Album of the Week: Boards of Canada- Geogaddi

Before I had ever listened to it, I read somewhere that audiophiles used Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon to test and calibrate their stereo systems. I've always liked the idea of people having a certain 'item' they run through new purchases for testing purposes, whether it be comparing a certain movie on Blu-ray vs. DVD or using one of those test CDs to make sure your car's new set-up can handle super loud bone-shaking bass. Me, though, I like to try out different visualizers, and while everyone else is focusing on how the new iTunes has a music recommendation feature called Genius, I've been putting the new visualizer through its paces.

My chosen album for putting said visualizers through said paces?? Geogaddi, of course. I find most instrumental music intensely visual, in a synesthesia kind of way--especially if it's electronic in origin--so it's nice to be lazy from time and time and let a computer handle the visuals while I relax my eyes and let drool slowly waterfall down the sides of my mouth. Some of my favorite times during school were watching science films with glazed-over adolescent eyes, and even if they were made in the same decade I was viewing them (the 90s, for those keeping score at home), they usually had this eerie soundtrack made up of late 70s/early 80s sounding keyboards, synthesizers, and sometimes even primitive drum machines. It sounded artificial and clunky, but it was otherworldly and oddly fascinating to me, and for the longest time I longed for music that sounded like it. Ambient music and ambient techno came really close, but my dream only can true when I discovered Boards of Canada, who--believe it or not--took inspiration for their name from 'The National Film Board of Canada', who produced many such science films.

Though Music Has The Right To Children, the band's first album, is widely considered to be a landmark in the electronic music genre, I personally think Geogaddi is the better album. This is for the entirely selfish reason that it comes the closest to meeting my longing for music that was like a science film soundtrack only better. Well, OK, I also think it's got better songs and does that magical music critic sentence fragment of "rewarding repeat listens." Speaking of magic, the duo behind Boards of Canada have talked about how they're obsessed and influenced by things like math, science, the paranormal world, cults, nature, childhood innocence, and outdated technology. At the same time, they have an aesthetic that reminds me a bit of the kind of...dark underbelly of late 60s music, with backmasked messages, mysteries about the making of their music and their identities (it was only recently revealed that the duo are actually brothers), hard-to-find albums or bootlegs of material not generally known to the public, a sense of general unease that hangs over some of their music, and a habit of putting hidden meanings or messages into their music (or at least, people reading it into their music).

I was recently relistening to Aphex Twin's first Selected Ambient Works album, and I realized why I don't like it as much as I do his second. It's entirely due to the instruments he used to make it, because the album has a very cheap, artificial sound to it rather than the organic, natural sound I associate with ambient music. Rather than being timeless music, it sounds very obviously early 90s, just like early Autechre does. Boards of Canada are so incredible to me because, by using outdated technology like analog synthesizers, their music becomes timeless. It's exactly why Brian Eno's groundbreaking ambient releases still sound captivating today. Don't mistake this for thinking that the only good ambient music has warmth or is human sounding, though. Great ambient music, and ambient techno in particular, often sounds cold, spacey, otherworldly, inhuman, and sometimes machine-like.

In fact, Geogaddi neatly juxtaposes human/otherworldly and natural/machine-like sounds. The shorter "interlude" tracks are usually free floating ambient pieces, sometimes with samples from science films or children talking, while the longer tracks have persistent beats that never fall prey to dancefloor bump-and-grind obvious-ness. Geogaddi is my ideal for how 'ambient techno' genre (or is that subgenre??) should sound, combining highly melodic and memorable keyboard melodies, synthesizer washes, surreal soundscapes, and plaintive minimalism with hypnotic-but-never-tedious percussive rhythms. More specifically, the album is full of contenders for the band's best work, including 'Dawn Chorus' (which reminds me of the beginning of 'The Gash' by the Flaming Lips for some reason) and 'Sunshine Recorder', a song I liked enough to have its title inscribed on the back of my iPod three years ago.

For what it's worth, the new iTunes visualizer passed the Geogaddi test. But more importantly, Geogaddi still holds up as one of the best ambient techno albums ever made, and one that I never seem to get tired of. Those interested in the genre (or subgenre...?? Whatever...) could scarcely find a better introduction, while those of you left a little underwhelmed by The Campfire Headphase are urged to travel back to this release and refresh your memory as to why you loved this band so much.