sheatheman Posted December 4, 2013 Share Posted December 4, 2013 I saw the cure live at ACL. Got a VIP band for free because I'm in with some people. My wife loved them. I appreciated them from a technical and phenomenological vantage point. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest rumbo Posted December 4, 2013 Share Posted December 4, 2013 Edward Scissorhands meets Bobcat Goldthwaite. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SR4 Posted December 4, 2013 Share Posted December 4, 2013 i deleted my computer and now i am dead Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Ron Manager Posted December 4, 2013 Share Posted December 4, 2013 TH is not on par with MHTRTC or Geogaddi, but it's fucking good, and definitely not far off. i've dipped in and out of TCH for years and it just doesn't grab me - it's not terrible, but it's nowhere near the other 3. Oscar See Through Red Eye is the only gem on there in my view. in contrast i was hooked on TH immediately, and i'm still enjoying it. ask me again in a year or two and by then it could well be alongside MHTRTC and Geogaddi for me. great album, definitely top 3 for 2013 at least. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sheatheman Posted December 4, 2013 Share Posted December 4, 2013 i deleted my computer and now i am dead you are better off Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest zaphod Posted December 5, 2013 Share Posted December 5, 2013 i still like it. it is concise and probably their most thematically obvious statement, and that doesn't take away from its power. i like how they've created a mimetic form of the "boc sound". the album also isn't afraid to be grandiose, which is honestly something they don't do often. i rank it below mhtrtc, iabpoitc and probably on par with campfire headphase, but they are totally different albums with different goals. campfire was about reinvention, detailed and dense but also sometimes lacking direction, cohesion or really substantive tracks. the highs on that album are pretty high, but the lows are boc at their milquetoast worst. tomorrow's harvest is, for me, more of a cohesive statement as an album. it is foggy and a little muddled sonically, and the tracks do cut off annoyingly early (come to dust is the worst offender), but i enjoy it as a celebration of where boc fit in to my own personal musical landscape. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sheatheman Posted December 5, 2013 Share Posted December 5, 2013 :) The lows for me on Campfire Headphase are: every other time i listen to Dayvan Cowboy; and sometimes Hey Saturday Sun's intro. But there aren't many artists that can claim as many great moments of my quietly solitary drives as BoC can, and that is really something. Have had some amazing experiences driving to Quaristice also. It's always about what is behind the sound, or beyond it. Tomorrow's Harvest is trying to get at it in a way that retains the mystery and magic of tracks like Eagle In Your Mind, but is also trying to be more specific, maybe even prescriptive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Dogboy73 Posted December 6, 2013 Share Posted December 6, 2013 Their best work for me. Can't understand this. I like TH, but the notion that people rank it higher than MHTRTC or Geogaddi is just baffling. I could maybe see TH and TCH being ranked close... But still, no idea how anyone could listen to Music Is Math, and somehow think anything on TH is on par Well, as I said it may be that I've done MHTRTC & Geogaddi to death! But trying to put this aside & look at each album individually for what it is I still think TH is up there with the first two albums. It's more subtle for sure. I think this is why a lot of people don't rate it as highly as the first two albums. But for me this is it's strength. Doesn't sound like BoC deliberately tried to top those albums. More like they just did what they do & what they do so well ........... ........... Okay I'll bite. Here's my very tightly contested & reluctantly delivered top 4 BoC albums (subject to change depending on my mood, state of mind, financial situation, how much sex I'm getting at any particular time, the value of the Aussie Dollar, the Global economic situation, how many drone strikes I've read about, the very real threat of a nuclear strike, China & North Korea's boldness towards war, US troop movements, the price of beef ....... ooh, and beer, what time of the day it is, how tired I am, the amount of whack in my gas tank & the pliability of my mother-in-law). 1. Music Has the Right to Children 2. Tomorrow's Harvest 3. Geogaddi 4. The Campfire Headphase Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alcofribas Posted December 8, 2013 Share Posted December 8, 2013 in 1998 when i was a teenager my cd stopped working and my dad gave me his old turntable to use until i could replace it. i quickly went out looking for records and on my first journey picked up a promo for mbm's "primate audio soup" and was fairly well blown away by the boc remix. at this time i was already getting into ae and aphex and was nominally familiar with boc since i had seen their peel sessions cd around and it looked a lot like the ae one which i loved (mind you, i had no idea what "peel sessions" meant). as soon as i got a new cd player i went to this little cd store in chicago that had all these warp imports and found MHTRTC. what's this? brail? wow, the faces are missing, how intriguing. got home, put it on and was completely