GENERAL NEW RELEASE SPECULATION TOPIC

[Moz]

Whoever made that fretless bass track, I am starting to think that it is much more recent than people claim it could be.

Sounds late 70s early 80s to me. German or UK maybe.

These tracks are similar and seem to fit in with the Societas x Tape vibe. Still no closer to the actual artist. I feel like it must be something on bruton\april orchestra\enter some obscure library tape label here.

https://youtu.be/Jv_azalZJiY

https://youtu.be/XD1im7qRLDo

These are both cool but they both employ "standard" production techniques used in that time. Our song does it way deeper. A disclaimer though, these are just my observations and speculations, I am probably full of bullshit. Here's why I think this is from the 90s or even later.
- Drum machine with sampled drums. Snare panned to the right. Hihat probably is somethin vintage. Other high frequency percussion sounds which I imagine also come from a synthesizer or a sampler.
- Multiple layered synth lines which was almost unheard of for a live band to do back then.
- Fretless bass is not a real bass guitar here, it is some other sound or a synthesizer manipulated to sound like it. Separate sub bass from fretless bass (one that does very low "bumps" or whatever is called, not the same as fretless bass!). If it is a same instrument why is it selectively turning on and off during a song? It is doing its own thing, nevermind the fretless part.
- Intro, sounds like they just took it out of something entire else, that drum roll and a guitar lick are completely another song. Ok it might be prog, but it is prog not done by prog artists, more like someone's excursion into it.
- This song was posted both at big library and prog message boards and no one's got a clue. There's gotta be someone who knows what it is until now. Such a unique song can't go so unnoticed by experts in both of these fields.

There are a couple of other areas worth looking into but whatever it is it is probably not that old.

[arvy]

I was thinking, that how they are going to present the idea of media capturing the reality.

We, know, that the world captured through the media is basically a time capsule. Which BOC usually like to explore. It' slike instead of pointing you to the history books they take the chunk of cultural history captured from contemporary art and color it with haunting touch of the recording.

This is why the 80's world of Day of the dead is an aftershock captured before 2020. Nostalgia juice.

[arvy]

My friend once had lsd trip, while tripping with his friends in the old, the beginning of the XX century, beach houses. And this is how he described it. You can almost feel the connection to those places. The old painted wood walls, the cricking sound, the smell of older, than you, wood and the furniture. This is how I imagine BOC. Synesthesia. Synesthesia or synaesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.

[funnnnpng]

There are a couple of other areas worth looking into but whatever it is it is probably not that old.

I'm still holding onto the belief that it's a custom BoC remix, and that the piano track is the only part of the song that isn't the brothers.

[KoA]

Someone have a time stamp link to “fretless bass track”? I’m having a brain fart on which one that is.


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[mthrndr]

Someone have a time stamp link to “fretless bass track”? I’m having a brain fart on which one that is.

I think it's this one: https://youtu.be/LXV1dsx5yfs?t=5632

Fwiw, I would be blown away if this was BoC. I'm convinced it's some obscure or archival piece from the 70s that is just not available online anywhere.

[tonx]

I’m gonna bet the fretless bass track is BoC. Didn’t Mike mention in an interview that they got to play around with some multitrack studio recording in their high school? This feels like something that was put together track by track — and assuming that the Julie & Candy-like drum isn’t a SXT addition... and I maybe get a small whiff of early Peacock Tail DNA in there...

And the fact that it just seems too good to not be attributable for this long.

[egbdf]

... and I maybe get a small whiff of early Peacock Tail DNA in there...

Peacock Tail was the closest DNA match for this track I could think of as well.

[Fredd-E]

I’m gonna bet the fretless bass track is BoC. Didn’t Mike mention in an interview that they got to play around with some multitrack studio recording in their high school? This feels like something that was put together track by track — and assuming that the Julie & Candy-like drum isn’t a SXT addition... and I maybe get a small whiff of early Peacock Tail DNA in there...

And the fact that it just seems too good to not be attributable for this long.

And you really started recording music at the age of 10?

Marcus: Yeah but I wouldn't describe it as Boards of Canada music at that time.

Mike: Obviously we didn't have a multitrack recorder, but we had two tape recoders. What you could do is record something on one tape recorder, play it back across two feet of air and while it was playing accompany it with something else on the guitar, the piano, the drums, whatever. We would do this, swap the cassettes over and do it again and again until the tapes started getting so distorted that you couldn't do it any longer. So it was really crude old-school multitrack recording. But it was a good way for us to learn how to compose our own stuff.

Was it always just the two of you playing together?

Mike: Well, I went to high school before Marcus did, and I formed a band there with friends.

Marcus: Initially we were in different bands in high school.

Mike: But when we came home [from school] we were recording music together. At one point in the mid-80s Marcus was in a really trashy heavy metal band and I wasn't into their music at all. So I invited him to play with my band. We then started to play around with synths. We were the only group at our high school to use synths.

https://bocpages.org/wiki/The_Downtempo_Duo

[Kamiki]

@boctransmission tweets aren’t loading right now, anyone else seeing this?

[TheStatPow]

Same here.




EDIT: seems to be on twitter's end:

[Kamiki]

Same here.




EDIT: seems to be on twitter's end:

Ah, that'll be it!! Part of me was holding out hope for something like when Radiohead archived all their Tweets for their most recent album

[tonx]

Was it always just the two of you playing together?

Mike: Well, I went to high school before Marcus did, and I formed a band there with friends.

Marcus: Initially we were in different bands in high school.

