Your controversial BoC opinions.

[Echelon]

Here is a controversial opinion presented by someone else but I'm posting here because I think it provides some talking points.

Autechre and Aphex Twin have been using the Coronavirus to give gifts to their fans. Aphex did a live stream and another soundcloud dump, while Autechre offered free downloads. Do you think BOC should be participating in this too?

My answer is "Yes, it would be very nice, but they aren't obliged to."

[mechanismj]

Here is a controversial opinion presented by someone else but I'm posting here because I think it provides some talking points.

Autechre and Aphex Twin have been using the Coronavirus to give gifts to their fans. Aphex did a live stream and another soundcloud dump, while Autechre offered free downloads. Do you think BOC should be participating in this too?

My answer is "Yes, it would be very nice, but they aren't obliged to."

Boc'ers gonna boc.

SERIOUS QUESTION!!!

Do you think it is possible we have not heard a lot of this older material in officially released form due to potential copyright issues with samples sources and the like?

[Echelon]

Boc'ers gonna boc.

To that, another friend of mine actually responded: "Is it necessary to keep the mystique in this day and age?"

My own response is "No, but again, they aren't obliged to do anything."


Regarding your question, let MDG answer that: "There's absolutely no question of "legal" regarding the BOC back-catalogue, and any hold-up with remastering or curating early work has been purely down to the time involved!"

[mechanismj]

Boc'ers gonna boc.

To that, another friend of mine actually responded: "Is it necessary to keep the mystique in this day and age?"

My own response is "No, but again, they aren't obliged to do anything."


Regarding your question, let MDG answer that: "There's absolutely no question of "legal" regarding the BOC back-catalogue, and any hold-up with remastering or curating early work has been purely down to the time involved!"

Oh yeah. I forgot he said that.

[dustbowl27]

I read this piece written by a literary critic about Thomas Pynchon and felt compelled to share the quote posted below. Pynchon is one of my favorite writers and -- like BOC -- he made an early decision to remove himself personally from the public release of his work.

“I suspect that Pynchon’s own efforts as a person to remain outside any of the networks of American literary-cultural life is further evidence of his conviction that to let yourself be humanly ‘known’ or identified is just as quickly to be appropriated and dehumanised by the System, made part of some vast effort by which contemporary institutions and contemporary media sort and ‘understand’ people so as to destroy any fragments of resistant life and reality. In the face of accumulating renown he has gone to ever greater lengths to remain unknown and unknowable, unclassifiable as a person.

The unique degree of Pynchon’s withdrawal from public scrutiny can be read as a refusal to surrender himself to forms of cultural power wherein knowledge of human life has become, in his view, inseparable from the effort to warp and control it..."

I would be sad if BOC decided to break their commitment to remaining personally unseen. Thankfully, this isn't exactly a controversial opinion.. but I just want to say that their intentional absence from music culture & social media goes much deeper than some idea about projecting mystique. I think the quote about Pynchon offers a helpful way to think about Hexagon Sun.

[Soul_Slip]

I read this piece written by a literary critic about Thomas Pynchon and felt compelled to share the quote posted below. Pynchon is one of my favorite writers and -- like BOC -- he made an early decision to remove himself personally from the public release of his work.

“I suspect that Pynchon’s own efforts as a person to remain outside any of the networks of American literary-cultural life is further evidence of his conviction that to let yourself be humanly ‘known’ or identified is just as quickly to be appropriated and dehumanised by the System, made part of some vast effort by which contemporary institutions and contemporary media sort and ‘understand’ people so as to destroy any fragments of resistant life and reality. In the face of accumulating renown he has gone to ever greater lengths to remain unknown and unknowable, unclassifiable as a person.

The unique degree of Pynchon’s withdrawal from public scrutiny can be read as a refusal to surrender himself to forms of cultural power wherein knowledge of human life has become, in his view, inseparable from the effort to warp and control it..."

I would be sad if BOC decided to break their commitment to remaining personally unseen. Thankfully, this isn't exactly a controversial opinion.. but I just want to say that their intentional absence from music culture & social media goes much deeper than some idea about projecting mystique. I think the quote about Pynchon offers a helpful way to think about Hexagon Sun.

I wholeheartedly agree. In most interviews they always allude to the fact that they deliberately go dark for a reason.. to stay true to themselves and their music. If they do reach outwards, i would imagine it is just listening to underground bandcamp artists or anticon or ipecac record stuff.. or goodwill thrift cupboard cassette finds lol....

I am happy for everything they have done including their decisions. I am glad us fans don’t dictate or influence almost anything in them.... keeps it fresh

[Echelon]

"Go dark" is a great term to describe them. Especially when you realize that all this site consists of is a black screen: http://music70.com/

Was it ever not a blank screen?

[The Spaniard]

The Bros have released music under an unknown a.k.a.

[PurpleFlurp]

The Bros have released music under an unknown a.k.a.

I would not be surprised by this at all. I also wouldn’t be surprised if their different alias were exclusive to Hexagon Sun as well.

[arvy]

Boards of Canada are more, than just two guys.

[Samplehunter]

Wow, I would have never thought that Palace Posy would cause so much controversy. It's not even on my Tomorrow's Harvest favorite tracks, but it's an okay one I think. However, I never saw it as an intermission or what.

Regarding my supposed controversial opinions:

Geogaddi is without a doubt their best album, their most interesting one, and one of the most fascinating ever.

