Boards of Canada: how the sound of a memory is made

Until the autumn of 2005, Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin said they had met as children because their parents lived in the same village on the north coast of Scotland.

Then, in the cafeteria of the Royal Museum in Edinburgh, Sandison asked the journalist from Groove to switch off the recorder, checked with his bandmate, and picked up where he had left off: they had never talked about it, but he and Marcus were brothers.

Eoin is Marcus’s middle name, not a surname. They had kept the family tie quiet to avoid being lumped in with Orbital, the other pair of brothers in British electronic music.

The same forethought runs through the sound. What usually gets called nostalgia, on their records, is a stated process, and it has a very particular origin.

The method came before the records

At ten they were recording with two cassette decks set half a metre apart. They played piano into the first, played it back from the second while adding guitar or drums, and taped the lot onto the first again.

They went round that loop, Sandison has said, until the recordings were so distorted that the individual instruments were barely distinguishable and the tape was worn clean through.

The band took its name from the documentaries and animated shorts of the National Film Board of Canada, watched on television as children. Those same films are the sonic model for the 1998 debut, Music Has the Right to Children.

“Turquoise Hexagon Sun” came out twice: in 1996 on the Hi Scores mini album for Skam, then on the Warp debut. The demos had gone to Warp, Rephlex and Skam, and only Skam wrote back.

Listen while you read

Two and a half minutes, with very little to hand

“Roygbiv” runs 02:29 and holds almost nothing: a bass, dry drums, a melody that never settles on its pitch.

That is a decision about method. Endless audio tracks and no restrictions send you round the bend, Sandison says; a mono synth and a drum machine limit what you can do, and the limit is what makes you more inventive.

The cassette deck method was never abandoned, Eoin explains: these days they use Logic Audio more or less as a tape recorder.

Everything we use is decrepit. Our studio is full of wooden things covered with red LEDs.

When the voices leave the stage

On The Campfire Headphase, October 2005, the vocal samples that had been their signature vanish completely. Strings, drums and slightly out of tune guitars take their place.

They wanted to step back and simply be a band, Sandison said, picturing the record a garage group would make: someone parks in the countryside at night, lights a fire, and dreams up the rest of the trip.

“Dayvan Cowboy”, exactly five minutes and previewed on Bleep.com, is the track that shows it best. The guitars get the treatment the samples used to get: the instrument changed, the procedure did not.

One second of audio, tracked down by road

In 2013 Tomorrow’s Harvest aims at a specific medium rather than a period: video tape, the eighties horror video nasty.

It was not enough to be “processing sounds through old media, which is a given with us anyway”, Sandison told the Guardian: they also timed the changes in the music to suggest soundtrack work from thirty years earlier.

So some tracks stop before you want them to, like cues on older soundtracks ripped out of much longer masters that nobody ever gets to hear.

The return, and a clean sounding record

In April 2026 a number of fans received unexplained video cassettes in the post, sent from an address linked to Warp and Bleep: decaying analogue visuals, vocal samples, shortwave style audio.

On 16 April “Tape 05” appeared on YouTube, just over three minutes with no context at all. On 7 May came “Introit” and “Prophecy At 1420 MHz”. On 29 May, Warp released Inferno, eighteen tracks, thirteen years after the last album.

1420 megahertz is the frequency of the neutral hydrogen line, the value the Big Ear radio telescope was listening on when it recorded some 72 seconds of the Wow! signal on 15 August 1977. It was never found again.

Fans timed the vocoder passage in the track and, The Quietus reports, arrived at the same 72 seconds. Back in 2005 Sandison noted that around Geogaddi people had found things in their records that did not exist.

The comeback campaign was built out of exhausted media. The record is not: the fidelity of their sound has grown album by album, The Quietus notes, and not everyone is happy about it.

Why go to the trouble

Sandison’s answer, back in 2005, is the least technical of the lot: the artificial ageing is there partly to express their sadness at losing the way of perceiving that a child has.

That same afternoon he said something that sits awkwardly with us: they are simply a band, neither an IDM band nor a dance band. We file them under IDM anyway, with the objection attached.

The imprecise memory you hear across these five tracks is not a mood they drifted into. It is the outcome of a chain of decisions, and they will talk you through it one step at a time.