amazed. completely. at the time i had read about Cato's notorious overuse of "carthago delendo est" and jokingly concocted my own version amongst friends, ending many of my sentences with "you MUST check out boards of canada." i vividly remember the only surprise party i ever had, conceived by a young lady with whom i was madly in love. my friend was supposed to keep me busy before hand and allow people to show up and prepare, so he took me by the river and got stoned as fuck. then, having lost track of time, he took me to the italian restaurant where they had rented the room for my party, only we were so briefly down at the river that still no one had arrived yet when we got there. i was stoned out of my head, going through boc in my imagination, wondering why on earth my friend took me to this italian restaurant after basically forcing me to smoke weed, and then being utterly amazed that practically everyone i knew started showing up. what a coincidence! and at this random italian place we've never gone to! how quaint! this weed is amazing! i'm amazing! you're all so lovely! took me a while before i was like "wait, is this a surprise party?" anyway, after the whole night, which concluded with a sweetly awkward hug with the aforementioned young lady which painfully did not include a kiss of any kind, i rushed home still fairly high and put on "hi scores." a blissful blue feeling washed over me, nothing was quite like the crunchy, dark beats of boc, the fading emotion of their melodies. it spoke to me in such an intimate way. boc was with me during this era of my life when i was discovering electronic music for the first time, falling in love for the first time, going to italian restaurants for the first time. everything you do is a balloon was almost too painfully beautiful for me and whenever i listened to it my gut would wrench. when i started making my own music i wanted to evoke these feelings. cut to a few years later when geogaddi comes out. i have my own place, a tiny garrett apartment with sloping ceilings so that you could only stand up perfectly straight in the center of the rooms. my friend wants me to come by his dorm room and have some drinks so i decide to bring the new boc just in case. we have some drinks and put on the record but after the first song i decide i can't continue since i feel i need to hear it for the first time on forever-alone-headphones. his roommate, a film student, suggests i use his headphones and he will film me experiencing teh boc for the first time. faithfully assuming the dragon asana which i had learned from a crowley book, head adorned with speakers, i sat in perfect utter stillness for music is math. my mind is blown. is that an 808 kick? on a boc track? lush pads! classic boc bass! omg vocodor vocals!! "the past inside the present!" what does it meeaan?? thoroughly convinced the video footage must be a complete masterpiece of musical transcendence i was amazed to find the roommate annoyed. "DO SOMETHING!" he commands. confusedly i take a lighter from the table near by and set fire to a paper towel. noticing his interest i decide to outdo myself and light the whole roll while unfurling the towels into a giant heap. like a bonfire. was this a proto-campfire headphase? i think so. but suddenly the fire is seeming like it's getting out of control. the flames are almost licking the ceiling. my friend splashes a pathetic glass of water on the fire to no effect. the filmaker is aroused and after pouring his beer into the smoldering bonfire smashes the bottle into it. now i'm totally frightened bc it seems obvious the entire building is going to burn to the ground. my friend ups the anty and empties the complete contents of his brita carafe onto the criminal flames. nothing. i manage to dampen some towels with which we successfully relinquish the color of the fire, terminating its very existence. our hearts raced as we cracked open beers and hearty laughter commenced as we reflected upon our dangerous adventure and subsequent achievement. fucking geogaddi man. years passed and TCH came out. i had a listening party with some watmmers (skytree lol) and we had a lovely evening. despite the lushness of some of the tracks and my overall sense of admiration for the tunes, i can't say this album ever broke into the sacrosanct realms of previous boc musics. i enjoyed it but no flames were unleashed, no italian establishments were intoxicatingly occupied by the complete edition of my friends. so this one passed over me somewhat and i never truly connected with it, nor did it connect with me. many more years passed and now i am in my 30s (fml). it's like i've lived a lifetime. a new boc comes out. wow. seriously, i kind of never thought this would happen. i spent a fair amount of my shift at work refreshing that fucking bleep page trying to preorder this shit. success at last! NO FUCKING WAY. NEW BOC. i follow all the hype and find that this is indeed a nice little adventure back to the company of my old mystic gurus on the astral plane, the boc brothers. finally it arrives. and i realize, i'm 31. when i first heard boc i was 16. hearing the music was something like seeing your best friend from school after many years of hearing nothing from each other. you've lived your life, so much has happened, how can you ever truly convey the substance of all those years to this person? how can you ever traverse the void and rekindle the geogaddi flames of intimacy, inspiration and mutual awe? and you are