Southern’s Jockey Slut article.
Beyond that, there are some inconsistencies in the timeline when it comes to these albums. As I mentioned in the last episode, BOC stated in a 1998 interview they’d only been using the name Boards of Canada for four years, so since ‘94. But the covers for Catalog 3, Acid Memories, and Closes vol. 1 posted on the old website, and supposedly all released long before 1994, show the name “Boards of Canada.” So either they’d been using the Boards name much longer than they said, or the covers at the very least aren’t from the time period that’s claimed. Were the “lost” albums originally just unlabeled cassettes circulated as compilations among friends, with covers made up later on for the website? Possibly. It just adds a wrinkle to the story.
There’s also the fact that Mike and Marcus are known to have made up song titles and bands to troll the public on at least one occasion. In 1999, each of them submitted their supposed “top 10 favorite new tracks” to the US magazine CMJ New Music Report. Most of the bands and the songs seem to have been totally made up, with artist names such as “Seagy Eyeball” and “Randy Rodd” (which they may have picked up from an old 70s porno), while a couple were aliases of themselves or their friends (Hell Interface - How Will I Know, which is also the title of a Whitney Houston song, and Delicass Harmonium by Arkady, another name used by Chris Horne). Each of their lists also included a track supposedly by the band “Magic Teens,” which was just a reference to a track on their “Old Tunes” compilation.
Finally, there are some curious comments posted by the electronic music artist Evan Snyder, also known as Skytree, on the Twoism fan forums. Skytree is a friend and collaborator of former Hexagon Sun associate Christ. and claims to have listened to old tapes of BOC music. In a 2009 thread titled “Old Casettes”(sic), regarding the lost albums, a user named “Dave from 2001” posted a picture of the Loch Ness Monster, seeming to imply that the records are a myth. In response, Skytree said “actually more akin to this,” and posted an obviously fake picture of a UFO, which was being held up on a string. Later on in the thread (Sept 3 2009), he made a post that now simply said “...sorry for the profuse edits...still can't bring myself to state it publicly. MDG or Boards should, though. The truth shall set you free.”
All of these things combined - the inconsistencies between the album art and the origin of the BOC name, the fact that the brothers have referenced fake band names and songs, and these generally overlooked statements by someone with connections to a former BOC collaborator, could provide circumstantial evidence that the albums never actually existed to begin with.
And if they were invented, why? Some of the skeptics suggest that it was to form a mystique and build interest in their band early on, or maybe started out as a joke that went too far to take back.
At any rate it's unlikely we'll know the truth unless the albums themselves ever see the light of day, and this looks increasingly unlikely. MDG stated in the past (Aug 2008) that a box set of old material was looking "99% likely to happen," and that it wasn't 100% because it "hadn't been finally compiled" yet. However, since that time the only word on the unreleased old material from the band has come in a 2013 New York Times interview accompanying the release of Tomorrow's Harvest, in which Mike said they were "tidying up and collating all [their early recordings… just for ourselves really, to know that we could tidy it all up and hand it on to our kids someday." Implying to me, at least, that their intention is not for these tracks to see public release.
No more word has been said on the subject in the near decade since.
Of more certain provenance are the two compilations “A Few Old Tunes” (also known as “Old Tunes Volume 1”) and “Old Tunes Volume 2.” Released in 1996 to friends and fellow musicians such as Mike Paradinas and Sean Booth, they eventually found their way onto P2P networks. The first volume contains 30 tracks across two sides, while the second contains a total of 36 tracks, for a combined total of nearly 2 ½ hours of music.
If you’ll remember back in last episode, the Matador bio of BOC said that in their early days they hosted so-called Red Moon parties where “bonfires were accompanied by electronic music, processed television themes, films, projections and reversed speech tapes to create an exciting, if slightly threatening, atmosphere.” This style of music is most apparent on the Old Tunes vol. 1 and 2 compilations, which display a plunderphonics philosophy, liberally sampling from television, theme songs, advertisements, pornography, and other sources. Throughout, commercials, television shows, and PSAs have been cut and respliced together to create humorous and often unsettling effects. In “Light, Clear Hair,” (track 2 of volume 1) a snippet of two women talking, presumably about an outfit or makeover, is repeated over and over again, made to flow seamlessly together as though the women are truly stuck in a time loop. One of the women seems to be denigrating the other’s appearance, telling her that her shoes make her legs look large, and continually interrupting her, with the repetition seeming to underline the casual cruelty played for entertainment on television. It also contains the odd and disturbing line “and this one is decapitating you.” The next track, titled “P.C.,” is a clip lifted directlyfrom an adult film called Summer of 72, which Boards would go on to sample in at least 3 other songs, which segways directly into a dark remix of the Colonel Abrams song “Trapped.” Later on we’re treated to what may be the band’s first ever Satanic reference: takes an old Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner commercial and chops it up so the narrator’s voice continues saying “devil” repeatedly, and ends with “get a devil!” “Iraq Says” takes a clip from an apparent news story, with a female news anchor stating “Iraq Says Nineteen People Died,” and repeating it over cheerful samples from the Terminator video game, before ending with an English male saying “we won’t know that until a full assessment has been taken in due course,” and a Sesame Street jingle, as if the claims of murder against Iraqis was being casually dismissed.
These chopped, screwed, and twisted bits of pop culture entertainment ephemera are seamlessly blended together with longer songs showing off the band’s sense of emotion and melody, from the gorgeous Forest Moon to the achingly nostalgic 5.9.78 (the shift into which from the previous track, the solemn Boquant may be one of the greatest transitions in Boards’ whole catalog). The Old Tunes also display the short vignettes for which later Boards of Canada albums would become known. Tracks like “Mushyz” (a seeming reference to magic mushrooms), Geometric Piss (which one might see while pissing during a magic mushroom trip) and the beautiful and underrated Solarium bridge the gaps between the longer tracks, setting mood and emotion.
Several track titles seem to reference specific people as well, such as “Davie Addison,” Wendy Miller, and Paul Russell’s Piece (David Addison, in fact, was a grade school friend of the brothers, and would go on to post a primary school photograph of himself and Mike in class in the Boards of Canada Facebook group), while “Buckie High” on volume 2 seems to refer to the duo’s high school in Buckie Scotland, near the town of Cullen, where they grew up, 185 miles north of Edinburgh. Additionally, the girl smiling on the cover of vol. 1 was said by a friend of the band to be Louise Campbell, the sister of Hexagon Sun member and photographer Peter Iain Campbell, giving the impression of a deeply personal project that directly names friends, family, and locations near to the brothers’ childhood - perhaps part of the reason the records were never intended for public release.
Ultimately the Old Tunes releases demonstrate Boards at their starting point - old documentaries, television shows, and radio viewed through a glass darkly, mixed with their childhood memories and committed to tape, raw and unfiltered, without nearly as much of the careful perfectionism for which they would eventually become known - essentially, what they were making before they knew the world was listening, without expectations.
Sadly, the audio quality of these releases, which were directly ripped from probably copied audio tapes, is not great, with some ill advised past attempts at noise reduction making the situation worse. Several remasters exist, which can be found on rareboc.org and the Twoism fan forums. Perhaps one day they’ll be given an official release in their high definition glory. Until then, we’ll simply have to enjoy them as they are.
Thanks for joining us for another episode of Turquoise Hexagon Podcast, a For Tune Telling podcast series. Next time we’ll be looking at BOC’s emergence into the public eye, starting with Twoism and culminating in their first studio LP Music Has the Right to Children. Until next time.
[sample of children speaking]
Bye, bye. Bye, bye, bye.
[end sample]