Isn’t this why people listen to BoC?
Even at their prettiest, their music feels sinister and cold to me. It’s why I love it, and why I like TCH the least.
Love Tomorrow’s Harvest. Not as much as Geogaddi, but still ace.
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Not me. For me, the first couple of albums had deeply nostalgic elements to them (Sesame Street samples - “Orange”, Leslie Nielsen narrating a documentary about lava, One Very Important Thought, etc), and while there is a darkness to them, they still have more of an “earthy”, psychedelic, and even playful vibe to me. Tomorrow’s Harvest just feels cold and dark and apocalyptic to me, none of that earlier playfulness, and clearly that’s the point of that album, but to me, it’s never been an enjoyable listen (although I do really dig the intro to it). All personal taste of course.
Part of me wonders if the reason I prefer the first two albums is because they are more sample heavy, which perhaps contributes a lot to the nostalgia factor.
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Tomorrow’s Hardest and Campfire Headphase kind of switch places as my favorite BoC album from time to time. CH took some time to grow on me, but TH was immediate love (though I still don’t like Palace Posey very much). It’s the exact vibe that I wanted from a new album, and I find its soothing yet apocalyptic tone very fitting for my mood on a regular basis.
Edit: also holy hell I can’t believe it has been 10 years since tomorrow’s harvest.
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i mostly remember the textures of the last track, so maybe give it a listen.
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Sort of loosely connected, but for “dark retro sci-fi” vibes, I think I prefer the soundtrack to Panos Cosmatos’s Beyond the Black Rainbow, over Tomorrows Harvest. (Great movie, btw, and would likely appeal to a lot of BoC fans I’d imagine. The whole movie looks like how I imagine a BoC album).
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I find some BOC tracks very warm and others a bit more cold. But they all have a special atmosphere to me.
It took some time for Headphase to hit me and and a bit more to learn to love Tommorrow’s Harvest. I listened to it on shrooms one time and my mind was blown. 
I still don’t like some of these tracks as much as other BOC stuff. And there’s one track (White Cyclosa) where everything is perfect and these lovely drums come in and they fade it out way too soon. But hey, i love these guys for their huge inspiration they had on me and my music.
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My story is above somewhere. But the long and short of it is…
I was deep into Ae, got BoC and found it was kind meh…too soft. Got it cuz I heard Happy Cycling and thought it interesting. But then one day Pete Standing Alone hit me, all the diff kicks, percs…subtle little shits in the track I’d never heard. I got sucked in…large.
[can’t stand Headphase. the album actually agitates me.]
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I think the thing with Harvest is, it’s one of those albums that has to be listened to…as an album. A few tracks can stand on their own. But it’s an entire package. It’s like a sound track. Harvest is good!
Out of the albums Geo is my fave. Headphase just feels like an obligation had to be met. I like a couple tracks, but they actually sound like tracks that didn’t make the cut for Geo.
I wonder if there is a, The Walls, Wizard of Oz meant to compliment Harvest. Just, no one has found it yet 
Re: Harvest, someone speculated that there is an alt playlist, because of the ‘symetricality’ of the album. The reversed direction mid track of the middle track 9 Uritual, the Owl of Minerva acronym, Palace Post acronym.
It’s an interesting way to listen to it.
- Gemini
- Semena Mertvyk
- Reach for the Dead
- Come to Dust
- White Cyclosa
- New Seeds
- Jaquard Causeway
- Sundown
- Telepath
- Nothing is Real
- Cold Earth
- Uritual
- Transmisones Ferox
- Split Your Infinities
- Sick Times
- Palace Posy
- Collapse
ugh correction acronym > anagram 
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My take on it is that overall Tomorrow’s Harvest is my favourite album overall… it’s the most cohesive and the overall quality is really high. Only one song doesn’t do it for me… Palace Posy feels a bit awkward. But, there a few tracks on each of MHTRTC and Geogaddie that are better than anything on TH but then there also quite a few that leave me cold… Aquarius actively rips my knitting. So, TH is more consistently awesome and I don’t feel the need to skip as much. But those high points on MHTRTC and Geo… chef’s kiss.
Heaphase is decent but doesn’t hit the other heights…
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pretty sweet cover. just didn’t have the fx, but sourced SOLID samples.
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that YT’er does some other covers of that variety. a couple AFX ones. really fun watches and he does a great job. some features on gear used for those records as well.
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Tomorrows Harvest is a significant album for me. First of all it’s BoC at its finest in terms of production. This album is dense and many nice discoveries to be had when listening multiple times.
But more important is how the album aged. It was released way before covid, but for me personally it fitted so well with the feeling of being in the middle of an epidemic.
It’s funny cause I had it on repeat when it when it was released, but during covid it felt like discover a whole new side to it.
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Just read this on wikipedia and was wondering if anyone had any specifics about the effects unit in question.
"During the recording sessions, Boards of Canada used a wide range of vintage hardware and equipment, including an effects unit “that cost [Eoin and Sandison] a lot of time and road miles to source.”
There are some very weird, scrambled vocal sounds on Tomorrows Harvest, maybe that’s the mystery effect in action. Anyone have any info?
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Anyone that would know would never share their secrets. The speculation has been going on since MHTRTC.
I think there is not one special effect, but rather an accumulation of fx and processing techniques that they use.
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I don’t currently see any such reference on their Wikipedia page
regardless… yeah, they’re super secretive about their lives in general, and even more so about gear. so you’ll likely never know what such a thing is, or if it even exists.
They said in an interview that they bought one device which was either hard to come by or quite expensive that they only used for one sound on an album.
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It was a water damaged DAT machine, shipped from Cornwall.
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Weird, I can’t find it anymore, but I distinctly remember reading an interview where they mentioned using a Drawmer rack unit around the time of Geogaddi, either a compressor or (more likely) a channel strip. They said they were amused at how they could dial in the character of different decades of recordings with the controls.
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I found the interview on bocpages.org
"Sandison: “We’re definitely vintage hardware freaks. We’ve always used older gear. Everything we use is decrepit. Our studio is full of wooden things covered with red LEDs. We’ll go to great lengths to get hold of a specific instrument just to get a particular sound. For example, there’s a sound in Cold Earth that is something like only one second of audio. It comes from an obscure old effect unit that cost us a lot of time and road miles to source, and it ended up being one second of audio on the record. As for our percussion, it’s never just a drum machine or a sample, we put a lot of real live drumming or percussion in there, woven into the rhythm tracks, and it brings a bit of chaos into the sound that you just can’t achieve any other way.”
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The funny thing is that their studio is full of old and obscure stuff. It could even just be an old overdrive or fuzz pedal.