Boards of Canada - Geogaddi - Warp Records
If Boards of Canada were a foodstuff, they'd have to be sushi prepared by
ET: all the right ingredients - even the authentic whiff of kelp, fresh off
the beach at Gairloch - but indubitably alien, in a feelgood, glowy-fingertip,
non-X-files kind of way.
Geogaddi - the feast - is a ten-course meal interspersed with twelve
sonic sorbets and concluding with a very flat after-dinner joke (see below).
In a sense, those in-between courses represent the essence of Marcus Eoin
and Michael Sandison's handiwork: to those of us chained to a 56k modem shuffling
MP3's along a geriatric BT connection at 4 Kb/s on a good day, these little
half-minute gems have always been worth the wait. In Geogaddi, they
contextualise the more substantial tracks in a properly palate-cleansing kind
of way, but their generic tiny strangenesses command the kind of respect reserved
only for the Nicholas Hillyards of the miniaturists conclave.
The Boards debut album - Music Has the Right to Children - precedes
this one by four long years, during which time the distinctive mix of beats
and samples that sealed their reputation and launched a thousand clones has
evolved from the standout 'Aquarius' (it's all there) into a much denser production
palette, but with no less sanguine an overall mood. They're not tormented
souls, the Boards of Canada - just mildly disturbed. It's as if they've come
across a cache of random acoustic samples of EM radiation scooped out of the
Heaviside Layer by our crop-circling alien pranksters over the last five decades
and woven them into a decorative foreground of digitised dance beats. There's
an honest aspiration to sunniness - '1969 (in the sunshine)' is nothing less
than a paean to a half-remembered-half-imagined golden age of open-mouthed
childish laughter - but somehow this has become a sun reduced to odd wavelengths,
then redefined in long chains of 0's and 1's - summer as barcode.
If there's a centre of gravity in this otherwise gravitationally unreliable
discworld, it has to be 'The Beach at Redpoint' - this fine track represents
a fulcrum, of sorts - the music without the jokes, extended, thoughtful, lyrical,
playful, elegiac - but still haunted.
Elsewhere, the ghosts are more apparent: there's a spooky/funny deconstruction
of a New Age self-realisation tape in 'The Devil in the Details' ("...when
necessary, you can re-programme yourself..."), and a passing nod at the
mournful relationship between curlews and drowned mariners in 'The Smallest
Weird Number'. Number itself, incidentally, appears to be a Boards obsession
- and the act of counting (frequently by children, but once - in 'a is to
b as b is to c' - by a scarily manic kids-TV type) becomes a cryptic leitmotif.
(There's even some wacko with a crypto-Illuminati site dedicated to proving
the Boards link with the Branch Davidians through numerological analysis of
their canon. Peace and love, man.)
Geogaddi is truly a feast - as varied, tasty, entertaining, and nourishing
as you could wish for. (And if that's not the glorious Leslie Nielsen commenting
on submarine vulcanicity in some parallel existence as a Film Board of Canada
voice-over artist in the background to the fabulously strange 'Dandelion'
- "when lava flows underwater it behaves differently" - then I'm
a Dutchman.) But why o why, after the lovely 'Corsair' - the penultimate track
- has sailed away, rocking on a sea of gently surging sine-waves, and disappearing
over a silent and silencing horizon, did they have to succumb to the bathos
of making the final track - 'Magic Window' a 1'46" of literal
silence? It's a strangely false, even pretentious note - a so-what lol (not)
- to conclude with. (And a gesture not without its perils, as the Wombles
of Wimbledon composer, Mike Batt, discovered, bizarrely, when he created a
One Minute
Silence of his own.) But hey. A fnord's a fnord's a fnord....