I don't really know what do people wait from the band's music, but I think that their versatility is underrated. For example, you have to keep in mind that tracks like Over the Horizon Radar and Corsair come from the same band that did stuff like June 9th and Nlogax. The same band that will do Peacock Tail and Dayvan Cowboy, etc.

When it's about strictly identical versions, I never understood their need to reuse tracks (do Turquoise Hexagon Sun need to fucking be in both Boc Maxima, Hi Scores and Music Has the Right to Children?). Regarding the fact that Wildlife Analysis, Roygbiv and Smokes Quantity are also reused in it, MHTRTC feel sometimes more like another compilation rather than a real first album.

About that, I would admit that Odd Nosdam's remix of Dayvan Cowboy kind of justifies the original reuse in Trans Canada Highway, it makes it more logical.

The vignettes at the end of Sixtyten and Triangles & Rhombuses are fucking useless.

From One Source All Things Depend should have been Geogaddi's closer instead of the fucking useless Magic Window. It would have made the album a little bit longer than 66:06 (so, goodbye the "Satan made the album lol" joke), but I think there are enough references to supposed Satanic and devilish topics in the music itself (and, seriously, without looking on Wikipedia or whatever, do you really notice the exact length of the album?).

Their remixes are not so great and interesting, except for Poppy Seed and Prime Audio Soup.

Roygbiv (Alphaquest Mix) > the original one.

On Hi Scores, title track and Seeya Later are the weakest and one of the rare boring Boards of Canada moments.

The Kool & the Gang sample in The Way You Show is awkward, as is the self-reference in MHTRTC version of One Very Important Thought.

[doll]

smokes quantity and turquoise hexagon sun are their saddest songs. i heard people saying that ths wasnt sad at all somehow.

[Navaru]

Turquoise Hexagon Sun is melancholy on track.

[Samplehunter]

While I'm at it, because I just said that reusings bother me, here's how I would have done track-listings of Boc Maxima and Music Has the Right to Children to avoid them without denaturalize the opuses too much:

Boc Maxima (which would have been their first official album, released in something like late 1996; it could have the same cover as the one we knwo):

1. "Wildlife Analysis"
2. "Chinook" (I like the segue better than with An Eagle in Your Mind; here, we talk about Boc Maxima's version, not the extended Aquarius one that seemingly didn't exist in 1996, regarding that version, it would have been called "Chinook (Version 2)" on the aforementioned single to avoid confusions)
3. "Everything You Do is a Balloon"
4. "Roygbiv (Alphaquest Mix)" (which could have been simply called "Alphaquest" for the Sesame Street reference; let's pretend that the original one doesn't exist)
5. "June 9th"
6. "Niagara"
7. "Red Moss"
8. "Concourse"
9. "Carcan" (Boc Maxima's version, which could have been called "Carcan (Version 2)", again to avoid confusions with the Few Old Tunes one)
10. "Nlogax" (I really like the Hi Scores version, but I like even more how the beat comes at the end of "Carcan" in this one, so let's keep the Boc Maxima version and erase the other one)
11. "Hi Scores" (the EP, except for this title track, consists of just reusings, so letting this track alone, I can't see the reason why it would have its own release)
12. "Turquoise Hexagon Sun"
13. "Whitewater"
14. "One Very Important Thought"

So as you can see, I would be a kind of fusion of Boc Maxima and Hi Scores. Boc Scores? Hi Maxima?

Music Has the Right to Children (same cover as the one we know and same release date as the 1998 US version)

1. "Triangles & Rhombuses" (without the vignette at the end; I place it here because I can't imagine a longer track to begin the album)
2. "Sixtyten" (kinda sets the tone of the album; without the vignette)
3. "An Eagle in Your Mind" (without segue from "Wildlife Analysis" obviously)
4. "The Color of the Fire"
5. "Telephasic Workshop"
6. "Kaini Industries"
7. "Rue the Whirl"
8. "Aquarius" (which would been called "Aquarius (Version 2)", to avoid what you know)
9. "Olson"
10. "Pete Standing Alone"
11. "Happy Cycling" (the track of AFOT with the same name doesn't even seem to be another version of it, so let's keep this name and rename the FOT one with whatever you want)
12. "Open the Light"
13. "One Very Important Thought" (which would have been called "One Very Important (Version 2)", to avoid wyk; I can't imagine that track not closing the album, so that's why I moved "Happy Cycling").

[Samplehunter]

Can't edit my first post, so I will add it here:

Sixtyniner and Twoism were amongst tracks that I liked when I discovered the Twoism EP a long time ago, but nowadays, they bore me to death. Their supposed "sad" and "desperate" tone sounds really annoying to me.

Even the Diskono mix of Sixty can't save it for me.

[Remulo]

Basefree shouldn't be on Twoism

[Sky and Trails]

I agree with ARVY 100%.

It is more than two people.

[zeoevil]

Treat Em Right is absolutely terrible.

[Josh]

Treat Em Right is absolutely terrible.

Yeah, it's bad. Easily the worst thing BoC has ever been involved in. I sort of wish it didn't exist, but on the other hand, it's proof that they're mere mortals like the rest of us.

[rodox_head]

-Basefree is one of my favorite tracks
-Critiquing anything pre-Twoism feels wrong and nonsensical since they didn't release them anyway
-I don't care if the back catalog never comes out and like them as mysterious cover art jpegs
-Trans Canada Highway is just a glorified single