confounded by how similar they are and it reminds you of how you once were, which is confusing and somewhat painful. the vibrant and ripe years of your youth have faded and somehow this character from that era can only really disappoint you. bc, that era is gone and right now you feel you need something else, something NOW. sure, sometimes you meet an old friend and it's just like old times but sometimes you just can't escape feeling like your meeting is unnatural or unreal, like you're visiting across time and thus can't truly connect. is TH a good album? hell yeah! but sadly for me i think those profound early years of boc were sealed off in a way, perhaps bc while i continued on my journey i did so without boc there with me. sure, i had the old albums but the longer time went on the more fixed they became in that early era, which became an epoch unto itself with no strand of new material to connect it to the present. so now, new boc feels like an anachronism. i enjoy the music and continue to have the utmost respect for the boys, my astral gurus. perhaps i shall simply need more time to let the new music flow into my life, who knows. but for now i can only say that while TH is a lovely album indeed, nevertheless for me it feels untimely and incongruous with my emotional landscape. 10/10 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest zaphod Posted December 8, 2013 Share Posted December 8, 2013 interesting post but i don't really feel the disappointment. here's why: there's no denying that tomorrow's harvest shares many qualities with film soundtrack work, particularly that of 1970s and 1980s sf films. those kinds of films, environmentally aware, dystopian, apocalyptic, captured a kind of shared mood in the popular culture at the time. this is what film does best; encapsulate the undercurrents of fear and doubt that race through culture and turn them into something entertaining and easy to digest. so in a way, tomorrow's harvest uses this form, that of the imaginary soundtrack, to actually track the arc of boc's own career path, and thus the shared listening experience of their fanbase, rabid and casual. i remember the first time i heard kid for today: it was a rainy sunday and i was 17 and my friend matt and i were driving around rural virginia trying to locate a party we had heard about. we didn't have gps or a map and we were completely lost. all we had was this four track ep on compact disc that i bought on a whim at a best buy of all places. i hadn't heard music has the right to children yet. i didn't have any awareness of who or what boards of canada was. it was just music, and the only attachment i had to it was the memory i was creating of this aimless drive. a few years later, around the release of geogaddi, i'm reading about boards of canada with the same hushed reverence that people reserve for a kevin shields or a richard d. james. a lot of this press already existed, but i was happily unaware of it until i stumbled upon xltronic and watmm. that pre-internet phase of listening, something i also experienced with squarepusher, autechre and afx, is a period i miss. i had a similar experience with every artist; listening to ccec on a sony discman while hiking and thinking "this is what rap will sound like in two hundred years" ; trying to finally "crack" music is rotted one note and then, later, having a kind of musical epiphany while listening to "my sound" that put the rest of the album in perspective ; the first gliding notes of xtal as it slides into focus. these are all musical sense memories that that no amount of hype or press or made up stories about the artist can take away from me. tomorrow's harvest feels like one of these memories in pill form, the sum total of a thirteen year relationship with this artist. i can load up my ipod with dozens (hundreds?) of boc songs and go for that same drive. i'm pretty sure i know where the party was, although there's probably an office park there now. i could listen to kid for today again and drive around thinking about how much my life has changed in a little over a decade. but i don't want to. i'll go to my modest crate of vinyl, pull out the torn up copy of tomorrow's harvest that bleep sent me and then refunded anyway, and listen to boc's own recollection of the past. and if i'm relying too much on my nostalgia to find value in this record, well, this is boards of canada we're talking about. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alcofribas Posted December 8, 2013 Share Posted December 8, 2013 i really miss that pre-internet period of music discovery and i'm grateful that my first experiences with electronic music (including boc) took place in that kind of environment. to be sure, i don't think i would describe my feelings about TH as disappointment, but rather as a kind of disconnection. i really like your comments on the record and i have to say i find the cinematic element really well done and compelling. i'm almost willing to conclude that it very well may be the case that i need to just give it more time to open up and make that connection, and that the intensity of my earlier relationship with their music is obscuring my receptivity to TH. i will continue to explore the record, no doubt. for now it feels like they've cooled down a bit but perhaps that's just the right temperature for such a comeback. maybe this is just a cooler, more subtle side of boc, i don't really know yet. it hasn't stirred me as previous albums have but that is a complex situation for which i do not fault the band. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jules Posted December 9, 2013 Share Posted December 9, 2013 quality posting fellas. I can't help but agree with my age and enjoyment now vs discovering that stuff back then. the late 90s were a long time ago. ugh. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
