No Filler Music Podcast - Sidetrack: Boards of Canada - Bocuma

Episode Date: January 31, 2018

This week's sidetrack touches on Scottish electronic duo Boards of Canada, one of the early pioneers of the IDM genre. We listen to "Bocuma" off the 1998 album Music Has the Right to Children, and discuss the major influence that Boards of Canada had on Tycho's early work. For more information, check out the show notes: https://www.nofillerpodcast.com/episode/tycho-dive#sidetrack Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Order Uber Eats now. For alcohol, you must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly. Product availability varies by region. See app for details. And we're back midweek with another sidetrack episode for you. This is No Filler podcast. My name is Travis.

With me, as always, is my brother Quentin. Q, how's it going? It's going, brother. It's good. We're two episodes in to the no-filler experience, the journey. And if you listen to episode two, that was Tyco's Dive, Tyco, Mr. Scott Hanson, Chill Wave, IDM, Down-T tempo.

And so for the Sidetrack episode, we decided to explore one of his influences, a band that has influenced widely considered a music, major influence to the IDM genre as a whole. A band called Boards of Canada. And that song you heard in the intro was called Aquarius. It was off of their album. Music has the right to children, which is an awesome name for an album.

Yeah, it's kind of weird. Yeah. Anytime I think of Boards of Canada, I think, you know, weird, just kind of slightly off. Their music's kind of strange to me. That one was pleasant, but a lot of their stuff is just kind of dark. Really? And you're not listening to Boards of Canada then, dude.

You know what? Let me tell you why I think that. Okay. And this is probably going to age us. You remember solid fingers, right, Travis? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

That's, dude, it's funny that you say that because I didn't realize that that was a Boards of Canada song. That song is so fucking creepy, dude. It's called, what was it called? Something about a stranger. Beware the friendly stranger. And that was off of their, I don't know how to pronounce this, Gio Gagati, and that came out in 2002. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But yeah, no, most of their stuff is more along the lines of hypnagogic pop, as we talked about in the previous episode, the more like kind of nostalgia, you know, chill wave glow five chill wave before that term was coined

that Aquarius song was um really down tempo the drum beat was at least yeah the drum beat yeah

and the layers um and when did that come out they came out in 98 okay yeah that was a long time ago yeah but you know they used a lot of

they used a lot of tapes tape machines uh vintage synthesizers and whatnot and I think they were kind of the pioneers of

of IDM music where it was kind of you know they brought in those hip hop kind of break beats which you know is more down tempo so anyway you have a quote from from a magazine right

yeah so Scott Hansen was interviewed for that internet publication sound toys. We quoted from that in our full-length episode. And they had asked him if he asked him if he was a Boards of Canada fan based on some of his techniques and stuff. And he said, absolutely. I'd say a little more than a fan. Boards of Canada defined a space that I felt really comfortable in as a producer.

They just showed me there's a different way of going about electronic music production that doesn't involve so much of the dance or the electronic element. It's a much more organic way of recording. That taught me the whole lo-fi tape vibe thing. And he says I took my favorite parts of that and applied them in different ways. So yeah, huge influence on him. So that's exactly what we were saying. So yeah, it's not about, it's electronic music that, that's not for dancing to.

It's dance music evolved. I mean, you can dance to it if you want. want, but I mean, you're not going to hear, you're not going to go into a nightclub and hear a boards of Canada track. You know what I mean? Right. Unless maybe it's like a dance club in like Portland or something. Yeah, maybe.

I mean, you're definitely going to hear it at a coffee shop or something. I feel like a trendy coffee shop. Or at least if I had a coffee shop, that's what I'd be playing. You'd be blasting boards of Canada? Hell yeah. But yeah. I've got another quote from ear milk, which I think, I think we referenced this same article in the last episode.

But he says that when he first started producing music, he was trying to emulate DJ Buchan doing drum and bass stuff in the late 90s. So I've never heard of this guy before. But that's where his drum and bass influence came from. And then he says he got into Bores of Canada and used them as a jumping off point. So he was influenced by drum and bass, probably down tempo as well. and then what I just said, and what you just said, Boards of Canada was like his, it seems like it was his major influence as far as like how to approach electronic music.

So the sidetrack for today is a track off of the same album, music has the right to children. It's called Bakima. And before we play it, I wanted to play just a quick clip from a Tyco song. off of his first studio album, past his prologue called Sunrise Projector, because I just really wanted to underscore like how much of an influence Boards of Canada was

on Scott Hansen when he was doing early Tycho stuff. You can really, really hear it, and I think it helps if you can kind of hear one of his earlier tracks. So let's play that quick clip from Sunrise Projector, and then we'll play the sidetrack. Okay, so that was tiny clip from Sunrise projector. But you heard, you know, that kind of his, what has become known as sort of the signature Tycho sound,

but, you know, really that sound, Boards of Canada kind of made that sound much earlier. You know what I mean? And then you heard sort of the clip that he, the sample that he pulled in of that, of that female voice. You're not going to hear that on Bacuma, but you can hear that on some other tracks

on music has the right to children. They bring in a lot of samples from audio, vocal tracks and whatnot. But let's listen to Bacchema now, and I think you're going to really hear the similarities. All right, so that was it. Very repetitive. Repetitive, yeah, sure.

