Boards of Canada — Campfire Headphase
Well gang, we’re living in the thrill of another BoC album launch! I suspect they’ll show up a lot this month, so I’ll keep it short.
One day I was at Future Shop (which was basically a Canadian Best Buy, until Best Buy bought and rebranded it), and the album cover caught my eye. I vaguely knew about Warp Records because one of my friends listened to Aphex Twin’s Come to Daddy EP obsessively, and I thought I had maybe heard something about BoC being good, so I decided to take a chance.
I can’t say the album CHANGED anything for me. I was in the twelfth grade, had already absorbed a wide range of music both as a listener and as a player, and had even started to get into solo music production on a Tascam 788. But Campfire Headphase FOCUSED everything for me, and inspired me to think about “simple contentment” and “joyful solitude” as valid musical themes.
BoC basically teaches a master-class in tape echo, not only driving an incredible sense of momentum in “Dayvan Cowboy,” but also adding tension and release to songs like “Satellite Anthem Icarus” and “Oscar See Through Red Eye.” And their sound design is perfectly on point throughout. I remember people questioning whether the guitar belonged in electronic music, which seems quaint in retrospect. They treated every instrument with a similar level of care, and honestly, their warbly noodling sounds almost perfectly modern today.
Finally, while Boards of Canada are famously not Canadian, I was thrilled to learn that they briefly lived in Calgary and that the cover photo for Music Has the Right to Children was taken in Banff. At the time, it felt like every Canadian artist worth celebrating was coming out of, or at least moving to, Toronto or Montreal. I left Calgary more than ten years ago and I don’t see myself moving back, but when we were visiting in early 2022 I finally dragged my family to the MHTRTC lookout for a photo:
