If you liked "The Da Vinci Code," you'll like Boards of Canada

Even the first look at the cover strikes a chord of nostalgia with its warm, saturated, out of focus colors. It could be any lost family vacation photo from the late 1970's or early 80's found inside the cover of a book you may have bought at an estate sale, or found at the bottom of a forgotten drawer. Your first listen reminds you of the old 1970's documentary films you may have watched on a rainy day in science class in second grade. Warm, warbled synths, audio samples from documntary films, nature, and cryptic noises barely audible in the background all add a sense of intrigue.


Boards of Canada, appropriately enough, adopted their name from "The National Film Boards of Canada," an educational film producer for Canada in the 70's and 80's. The duo has been recording music since the 80's, they are notoriously secretive to the point that they only revealed in 2005, after 15 years, that they were actually biological brothers.


The allusions to science and nature are abundant in the music and imagery. With titles like "zoetrope," "Sunshine recorder" and "Over the horizon Radar," all actual peices of curious scientific equipment (click links to find out more). My personal favorite title is "Dawn Chorus." A dawn chorus is the sound the sun makes as it breaks over the horizon, the corona and rays of light send radio signals to sensitive radio equipment that scientists say sound like "a huge chorus of birds singing," some say you can even hear what sounds like human voices sometimes amidst the whistles and chirps as the sun breaks day.


Even the track lengths are strangely suggestive. For instance the "Geogaddi" album is exactly 66 minutes and 6 seconds long, and also, if you rip all of the tracks to .WAV format, the total size of the album is 666 Mb (666.8 to be exact). The record label is known by two names, Tourqouise Hexagon sun, and Music70. The hexagon is an undercurrent and you will see and hear many references to it throuought their albums.

What is the signifigance of Music70? B.O.C. has a track called the "The Smallest Weird Number," don't dismiss this as benign. [In mathematics a "weird number" is a number that is "abundant" but not "semi-perfect". Meaning? Take all the "proper divisors" of 70 (i.e. all the divisors of 70 except for 70 itself). They are 1, 2, 5, 7, 10, 14, 35. When the proper divisors add up to more than the original number, the original number is said to be abundant. For 70: 1+2+5+7+10+14+35 = 74 > 70, so 70 is "abundant". Now, if there was some SUBSET of these numbers 1, 2, 5, 7, 10, 14, 35 which added up to 70, then 70 would be said to be "semi-perfect" (or "psuedo-perfect") But there isn't. Try it. You can make 71 by missing out the 1 and the 2, or you can make 69 by missing out the 5, but you can't make 70. I hope that explanation is clear. The first few weird numbers are: 70, 836, 4030, 5830, 7192, 7912, 9272, 10430, 10570, 10792. ] Making 70...the smallest weird number, the name of the record label and also an allusion in the track "Sixty ten." [example taken from unofficial BOC info site]








I had originally thought this to be maybe a jellyfish viewed from underneath, with the sun shining through it. See the rough outline of a hexagon?

On several tracks there are subliminal messages when the track is played in reverse or slowed down. In fact in at least one instance the music is layered so that if you play it in reverse at regular speed you hear one thing, and if you slow it down 3x you hear another in the same exact spot. [If you take the track 'You Could Feel the Sky' and play it in reverse you hear the phrase "a god with horns" repeated, along with crackling fire sounds, as though some sinister ritual is taking place. However, slow down the reversed section by a factor of 3, and new and disturbing details will become apparent. The sibilant S at end of "horns" is resolved as a woman's screams, and a tolling church bell can be heard in the background.] (They deny being satanists but are in fact very interested in Wiccan beliefs which have to do with nature and the natural order of things such as math and patterns, the numbers predominant in their work seem to have more to do with the underlying mathematical principals and patters that you see every where in nature). [taken from an unofficial BOC info site]




The most interesting thing I find about them is that on one track contains a 'phonetic palindrome,' if you remember what a palindrome is, it is a word that is spelled the same way forwards and backwards like the name "Hannah," or the word "racecar." So it follows that a phonetic palindrome is a word or phrase that *sounds* the same when you play it forwards or backwards. Wrap your head around that for a minute and try to think of a word/phrase that sounds the same way whether you say it forwards or backwards, I can't even think along those lines. But here is an example, the phrase "new moon."



I hope I've bored the hell out of you, there's a lot more of these easter eggs on their tracks. If you see me at school in the rotunda, 10 minutes before test time with my ipod. I'm probably listening to BOC ...well either that or Notorious B.I.G.

Samples:
Pete Standing Alone
Slow this bird down