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Sep 17, 2006

It's the snot that makes it seem so familiar



Fluffy elephants, almost-dry glue, snot-encrusted duvets, wombs and your uncle's trousers may be some of the most comfortable things known to mankind.

However, none of them are as comforting as the de-tuned fuzziness of
Boards Of Canada. Perhaps there is something about the woozy nostalgia of their downtempo drummery that feels haunted by the ghost of 70s ambience.

>Cheese strings

Their 1998 debut Music Has The Right To Children sounded like the whole back catalogue of Ninja Tune had been fed through cheese strings and dictaphones before having its spliff diet replaced with a morphine drip. The thrill of hearing that album for the first time was like meeting a new friend you felt you had known all your life. Like when Richard met Judy. Or when Punch met Judy. The other Judy, not that one.

In the past eight years, I have grown fatter, stoopider but more optimistic. No such progression for BoC. They have a few guitars on recent album
The Campfire Headphase, but they're still living the same lolling retro-daydream.

>Kriss Kross


So respect due to a chap called Kaini who has set up a Boards Of Canada wiki site. 'Wiki' is the sound DJs make when they scratch records and is thought to originate from 'wiggida wiggida wack' from Kris Kross' 1992 hit single Jump. This is a lie.

A wiki site is a website anyone can edit (not a lie), and you should check out the BoC wiki site now. It needs content, so get writing, people. Or you could just copy stuff from their Wikipedia page. I would write stuff myself, but I have no fingers.

>David Koresh

And while I'm bigging up the Boards, What The Hell Is Up With Boards Of Canada is a wonderful summary of their Geogaddi album, including all the David Koresh references, back-masking tomfoolery and, um, Pascal's Triangle of Binomial Coefficients.

BoC are the best thing to come out of Scotland since Shooglenifty (not so much as a lie, as a post-post-modern ironic reference). Like a spent pipe-burst, I'll stop gushing now.

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