Boards of Canada
Hi Scores

Hexagon Sun Collective: Ghosts Of Electronics.

/ transmission - radio static. <<Listen. Testing. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, (nine), ten. (oops) Up and down (background) six, six, nine. The stuff, the right, turn it up, Count. Orange. One... three, four, fi-ive, six, seven, eight, ni- (garbled). Heard in the background from 1:07 to 2:07. Counting. Loud. One, two, three, four, fi-ive, six, six, seven. Nineteen-ninety-nine. They're outside. The others. Overflow, Roger. You'll believe anything. Six. Zero Zero Eight Zero (Nine?). Eleven. Goodbye - Goodnight. Risen.>>

National Film Board Of Canada is a Canadian agency for the production and distribution of documentaries, animated films, short films, auteur films, now freely accessible online. Founded in 1939, the footage it produced during the sixties and seventies in the twentieth century has over time achieved legendary status. These video materials, created as documentation of the country's natural resources, were characterized by their lack of verbal exposition. The narration was entrusted to a more subconscious level with the electronic and real world music of those years. Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin, during their childhood, spent time in French-speaking Canada, not knowing the language, often self-isolating, and spent afternoons watching the footage from the NFBOC. Enchanted and seduced by those relaxed film visions and after returning to Scotland a few years later, they sought to build a musical and cerebral world similar to that of that video archive. Their early experiments resulted in BASF cassette collections which they distributed to those close to them under the aegis of music70, an unofficial label that still appears on their productions today. The moniker BOARDS OF CANADA was born from the aura of that Institute. Maps, electronic weather forecasts, symbols, acronyms, green nations seen from above in aerial visions and narcosis with spread-out music in states of drowsiness, navigation methods, the amniotic allure of travel charts. Boards of Canada, Reel Sessions.

Boards Of Canada are a mystery. They sound so human they induce hypnosis, recording their works in a studio shrouded in nothingness, Hexagon Sun, perhaps a bunker or a last resort in the unknown Pentland Hills. They rely on equally little-known Hexagon Sun Collective for graphics, photography, and layouts, once celebrating yearly, now who knows, musical gatherings devoted to nature in the Highlands woods, Redpoints, Red Moon.
It was said about them, in some now unreachable corner of the deep web, that they privately engaged in higher and university education, mathematics, biology, botany. It was also whispered that as infants they drank breast milk from a member of the Incredible String Band.
They do not truly exist, their recorded music does. Their fundamental characteristic is absence.
Then the presence of transistors for a new continental music.

Aquarius, Nova Scotia. Professional musicians in every right, active since 1986 as an open collective of videomakers, artists, photographers, instrumentalists, and writers, over the years became first a trio, then a duo, and have since focused primarily on music. Producers of broadly cinematic sounds and those out of time, or with strictly defined and idealized temporal references. Modern equipment mixed with analog synthesizers of kraut/kosmische and psychedelic memory, much old gear, often worn out by practice time, defective, and thus characterizing the sound that distinguishes them. Slowdonia. National Park of Bioelectronica. Their music is a blend of warm, nostalgic atmospheres, akin to certain post-hippie German electronic sounds, and thus much less naive culturally and technologically. Scenarios of post-nuclear H war and fascinating astral adventures, robotically and isolationist sound/headscapes, ancestral journeys to undertake in darkness.
Not dance electronic music, but chamber electronic music, music for the brain, that refers to dreams, imagination, evoking and awakening maritime and Georgic settings in the mind. Heartbreaking melodies, notes held for interminable lengths, keyboard and piano touches that enter once and then disappear, tormenting rustles, magnetic VHS-quality stains, cellulose nitrate sonic grains, underwater reverbs, soundtrack music shades and interruptions, hip-hop beats, tablas, muted drum sounds. Gyroscopes, lights and shadows on oceans, rainforests, solar systems.
New Zealand. Electronics of Alaska.

Alaska_music. Very few promotional photos, interviews mostly given via mail, accounts that they operate on at year-long intervals. Few live sets at festivals and with labels in the early days, the last in 2001. Societas X Tape (2019) was their last non-live appearance, a radio selection curated for the celebration of their current record label, Warp Music. Four LPs, six EPs, some singles, several remixes, appearances in compilations, extended hiatuses in 25 years of activity, in continuous wait for new, rare, sedative sounds. Boards Of Canada have significantly influenced modern electronic music with their subtle play of subtraction, with their suggestion, spreading awe around them, preferring to distribute their music, their internal world, in a private dimension, airstream/room music. They have sown in their records the seeds of countless allusions to esoteric numerology, subliminal messages, radio recordings from desert number stations, reversed tapes, references to the history of David Koresh's Y Series, the Davidian Branch, Waco, they managed creative ARG and participatory viral marketing, previewed their records in cathedrals, churches, forgotten aqua parks in the Mojave Desert, always in their absence. They recorded following obscure theories and mathematical sequences, for the non-initiated, as if to remind that the Devil is hidden in the details. 1969 in the Sunshine Recorder.

Holy Ghosts. Childhood and adolescence are a discontinuous Doppler space-time of intermediate passages, this is true for everyone's life. Evanescent transits where all people will later recognize each other only as adults. As if the children they were, pure, carefree, had been lost somewhere and replaced by grown, changed beings, thus adults. It remains to seek an alternative contact, stimulated by sound that, even if only briefly, manages to tune in to the places where those children have ended up, managing to faintly pick up their sounds, their voices disturbed by interference. Boards Of Canada never sought to reproduce a time, a space, especially in the past; they invented a uniqueness that never truly existed. Splendid isolations in unknown and remote places of the psyche and the earth's orb where man left at least a para-material trace of his passage through pillars of cerebral and bodily electricity. Imagined, dreamlike landscapes, which are not looked at, but listened to. Induced memories, not of the individual, but of entire communities, lysergic narratives of singularities dissolved into an entire collective, humanity with its shapes, but its faces dissolving as if thought by alien entities and dreamed robots.
How Was The Sky When We Were Young?
#Sci-Fi Momentuum: Hexagon Sun Recordings, Dec 1996. A Beautiful Place.

Hi Scores is the first official EP from 1996, made possible through the involvement of Autechre, whose influence is still heard, for Skam Records in Manchester. The EP, along with the future LP Tomorrow's Harvest (of almost unbearable beauty), confirms their only properly isolationist diptych.
Residential bases, names in Braille, Morse codes, helicopters in the sky, invisible Artificial Intelligence, social utopia on a cold and sanitized earth, quarantine confinement in studios and buildings, shortwave radio scans: astrophysics, medicine, biology and technology, paranoia keys with pills, interfaces/innerfaces, virtual psychonautical and astronautical surrealist funk, the nines of June every year, logarithms n of x, a turquoise hexagonal sun, automatic dawns. Then everything you do is a balloon,
great enterprises. Foley ~ Sound Effects. End of Transmission. Antennae.
Humanity monitored by a machine. Semena mertvykh, Owl of Minerva.
Семена Мёртвых. Dance in Київ, Dance in Rossija. Deadly Harvest. Radio-Aktivität.

navigation hi: <<I have a story to tell. Once there was a boy who had a big dog; the dog was called Xentrix. One day the boy was walking in the woods with Xentrix; he stumbled upon a wooden door. Xentrix opened the door and the boy followed him inside. What the boy saw amazed him: there was a mile-long cave, and inside the cave were a million other children and a million dogs. The boy could not hold back his tears when he heard Xentrix say: Welcome, my friend.
This is my people; it is now also yours.>>
The Killings At Outpost Zeta (but) Nothing is Real. Ghosts Of Tomorrow.