Top Albums of The Decade #6
Boards Of Canada – Geogaddi (2002)
Boards Of Canada has fans, lots of them, and pretty obsessive ones at that. How obsessive? Take a look at Bocpages, a user-contributed wiki dedicated to collating and analysing every diminutive bit of information about the band. Song meanings, samples used, the number of biblical references, allusions to the golden ratio, back masked vocals. It’s insane.
BOC has this otherworldly persona about them that is only rivalled by Aphex Twin, beginning with their penchant for reclusiveness and aversion to interviews. An example is how the duo kept mum about the fact that they are actually brothers until a Pitchfork interview outed it in 2005. Of course, there’s the music itself which conjures up the images of faceless children in 70′s summer clothes, scratchy Werner Herzog film footage and rotating kaleidoscopic patterns.
There’s an ample amount of religious references and doomsday paranoia on Geogaddi, but only if you listen close enough (or if you are fixated enough to read about them on Bocpages). I spent years listening to ’1969′ not knowing what that synthesized noise that runs throughout the track was. Turns out that it’s actually a heavily processed voice of a woman going, “Although not a follower of hseroK divaD (David Koresh, in reverse), she’s a devoted Branch Davidian.”
Another track, ‘Dandelion’, has always been particularly endearing to me. It’s short, it’s repetitive and its sampling of Leslie Nielsen narrating about undersea volcanic explosions makes no apparent sense. But that’s exactly what makes it work. Boards Of Canada, intentionally or otherwise, leaves their music vague and open-ended. How you interpret it is left entirely to your own state of mind.
‘Dandelion’
’1969′