[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Boards of Canada: “Telephasic Workshop”
From the album Music Has the Right to Children (1998)
The music of the Scottish duo Boards of Canada occupies a unique and difficult to define stylistic position in contemporary electronica. It’s a creative mix of (among other influences) IDM, ambient, and a brand of sonically expressed technostalgia that seems to flourish in the British isles. (See my previous post on Belbury Poly.)
Some of Boards’ music is a bit too close to the “sonic wallpaper” aesthetic that, even now, after so many barriers have fallen— I recently learned to love the music of Dolly Parton— I still have a hard time getting into. I will write more about this later, perhaps after I have undergone a regimen of Brian Eno-dominated musical “reprogramming” a la A Clockwork Orange.
But at its best, I hear this music as the throbbing heartbeat of the technologized world. Like much of Boards’ music, “Telephasic Workshop” is based on a quasi-minimalist repetition of sound material: in this case, a drum loop, evocative harmonic samples, and strange vocal fragments that never quite turn into speech. Upon careful listening, one perceives the subtle and almost organic mutation of these basic forms, which allows them to breathe, and— perhaps paradoxically— strengthens the overall effect of incantation through obsessive restatement.
Played 70 time(s).
September 04, 2009, 9:19am
