Ben Ruset Sysadmin, etc.

The Cycle: Three Boards of Canada Albums

I've been meaning to write this article for a while now. I find that as time goes on it gets harder and harder for me to to put words together that make a lot of sense. Most of my thoughts are abstract - a problem here, a solution there, ways to make things better over there - which is not really the most effective mode of thinking for someone who wants to write.

Thinking, fortunately, still comes easy. And it's come a lot easier now that I've been listening to some really great independant electronic music. Unlike most mainstream recordings, there's no "rock star lifestyle" going on with the performers. There's generally nothing but the music itself for you to look at and judge. It's like looking at a Van Gogh painting twenty years before he died. You can see the raw talent, appreciate the beauty, but for what it is, not the legend behind the creator.

Boards of Canada has become my new favorite band. Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin, brothers, hail from Scotland and Canada and make up the band. I've heard BoC described as "intelligent techno" but I like to call them "ambient electronica." At the end of a long day, or during a long bus ride home from Manhattan, it's sublime to listen to one of their albums from start to finish, simply immersing myself in the music.

Mike and Marcus, like myself, are products of the 1980's. Being a child of the 80's was different than being an adult in the 80's. Whereas most people look at the 80's and think of the growing race for wealth and increasing social status, I look back upon it with a sense of wonder. These were the days before what we know of as the internet. News still came from local stations. The world was a smaller place. The late 1970s and early 1980's saw the beginnings of educational TV, with low-budget soundtracks made up of weird synth patches. There was a sense of innocence that us children of the 80's had, that I am pretty sure died with the decade. I don't know if any children of the 90's would say the same thing about their generation.

Loosing yourself in a BoC album is like stepping back into those times. Their three "major" albums, 1998's Music Has the Right to Children, 2002's Geogaddi, and 2005's The Campfire Headphase all hark back to the early 80s - not in a candypop or Kraftwerk like sound, but in an organic flowing mass that, at least for me, invokes long autumn weeks in 1984 that would never end. Music Has the Right to Children has a more synthesized sound to it. The first track - "Wildlife Analysis" sounds like the theme music to some Nova special on PBS. The tracks seem to have a harder rhythm to them. Geogaddi begins to lose that "rough" edge, and by the time you listen to The Campfire Headphase, it's almost completely gone.

What I find the most interesting, though, is how the albums - as far as I know never meant to be taken as a collective work - really compliment each other. Music Has the Right to Children invokes the sense of wonder in the word. Limitless possibilities that abound for any eager mind willing to grasp opportunity. Those of us who watched Mr. Wizards World on Nickelodeon and dreamed of being the kids in the experiments might know what I am talking about. Childhood is clearly a theme in this album. Sampled child-like voices can be heard throughout the album - notably on the track "Color of the Fire" - where a heavily sampled and distorted "I love you" is repeated throughout the track, like the way a child would sincerely tell their parents of their affection. In "Aquarius" - a later track - you can hear some childlike laughing and a sampled "yeah, that's right" throughout the cut. To me, this album is about birth and discovery of the world. A look at the world through totally innocent eyes which, up until the birth of my daughter in 2005, I'd completely forgotten about.

Geogaddi takes a completely different track. The innocence is gone here, replaced by knowledge that has given birth to darkness and cynicism. It's hard to imagine an electronic music album as dark, but that's how I'd have to describe it. This is in no way a detraction against the album, which is my personal favorite. What was learned in the previous album has been been put back into subconscious memory, replaced by the beginnings of the daily grind. Memories are still there, but they're not thought of as often. The first second track "Music is Math" has the lyric "the past inside the present" repeated several times. Our happy childhood memories are a part of us, but far too often we focus on the now - and leave precious little time for appreciating the past. This album is about discovery - becoming an adult. Learning adult things - about the world. The track "Gyroscope" has a sampling of a numbers station, which to me is a metaphor for learning the secrets of the adult world. I can picture myself as a teenager with a ham radio, up late at night, roaming the dial trying to find the aural terror of stations I had no business listening to. We're treated to a warning of our uncertain future in "Energy Warning," an aptly relevant piece with a bit of dialog from a Canadian National Film Board documentary of a child warning of the dangers of using up all of the energy and there might not "be enough energy left to go around when" [they're] "a parent." The album winds you down into darker and darker places. Mike Sandison sums the album up perfectly in an interview:

"I would say 'Music Has The Right...' is a record for outdoors on a cold, blue-skied day, while 'Geogaddi' is a record for some sort of trial-by-fire, a claustrophobic, twisting journey that takes you into some pretty dark experiences before you reach the open air again. It has a kind of narrative. That's why we ended it with 'Corsair', it's like the light at the end of the tunnel.

It's also interesting to note that BoC engineered this album to be exactly 66 minutes and 6 seconds long.

In their latest album, The Campfire Headphase, the child is an adult. In some ways less of a cynic and more of a realist. The album itself is markedly different from prior BoC albums in that it uses more traditional instruments such as guitars and some of the songs are musically more mainstream. Anybody who has watched Adult Swim on Cartoon Network has inevitably heard some BoC songs. Just the other night I heard "Dayvan Cowboy" play as background music in a General Motors commercial. Mike Sandison again tells us exactly what this album is all about:

We usually imagine our music to have a visual element while we're writing it, so we were picturing this character losing his mind at the campfire and compressing weeks of events into a few hours, in that time-stretching way that acid fucks with your perception

It's easy for me to picture this. The album starts off in an incredibly upbeat song (Chromakey Dreamcoat), and then as the album progresses the tempo slows down and the character begins to take in the fire and relive what I assume are uncomfortable or painful memories. (Satellite Anthem Icarus) The masterpiece of the album is "Dayvan Cowboy" which is probably one of the most amazing songs I've heard in the genre. I think it's the turning point of the album - the character is reborn from the second the tempo of the song changes and the powerful bar chords are played midway through the song. The character gets a brief, clear perspective on life in "A Moment of Clarity" and then finally an acceptance of who and what they are on the back half of the album.

In these three albums you can see a progression from the youthful innocent of childhood, the angst of young adulthood, and finally the acceptance of the reality of life. Each album stands well on their own, but taken together they show a powerful lesson.