Tag: analogue

The New York Times interviews Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin of the Boards of Canada:

I think the digital world suffers from being just so literal, so deliberate and sober. As with digital photography, people have gotten used to applying simulated filters onto their pictures just to inject a bit of romance into the thing, because the raw pictures are so flat. But in the analog realm these beautiful things just happen by themselves without your conscious effort. You could say the wobbles and flutters in our music are equivalent to something like weeds overgrowing an old building. Nobody puts the weeds there, but nature comes along and makes the scene very tragic and beautiful.

Dorian Lynskey (who wrote 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs from Billie Holiday to Green Day) reviews the new Boards of Canada album, Tomorrow’s Harvest, for The Guardian:

Tomorrow’s Harvest is their most cinematic and vast-sounding album yet, suggestive of barren plains and burning skies, wonder and dread, watching and being watched… It’s the kind of music that gives rise to strange notions. Boards of Canada sow a few clues as to their own intentions while leaving space for each listener’s pet theories. The title of the loping, suspenseful Jacquard Causeway seemingly indicates French geneticist Albert Jacquard, a proponent of “degrowth”: the idea of increasing happiness by working and consuming less. Alongside such titles as Sick Times and Collapse, it implies a concern with dwindling resources which infects the album title with apocalyptic menace akin to John Christopher’s 1956 eco-horror novel The Death of Grass.

Certainly this track, ‘Reach for the Dead’, sounds like music from a lost dystopian science fiction movie:

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