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Boards of Canada's discography lists 9 recordings -- 3 full length records, 3 eps, and 3 "singles". If you look at the discography page on their website here, you'll notice they don't separate these categories. Everything is the same as a recording, it doesn't matter if you listen to BOC for 75 minutes or 5; everything you hear is part of this same eternal stargazed world, this same nocturnal desert island deliverance. "They" are two -- that is, there are two BOC'ers, although it doesn't appear that the number of people matters much, other than the fact that it can't be "a single" person, because the cosmology of the sound is the cosmology of some ancient pact made "betwixt" one and another. "They" have been releasing recordings since 1996, last doing so in 2006. So it's been 5 years since any "recordings" have been made physical in the world; it's been 5 years since I could walk to the record store, flip through the bins, and find something "new" to hold in my hand. But time is ethereal not only within their music, but around it, too, as though the entire mechanism of time passing is contained within and so ordered by this endless telescopic aura. I forget when I last bought their music; I forget that I know their music; I forget that I covet their music. When I return to their music, a return I attempt to prolong through my most hopeful, my most wonderous forgetting, everything I have ever forgotten of it returns, the ancient planet at the heart of everything I have ever longed for as "music".
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Boards of Canada have their own You Tube Channel. All the imagery they allow their music to be fit to is complete -- aged and ancient, emergent and modern, natural and desolate, man-made and intimate. And yet, endless variations exist, can exist, will exist. I'm sure that no one who would make their own You Tube to BOC would ever run out of ideas, there are as many possibilities as to imagine the narrative elements of these songs as there are atoms in a sheet of sheer Saran Wrap. The ease with which your mind rides the sonic elements through a cloud that parts into alien particles is proof that the entire image is as open and life affirming as amniotic fluid, which nourishes, protects, develops, expands. The internal images you make when you listen to BOC expand as the music swells, as the synthesizers slither around you and the drums suddenly sound, when the echoes are stripped away, like Africa. Where is Africa when you look through a telescope? It isn't that Red Planet, is it? Of course it isn't, that would be unfair to think of Africa as "over there", while I am simply "here" dreaming of it. As though all those people in that country, that continent, are simply what I would wish them to be, as alien as anything I have the arrogance to imagine. Jorge Luis Borges' story "The Circular Ruins" is the story of a man who "slips into the unanimous night" to dream a man into reality, only to die in the dreams of the man who dreamed him into reality. It is this "unanimous night" that is the backdrop of BOC's dream, it fills the dream with the emptiness that defines the heart of all things.
Boards of Canada's music sounds like a record left too long in the afternoon sun, perhaps stored beneath a window through which the afternoon sun shines and burns into an empty bedroom. Records swell and warp, being made of black plastic, in the heat, and a warped record's grooves turn forever asymmetrical once the sun strikes them and distends them until they become an alternate sound universe. But the strangest thing when you listen to a warped record is this -- you try to deny it is warped, because it means the record is over, that you can't listen to it as it once was, that the universe that has been altered is this universe, that time travel is the travel from one (known) time to another (unknown) time, which is still time, which is still you aging and dying and have been being born. The name of their first full-length record, "Music Has a Right to Children", references the deepest concept of humanity, children, possibly to acknowledge that there is nothing so alien as looking through the telescope itself at the sky, which shines in every window through every day and which knows us as well as we know that we were once born. Because we once were born, because we once had that right, and now we simply have the right to time, to the empty day, to something that sounds like something that it no longer is.
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Boards of Canada's music sounds like a record left too long in the afternoon sun, perhaps stored beneath a window through which the afternoon sun shines and burns into an empty bedroom. Records swell and warp, being made of black plastic, in the heat, and a warped record's grooves turn forever asymmetrical once the sun strikes them and distends them until they become an alternate sound universe. But the strangest thing when you listen to a warped record is this -- you try to deny it is warped, because it means the record is over, that you can't listen to it as it once was, that the universe that has been altered is this universe, that time travel is the travel from one (known) time to another (unknown) time, which is still time, which is still you aging and dying and have been being born. The name of their first full-length record, "Music Has a Right to Children", references the deepest concept of humanity, children, possibly to acknowledge that there is nothing so alien as looking through the telescope itself at the sky, which shines in every window through every day and which knows us as well as we know that we were once born. Because we once were born, because we once had that right, and now we simply have the right to time, to the empty day, to something that sounds like something that it no longer is.
