Music

Buckelew Beat

by Kevin Buckelew

Tuesday March 7, 2006

The Boards of Canada are so mysterious! . While their most recent album, "The Campfire Headphase," was certainly a step down, their two masterpieces "Music Has a Right to Children," and "Geogaddi," stand as veritable goldmines of puzzles and perplexities. I’ve learned so much just from doing research on the band that I’m seriously considering dropping out of school and pursuing a career in the occult.

For example, their song "Gyroscope" uses samples from "numbers stations" on shortwave radio, which broadcast strings of numbers for the purposes of espionage. "The Smallest Weird Number," that is, a number that is "abundant" but not "semi-perfect," is seventy. "The Magic Window" refers to the range of frequencies optimal for communicating with other dimensions. They also use sounds from old episodes of "Sesame Street."

One of the most amazing things I discovered through their music was the concept of the electromagnetic dawn chorus. It is, according to Wikipedia, "an unexplained phenomenon that occurs most often at sunrise or shortly after, that (with the proper radio equipment) resembles the sound of the birds’ dawn chorus. It is thought to be caused by high-energy electrons that get caught in the Van Allen radiation belts of the Earth’s magnetosphere and fall to the Earth’s surface in the form of audible radio waves." Check Wikipedia for recorded MP3s (totally worth it).

Their music takes a turn for the sinister in the song "You Could Feel the Sky." If it’s reversed and slowed down, you can hear a voice saying, "A god with horns," followed by a woman screaming and a church bell tolling. Possibly even creepier than this is their entire EP, "In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country," which is based on and includes various references to the Branch Davidians, the religious group involved in the Waco massacre.

All these things aside, the band also does some really fascinating things with their actual music. "An Eagle in Your Mind" features percussion made entirely by distorting a clip of someone speaking. They created "Julie and Candy" by recording flutes and recorders for the melody and then bouncing them back and forth between tape decks until the sound had completely degraded. Although their music is technically filed under the IDM category (and is, in fact, credited as pioneering the genre), the fact that it’s all analog puts them, in my mind, well above most other electronic artists. It also helps that they’re absolutely brilliant with both rhythm and melody (listen to "Sixtyten" for a good example).

The band members themselves, two Scottish men who only recently were revealed to be brothers, are equally mysterious. Being generally reclusive and having only played several concerts in their career, they have made it clear that they’re really into the Incredible String Band and Jan Svankmajer. But even if they don’t like to talk much about themselves, the most important things show through in their music: they’re obsessed with childhood, psychedelic drugs and mathematics. And, I mean, that’s awesome.

All this and more can be found at fredd-e.narfum.org/boc.