solarion Posted December 9, 2013 Share Posted December 9, 2013 i think it's okay. it is worse than mhtrtc and geogaddi, it is better than campfire headphase, it has a noticeably different sound to any of these. i think there is a noticeably worse filler ratio (a bit too texturally ambient at the times, which when not alleviated with melody has always been my less favourite part of their work) but highs are very high. jacquard causeway had that "i have actually not heard stuff like this before" feel which is always a good sign. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ninjatron Posted December 9, 2013 Share Posted December 9, 2013 I've given this album a long time and lots of listens. Overall, I feel like it is one of their weakest releases. It has a stale feeling, like they had an idea of what they should be making and just stuck to that. It feels like they have already done that dark, dusty memory thing before, keeping to their Boards of Canada guns. Most tracks mush together to form a blob of a memory of this album... lots of filler tracks that I felt were support for this apocalyptic vibe they were exploring. I was hoping after years in recluse they would have something fresh and perhaps inventive for them. Most of the tracks felt like filler, like I was waiting for that moment. That moment did come, and it is an exception I hold to this album... Jacquard Causeway is absolutely beautiful and heart piercing, one of the only tracks that I feel is devoid of any cheesy emotion and is coursing with pure feeling, hitting me on a deep and profound level. To me it is the one track that doesn't SHOW me the ideas they had in mind, but instead sheds any preconception or thought I had about this album when I first heard it or even now. It is all enveloping and forces me to reflect inwardly as well as outwardly, towards conflicts of the world, human kind as a whole, and death. Like, goddamn... First time I heard this I was like ehhh at first and then slowly the track wrapped around me and totally put me in my place. Boards of Canada has done this to me before, maybe with Sixtyniner or something, but never as intensely as this. Maybe someone else feels the same... Cold Earth is an intermediate for me, just a good quality tune not too full of itself and hitting back on some nostalgic Boards of Canada memories for me. Palace Posy sticks out like a sore thumb to me. This feels like an incredibly playful tune, bouncing along and grooving, just making me smile. Is it just me or does this not fit into the album at all? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jules Posted December 9, 2013 Share Posted December 9, 2013 funny I feel like palace posy fits pretty well but jaquard sticks out like the one that doesn't belong Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
manmower Posted December 9, 2013 Share Posted December 9, 2013 I've given this album a long time and lots of listens. Overall, I feel like it is one of their weakest releases. It has a stale feeling, like they had an idea of what they should be making and just stuck to that. It feels like they have already done that dark, dusty memory thing before, keeping to their Boards of Canada guns. Most tracks mush together to form a blob of a memory of this album... lots of filler tracks that I felt were support for this apocalyptic vibe they were exploring. I was hoping after years in recluse they would have something fresh and perhaps inventive for them. Most of the tracks felt like filler, like I was waiting for that moment. That moment did come, and it is an exception I hold to this album... Jacquard Causeway is absolutely beautiful and heart piercing, one of the only tracks that I feel is devoid of any cheesy emotion and is coursing with pure feeling, hitting me on a deep and profound level. To me it is the one track that doesn't SHOW me the ideas they had in mind, but instead sheds any preconception or thought I had about this album when I first heard it or even now. It is all enveloping and forces me to reflect inwardly as well as outwardly, towards conflicts of the world, human kind as a whole, and death. Like, goddamn... First time I heard this I was like ehhh at first and then slowly the track wrapped around me and totally put me in my place. Boards of Canada has done this to me before, maybe with Sixtyniner or something, but never as intensely as this. Maybe someone else feels the same... Cold Earth is an intermediate for me, just a good quality tune not too full of itself and hitting back on some nostalgic Boards of Canada memories for me. Palace Posy sticks out like a sore thumb to me. This feels like an incredibly playful tune, bouncing along and grooving, just making me smile. Is it just me or does this not fit into the album at all? Maybe I shouldn't be posting here since it's the thread for those who dislike TH, and I love it more with every listen, but anyway: Jacquard Causeway has become one of my favorites too. Funny that you mention Cold Earth as an example of "an intermediate", it's the one track I've found underwhelming from day one when that DEMF (or whatever) video was posted. The 'Cold' in