Widely hailed as one of electronic music’s most emotive acts, Boards of Canada have amassed legions of devotees across the genre aisles.
Building a quintessential sound that melded nostalgic, retro-flavoured samples with dense, enveloping atmospheres, interspersed with tranquil melodies and skittering breaks, Scottish brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin established their own space within the diversifying electronic music scene of the 1990s.
It was music that facilitated a comforting sense of introspection, beginning with their widely acclaimed debut Music Has the Right to Children in 1998.
Released on the iconic Warp Records, Boards of Canada’s dusty, analog-saturated universe sat somewhere on the threshold between electronic dance music, ambient expressionism, hip-hop, and even folk, with tracks such as the woozy Roygbiv and the uneasy Sunshine Recorder prompting half-remembered, hazy childhood memories, along with fragments of imagery. Typically, these reflected carefree outdoor abandon, but could sometimes have more sinister undertones.
Eoin and Sandison’s painterly approach to aging and distressing sound purposefully sought to tap into a shared reminiscence with the listener, and was later cited as pioneering the ‘hauntology’ aesthetic that would become popular in the years that followed.
Writer and journalist Simon Reynolds perfectly described the brothers’ unique brand of electronic alchemy in his fascinating 2011 book, Retromania. “Our cultural memories are shaped not just by the production qualities of an era but by subtle properties of of the recording media themselves," Reynolds said. "Boards of Canada’s artificially faded and discoloured textures stir up the kinds of feelings you get from watching old home movies that are speckled with blotches of colour, or from leafing through a family photo album full of snapshots that are turning an autumnal yellow. It’s like you are witnessing the fading of your own memories.”
While some of Boards of Canada’s most captivating cuts could be found on their debut, and its more darkly-hued 2002 follow-up, Geogaddi, it was on the Boards’ third album, The Campfire Headphase, that the pair landed upon a variant of their sound which cut a path back from nicher frontiers to the arms of broad appeal. Reeling in a new swathe of listeners along the way.
The most obvious example here, being the transcendent Dayvan Cowboy.
Expanding the Boards of Canada template via its widescreen scope, and its more distinct use of guitars and organic percussion, Dayvan Cowboy soon became the jumping-on point for many a perked-up ear.
The thematic thrust of album three was built around the vision of the track’s titular cowboy experiencing a reflective (and likely drug-induced…) mind-trip whilst sitting by a campfire.
"You're somewhere in a camp in the woods, spaced out around the campfire. It's dark, you're alone, you close your eyes, and you fantasise about eighteenth-century America,” Mike intriguingly told Dutch magazine OOR. “You lose all sense of time. Hours turn into days, weeks. Strange things happen, inexplicable things, leaps in time, transformations - a bit surreal, without you experiencing it as such."
Although the album wasn’t released until 2005, ideas for its tracks began right on the heels of Geogaddi’s release back in 2002. The album gradually took shape within the brothers’ new Hexagon Sun studio in Scotland’s Pentland Hills.
The music-making process for The Campfire Headphase marked a cognisant turn way from the now established BOC approach and brought in more real instrumentation. The more pronounced presence of guitar was the most striking example of this shift.
It wasn’t just an additional texture, however. Guitar came to define the record’s key arrangements. There’s the springy back and forth riff of Chromakey Dreamcoat, the burning acoustics that infuse Satellite Anthem Icarus and of course, the shimmering beauty of Dayvan Cowboy’s repeated chord chime.
“We wanted to simultaneously shift and reduce the sound palette, making it more like a conventional band gone over the edge,” Sandison told Remix Magazine. “It's taking away the reliance on samples, vocals or cryptic references and adding more organic instrumentation. That's not to say we left all that behind for good; it was just the feel we had for this particular collection of songs.”
Marcus Eoin described the genre-smushing record to Clash Magazine as trying to aim at a 1970’s-evoking acoustic flavour. “We’d known for quite a while, since Geogaddi, that we wanted to make a guitar record next. In the end what we’ve actually made is really more of a weird crossbreed.”
The typical approach for building a BOC track at this point in time was for the pair to track their extended jams, and trim out interesting sections using a classic (typically faulty) tape machine. This could be a time-consuming task, even if the brothers were able to tear themselves away from their new, spontaneous grooves.
Frequently on hand to capture potential song starting points were a Tascam MSR-16 reel-to-reel as well as a dusty aged Revox recorder (pictured below). Then there was a Grundig TK5 tape machine and, if all else failed, Marcus just dug out a simple cassette tape.
“The great thing with machines such as the Grundig is that it's tragically bad. Whatever you record into it just doesn't come out unscathed,” Marcus told Remix Magazine.
