Boards Of Canada: 18 Years Of Chilling To Perfection

18 years after forming, downtempo ambient experimentalists Boards Of Canada find themselves near the top of the electronica tree, after a career progression that's been as slow and uncompromised as their music itself. Snapped up by Autechre's Sean Booth in 96, after 12 years of wilful obscurity, the Scottish duo of Michael Sandisosn and Marcus Eoin, went on to sign with Warp (1998) followed by US deals the year after.

Critically acclaimed debut album Music Has The Right to Children cemented their reputation and since then their back catalogue has soundtracked countless documentaries and projects. Their lush layered electronics, sparse sampling and simple melodies have become benchmarks in serious chill out music and they continue their theme on new album Geogaldi. Skrufff's man-in-Sydney Tim Colman hooked up with the pair to discuss the new record.

Skrufff: How did Boards Of Canada first come together-

Boards Of Canada (Marcus): "We'd been recording music since we were kids at school, as members of different bands. Then at some point in the mid-eighties I joined one of Mike's bands and we started heading down the path of electronic music. In the early 90s we realised there was a sound we kept coming back to, and over time the band we whittled it down to just myself and Mike."

Skrufff: Were you always into the more chilled style and sounds-

Boards Of Canada (Mike): I'm not sure why we tend to do this style, it's probably just a reflection of us as people. We're into every kind of music under the sun, even the most aggressive music ever heard, but we distil and distort our influences down to our own thing, which tends to be a bit less frenetic than most electronic music. Also, the fact that we're not living in the city probably keeps our heart-rates rarely above 30 bpm. That's going to have an effect on our music too."

Skrufff: You seem to prefer to focus on and refine one style rather then experimenting with many different genres and beats, why-

Boards Of Canada (Marcus): "We've tried to carve our own sound in order to create longer lasting music. It's easy to play around with other genres and so on, but you risk dating yourself to a certain year or fashion in music."


Skrufff: You're released on the Warp label whose artists tend to release music a lot harsher in nature. What do you think of your label mates-

Boards Of Canada (Mike): "We've got a lot of respect for most of what Warp puts out. I think they've pushed the boundaries of electronic music more than any other label. Back in the early eighties we were listening to a lot of music that people might describe as difficult or harsh, like DAF, and back then we went through our own patch of making hard minimal music. We use our own production techniques that we've picked up over the years, as have the other bands on Warp. If there are similar techniques being used to produce tracks it's a coincidence."


Skrufff: In what ways do or did visual documentaries and soundtracks effect your
sound-

Boards Of Canada (Marcus): "Hugely. Both of us grew up on a diet of wildlife documentaries and public information broadcasts on television. We were both drawn into the partly surreal nature of the public information films and also their weird soundtracks that usually included imperfectly-tuned synthesisers and muffled voices. I guess today we're constantly trying to get back to that influence through our own tunes by damaging the sound as much as possible."

Skrufff: Do you often take into account the visual side of music when writing a
track-

Boards Of Canada (Mike): "When we're composing it's as though we're writing a soundtrack for a film or an abstract visual and that acts as the fuel for ideas in a track. I guess we do that on two levels, since each track is influenced by a different imagined visual idea, and the compilation of our albums is intended to suggest the journey-like flow of a movie, just as an entire film soundtrack would."

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