But, I mean, to go back to the idea of what IDM is, there wasn't even a drumbeat on that entire track, you know what I mean? No. So, and it's funny that it's called IDM Intelligent Dance Music, but part of the whole point of IDM is that you don't, you're typically not going to dance to it, you know? Right. But you can really hear the similarities between that song and the Tyco track.

Big time. Big time. It's like that wobbly kind of, you know? Well, the way, yeah, the way that, that he kind of, what's the term I'm looking for, man? The way that they, this is where we need,

like a music producer on this pod to say the term. But, yeah, the way that they kind of put those three notes together. I'm not even going to attempt. Yeah. But yeah. But you heard it.

Yeah, so if you were to sit somebody down and play them a Boards of Canada track, followed by a Tyco track, they'd probably think it was the same artist. You know what I mean? They wouldn't immediately, think, well, I'm definitely listening to two different artists here. You know what I mean? Because the similarities are so, let's just, let's make sure that we'd say

Tycho's early work. So it's really Tycho's early stuff that sounds where you can hear the big time influence. And then he sort of took, took that sound and it made it his own. But, yeah, he started to evolve as an artist. Yeah. But I mean, you can, you can certainly hear the the influence on his early work. And like we mentioned in the previous episode, in the full-length Tycho episode, it's not just him anymore. He's,

you know, he's got two other dudes in it that are influencing the sound. Yeah, definitely. But, but yeah, it's kind of, we touched on this in the Tyco episode,

the term hypnagogic pop, you know, where it kind of music that kind of touches on cultural memory and nostalgia. like Boards of Canada definitely did that. So much so that like there's this quote that I found that's really funny from from one of the two members of Boards of Canada,

which we haven't even mentioned yet. So let's say that. It's two Scottish electronic musicians by the name of Michael Sandison and Marcus Owen. And Marcus, or I'm sorry, Michael Sanderson is quoted as saying, when asked about like how they approach like nostalgia in their music, he says when I was a fetus I was nostalgic for when I was a sperm

which I thought's really funny that's really funny it's a weird way to look at it to think about it I mean that's kind of a good way to summarize there's this there's always this like

drive for like going back you know what I mean a lot of people have that that's what nostalgia is all about it's like for some reason the past always seems better than the present you know what I mean yeah and it's easy

easier than ever nowadays to go back and relive your childhood, you know, with the internet. Yeah, so that's what hypnagogic pop is all about. It kind of taps into that, that sound of like 80s, you know, analog synthesizers and whatnot. And, you know, a lot of IDA music was heavily influenced by Boards of Canada. And you hear it in Tyco and you hear it in a ton of artists. But I think they were kind of the first ones who, you know, the first ones who, you know, really started to kind of bring in that that kind of sound. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, it's that hypnagogic pop.

Yeah. So that's it. That's our sidetrack for this week, short and sweet, as it should be. So next week, or I guess I should say Saturday or Sunday when we drop the next episode, we are going to talk about Kings of Leon's debut album, Youth and Young Manhood. and that is a great episode. So stay tuned for that one. Yeah, that's a good one.

All right, so yeah, that should do it for us midweek here for our side track episode. Hope you enjoyed it. Be sure to hop on to our website, no filler podcast.com. You can check out the show notes for all of our episodes where you will find the show notes for the sidetrack as well. And you can stream our SoundCloud player. directly from our website. Of course, you can always subscribe to us through any of the podcast apps that you use.

We're on iTunes as well. And on the tweeters at No Failure Podcast. Did I touch it all, do? Do we have a contact page up yet? No, but we will. Okay. Well, probably will about the time this episode airs. But yeah, you can use a contact form on our website.

if you have a suggestion for an album or a band you'd like us to talk about. But you can also shoot us an email, no-filler podcast at gmail.com. But I also wanted to mention that because this is the end of January, we're going to put our first no-filler playlist on Spotify. So that's going to have any track that we mentioned or referenced on the episodes. It's going to be put on a playlist. And we're going to come out with a monthly playlist. So the one that is going to be live on Spotify, by the time you're hearing this, we'll have every track from the first episode and every track from the side tracks as well.

And starting in February, we're just going to put the playlist up and just add to it as the episodes release. Yeah, so you can follow us on Spotify. And it's basically just a way for you to, you know, if you want to. want to listen to a song in its entirety from one of the songs we talk about or, you know, a song that we play a clip of on our episodes. You can listen to the full track. If it's on Spotify, we will have it on our playlists. So yeah, we figured that would be a good way to, if you hear something on this podcast

that you want to kind of explore a little bit deeper as far as the music, that would be a good way to do it because you can just, once you finish hearing an episode, go on Spotify and you can basically hear a playlist of everything that we just talked about. So that's the idea there. Follow us on Spotify and all the other things that we mentioned. So that's it. We will release another episode here in a few days and we're just going to keep on rocking. So that's it.

See you all next time. Take care now. Bye, bye then.