Mike: But when we came home [from school] we were recording music together. At one point in the mid-80s Marcus was in a really trashy heavy metal band and I wasn't into their music at all. So I invited him to play with my band. We then started to play around with synths. We were the only group at our high school to use synths.

https://bocpages.org/wiki/The_Downtempo_Duo

I think I was remembering this other bio bit... (though I thought there was another interview where they were even more explicit about a teacher hooking them up with studio time - an 11 year old obviously didn’t make this track) https://web.archive.org/web/19990203165 ... anada.html

1984: michael's first visit to a recording studio (arranged by a music teacher) yields three or four multi-tracked synth tunes, which he later performs at school with the aid of a reel-to-reel accompaniment (no sequencers available to him). both michael and marcus were at this time recording found sounds from television and punching them into sequences of a very basic household tape-recorder. the duo began a crude form of multi-tracking by bouncing tracks back and forth between the tape recorder and an old hi-fi. Instruments used included pianos, voices & schoolbags!

1984: marcus began programming multi-tracked melodies on his BBC Microcomputer. he composed mathematically, once notably writing an entire tune as a mathematical palindrome.

1985: began making the first of many tapes of experimental tunes, mostly very melodic but instrumental.

1986: michael formed a new band, this time with a full line-up of drums, bass, guitars, vocals. once played a cover of "L.A." by The Fall, who spookily turned up eleven years later on a Skam compilation "0161", Skam being the first label to release a Boards of Canada EP.

1986: michael invited marcus to join the band, and marcus played bass, more synths joined . . .

1987: the full band (then a five-piece) performed at an all-night music marathon where a stage invasion resulted in members of the audience playing some of the keyboard parts. " . . . one person for every key on my synth. It was chaos. We just left the stage and watched . . .", michael says this was some of the best music the band has ever played.

[kakanara]

https://bocpages.org/wiki/A_M%C3%BAsica ... i%C3%A7osa

in the interview i translated mike says that he began making music when he was around 10 with borrowed instruments, he also states that his studio visits happened in 1983 instead of 1984.
weird inconsistencies!

[Fredd-E]

Was it always just the two of you playing together?

Mike: Well, I went to high school before Marcus did, and I formed a band there with friends.

Marcus: Initially we were in different bands in high school.

Mike: But when we came home [from school] we were recording music together. At one point in the mid-80s Marcus was in a really trashy heavy metal band and I wasn't into their music at all. So I invited him to play with my band. We then started to play around with synths. We were the only group at our high school to use synths.

https://bocpages.org/wiki/The_Downtempo_Duo

I think I was remembering this other bio bit... (though I thought there was another interview where they were even more explicit about a teacher hooking them up with studio time - an 11 year old obviously didn’t make this track) https://web.archive.org/web/19990203165 ... anada.html

1984: michael's first visit to a recording studio (arranged by a music teacher) yields three or four multi-tracked synth tunes, which he later performs at school with the aid of a reel-to-reel accompaniment (no sequencers available to him). both michael and marcus were at this time recording found sounds from television and punching them into sequences of a very basic household tape-recorder. the duo began a crude form of multi-tracking by bouncing tracks back and forth between the tape recorder and an old hi-fi. Instruments used included pianos, voices & schoolbags!

1984: marcus began programming multi-tracked melodies on his BBC Microcomputer. he composed mathematically, once notably writing an entire tune as a mathematical palindrome.

1985: began making the first of many tapes of experimental tunes, mostly very melodic but instrumental.

1986: michael formed a new band, this time with a full line-up of drums, bass, guitars, vocals. once played a cover of "L.A." by The Fall, who spookily turned up eleven years later on a Skam compilation "0161", Skam being the first label to release a Boards of Canada EP.

1986: michael invited marcus to join the band, and marcus played bass, more synths joined . . .

1987: the full band (then a five-piece) performed at an all-night music marathon where a stage invasion resulted in members of the audience playing some of the keyboard parts. " . . . one person for every key on my synth. It was chaos. We just left the stage and watched . . .", michael says this was some of the best music the band has ever played.

oh yes that also on bocpages, forgot to check the biographies section

https://bocpages.org/wiki/Official_Biog ... imusic.com

[KoA]

Someone have a time stamp link to “fretless bass track”? I’m having a brain fart on which one that is.

I think it's this one: https://youtu.be/LXV1dsx5yfs?t=5632

Fwiw, I would be blown away if this was BoC. I'm convinced it's some obscure or archival piece from the 70s that is just not available online anywhere.

Thanks, though this just starts from the beginning, do you know the time that it starts?


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[SamuraiDrifter]

Thanks, though this just starts from the beginning, do you know the time that it starts?


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1:33:52, according to the timestamp in the comments.

[KoA]

Oops double post

[karpeggi]

If you listen carefully on the fretless track you can hear the pops and clicks of a record. Its not hard to layer that atop another track to throw in a curveball but I thought worth a mention.

Also the timbre of the tambourine on the fretless track sounds similar to whats on several other BoC tracks, for instance dayvan cowboy or satellite anthem icarus. It also sounds like a 1 bar looped sample of a tambourine on the fretless track, which seems weird for the supposed era?

[tumuli_stump_jumper]

Speaking of Societas X. Any ham radio enthousiast tried decoding the little radio stuff at the beginning? It might just sound like samples of random radio signals but it still would be easy for them to create them and so in turn we must assume that they have.

Looked. Nothing there. Sounds like a real band scan although there is a snippet of rtty which i haven't decoded yet...