Geogaddi’s more ominous tone was out too, with the siblings striving for more clearly defined - and positive-sounding - melodic through-lines in their new work
It was something of a contrast to Boards of Canada’s former view that texture was the primary musical form.
“For us, texture is as important as melody,” Mike told Japanese magazine Crossbeat. “Otherwise, we'd be composing ringtones. One thing we always focus on is creating a dazzling feeling. We want to bring out a sound texture that feels kaleidoscopic, constantly changing. It's similar to dreaming about music - vague and indescribable, only leaving a fuzzy memory of the song.”
As the record’s fifth track, Dayvan Cowboy perfectly encapsulated the new approach. It was arguably the track that marked the most notable departure from the pair’s more abstract past.
Whilst some of the record’s other tracks were still daubed in BOC’s opaque hallmarks, Dayvan Cowboy’s arrangement heavily foregrounded sparkling electric guitar strums.
The track began with a gentle, faint intro of enmeshed sonics - although backwards guitar and distant tape-echo routed swells could be detected swimming through the mix.
The intro’s protracted, blurred form still had a firm foot in the ambient universe, yet BOC’s established audience were about to be taken aback by a sudden switch-up as Dayvan Cowboy swung into its guitar-led groove.
“I think that will probably be [Dayvan Cowboy] that surprises everyone the most,” Sandison told After Hours. “That’s because the intro is really long, and it doesn’t give any hint of what’s going to happen, but then suddenly it starts moving. It’s quite a wild song, filled with guitar tremolos and strings. I think people who know our music will be most surprised by that song.”
The sparseness of Dayvan Cowboy’s intro felt more akin to the pair’s earlier work, albeit on a vaster scale. Although it does prefigure what is to come subtly, as the underpinning music gravitates around the same four chord loop (F#, A, E, B) that becomes the primary motion of the second section's groove.
The pulsing throb through that four-chord loop became hypnotic as the groove locked in. Meanwhile, a plaintive chord rang out the F# root - panned around the stereo image - and formed a repetitive motif. It held firm against the shifting backing of the chord cycle.
While you might expect BOC's layered sounds to have been effect-saturated, the duo at this point had challenged themselves to avoid using conventional effects units, and try to achieve as much aural expressiveness via the manipulation of EQ or just by trying out different recording practices.
“We try to push it, to see how far we can change sounds without resorting to using effects units at all,” Sandison told Remix Magazine. “For example, we would never just put down a wind instrument clean. We'd usually do something long-winded like laying down six roughly identical takes together onto mono tape so they clash and chorus microtonally over one another, then overload them to hell and back, then sample it off the tape and shift it by an octave or something like that.”
Needless to say, the perpetually hands-on Boards of Canada avoided software in the early 2000s, although Apple’s then recently-acquired Logic Pro fast became a useful tool for handling the structuring of the arrangements.
Though the peaks and troughs of Dayvan Cowboy’s mix still sought to tease out those buried memories within the listener, the ultra expressive percussion samples were dynamically riveting. Snapping the listener into the here and now.
The cymbal-heavy breakbeat cascaded away at (a still quite leisurely) 83bpm, and injected a rockier, human element via occasional ghost notes and syncopations (characteristically enhanced by crunchy tape saturation).
The effect is a beat that seems to gradually plummet down a chasm, jogging - or dropping - far from the placidity of the intro.
It was a more exciting rhythmic approach than the more glacial loops often deployed throughout earlier work. A style that was perhaps most aptly described by Simon Reynolds in the pages of Retromania as beats that, “trudge stoically like an elderly shire horse on a canal’s tow path, pulling a barge behind it.” That’s certainly not a description that could be said of Dayvan Cowboy’s thrilling breaks.
Released as the band’s first widely available single in October 2005 (and later re-appearing as the first track on the Trans Canada Highway EP) Dayvan Cowboy has become one of the most frequently-cited discovery points for those approaching Boards of Canada for the first time.
Standing with its arms wide at the crossroads of genres, the track’s silky guitar tone and transcendent feel proved a compelling lure, inviting people to delve further down the BOC rabbit-hole. “It’s our take on a pop record, pop music that has been melted on a hot dashboard in the sun,” said Mike upon the record’s release.
Dayvan Cowboy’s video (recently upscaled to 4K) fused grainy stock footage of Joseph Kittinger’s high-altitude parachute jumps from Project Excelsior with clips of surfer Laird Hamilton catching waves. It's hard to think of a more fitting visual accompaniment to this most gravity-defying of tracks.
Thanks to BOCPAGES - the unofficial Boards of Canada wiki for reproducing many of the band's original print interviews.
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