Mouthpiece: Unravelling the Boards Of Canada conspiracy
After a month of mysteries, misdirection and speculation, ambient music pioneers Boards Of Canada have confirmed details of their new album. But what have the band been up to for the past 13 years? Unsurprisingly, our regular columnist Kevin Fullerton has some theories of his own
True to their mercurial nature, Boards Of Canada spent springtime sending VHS tapes to a select number of North American fans. The heavily degraded footage was soon doing the rounds online and featured clipped sounds, juddering feedback and a general air of spacey menace. No explanation was provided by either Boards (the brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin) or their record label Warp, and so Redditors scoured the tapes for clues of a new album or some kind of archival release.
Soon, similarly worn-out VHS footage was spied on the band’s YouTube channel; entitled ‘Tape 05’, this was presumed to be a forthcoming single. Speculation continued until the band announced concrete details of new album Inferno (set for launch on Friday 29 May), a devilish title that confirms my own theories about what the band have been up to for 13 years: Sandison and Eoin have joined a satanic death cult.
After their seminal 1998 album Music Has The Right To Children, the legendary Moog-fetishists presumably decided to invest a huge amount of their newly accrued wealth on the then booming field of VCRs. As their art reshaped the ambient landscape, the band’s stock portfolio ran in direct opposition to their forward-thinking compositions, cleaving to the VCR market with the vicious grip of a rabid labrador humping its slowly dying owner’s leg (in this analogy, the labrador is a stock option and the owner, bleeding out from the bite of its rabies-infested pet, is Boards Of Canada’s increasingly precarious financial portfolio... are you following all this?).
By the time their last album (Tomorrow’s Harvest) was unleashed upon us in 2013, the siblings were one of the most influential acts on the planet yet lumbered with thousands of unsold VCRs. They needed a change and so they combined the incantations of Aleister Crowley with an instruction manual for a Panasonic VCR-25800 to conjure a series of tapes that would hypnotise all those who watched into adopting obsolete technology. I myself have purchased 18 VCRs since their video surfaced online and have even moved onto the hard stuff: Betamax. I’ve also started selling my body to truckers from Norfolk to scrounge enough money for a LaserDisc although, admittedly, I was doing that anyway.
If we allow Sandison and Eoin to continue pursuing this dark practice, frothing electronica lovers will besiege provincial charity shops, stabbing each other for the final tape machines in human existence. Netflix, Apple TV, Now and HBO Max will close their doors while men, women and children hunch over 14-inch CRT screens in an Infinite Jest-style mass hypnosis. That manky woman from The Ring will return to claw at the faces of pensioners, all while an Edinburgh duo rake it in big on the stock market. Whatever Boards Of Canada are up to, one thing is clear: they must be stopped.
Either that or it’s just a new album. Who’s to say?
Inferno is released by Warp on Friday 29 May.