Sunday, June 16, 2013

Geeta Dayal at Slate on Tomorrow's Harvest:

"If there’s an ongoing theme in Boards of Canada’s music over the years, it’s a celebration of the beauty of imperfection, of slow deterioration. The concept of capturing a bygone moment and holding it in your hand as it slowly dissolves is central to Boards’ aesthetic... True to form, the melancholy closing track... “Semena Mertvykh” (in Russian, the title apparently translates to “seeds of the dead”), was “performed into a dissected VHS deck with the motor running super slowly, so you can hear all the pockmarks, the dropouts in the tape,” according to a recent New York Times interview. (Eoin also noted with pride that the track was recorded in mono.)...  Everything we use is decrepit,” Sandison said in a recent interview with the Guardian)....

"...  Boards of Canada always sounds like Boards of Canada.... As unrelentingly dark as most of Tomorrow’s Harvest is, there are moments where it’s hard not to smile. In “Palace Posy,” the mood steadily grows warmer, culminating in a cut-up vocal sample that sounds like it could have been ripped out of 1998’s Music Has A Right To Children. Boards of Canada—they’re just so … themselves."

Of course, a not-as-nice way of saying this is "self-parody".... 



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