the title is strangely fitting, it's as if someone programmed a computer to do a BOC track and it created a soundalike that's completely devoid of the human element, like an Aquarius made by machines. I'm not sure that was entirely on purpose and either way I'm not a big fan of the result. I like that track about one out of every two times I play the album, and the best part of it is always the fade-out, lol. What I never get from this album is the general feeling that they've done it before (not strictly responding to your post here, but it's been a recurring theme in discussion of TH that it's somehow a safe or predictable album for them). It's a BOC album alright, but it's as different or more from its predecessors than those were when they came out. When we first heard Reach For The Dead, I wasn't expecting it to sound the way it does at all, so stark and with those bitcrushed drums. And then when the YouTube stream happened the same thing went for almost all of the tracks. Anyway, I'm not getting into a track-by-track here but to me TH sounds like a very unique, original album (and manages to do so despite wearing its influences on its sleeve). They seem to be at the top of their game as far as I'm concerned, here's hoping that they make hay while the sun shines and get around to releasing more new music in a not too distant future. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sheatheman Posted December 9, 2013 Share Posted December 9, 2013 in 1998 when i was a teenager my cd stopped working and my dad gave me his old turntable to use until i could replace it. i quickly went out looking for records and on my first journey picked up a promo for mbm's "primate audio soup" and was fairly well blown away by the boc remix. at this time i was already getting into ae and aphex and was nominally familiar with boc since i had seen their peel sessions cd around and it looked a lot like the ae one which i loved (mind you, i had no idea what "peel sessions" meant). as soon as i got a new cd player i went to this little cd store in chicago that had all these warp imports and found MHTRTC. what's this? brail? wow, the faces are missing, how intriguing. got home, put it on and was completely amazed. completely. at the time i had read about Cato's notorious overuse of "carthago delendo est" and jokingly concocted my own version amongst friends, ending many of my sentences with "you MUST check out boards of canada." i vividly remember the only surprise party i ever had, conceived by a young lady with whom i was madly in love. my friend was supposed to keep me busy before hand and allow people to show up and prepare, so he took me by the river and got stoned as fuck. then, having lost track of time, he took me to the italian restaurant where they had rented the room for my party, only we were so briefly down at the river that still no one had arrived yet when we got there. i was stoned out of my head, going through boc in my imagination, wondering why on earth my friend took me to this italian restaurant after basically forcing me to smoke weed, and then being utterly amazed that practically everyone i knew started showing up. what a coincidence! and at this random italian place we've never gone to! how quaint! this weed is amazing! i'm amazing! you're all so lovely! took me a while before i was like "wait, is this a surprise party?" anyway, after the whole night, which concluded with a sweetly awkward hug with the aforementioned young lady which painfully did not include a kiss of any kind, i rushed home still fairly high and put on "hi scores." a blissful blue feeling washed over me, nothing was quite like the crunchy, dark beats of boc, the fading emotion of their melodies. it spoke to me in such an intimate way. boc was with me during this era of my life when i was discovering electronic music for the first time, falling in love for the first time, going to italian restaurants for the first time. everything you do is a balloon was almost too painfully beautiful for me and whenever i listened to it my gut would wrench. when i started making my own music i wanted to evoke these feelings. cut to a few years later when geogaddi comes out. i have my own place, a tiny garrett apartment with sloping ceilings so that you could only stand up perfectly straight in the center of the rooms. my friend wants me to come by his dorm room and have some drinks so i decide to bring the new boc just in case. we have some drinks and put on the record but after the first song i decide i can't continue since i feel i need to hear it for the first time on forever-alone-headphones. his roommate, a film student, suggests i use his headphones and he will film me experiencing teh boc for the first time. faithfully assuming the dragon asana which i had learned from a crowley book, head adorned with speakers, i sat in perfect utter stillness for music is math. my mind is blown. is that an 808 kick? on a boc track? lush pads! classic boc bass! omg vocodor vocals!! "the past inside the present!" what does it meeaan?? thoroughly convinced the video footage must be a complete masterpiece of musical transcendence i was amazed to find the roommate annoyed. "DO SOMETHING!" he commands. confusedly i take a lighter from the table near by and set fire to a paper towel. noticing his interest i decide to outdo myself and light the whole roll while unfurling the towels into a giant heap. like a bonfire. was this a proto-campfire headphase? i think so. but suddenly the fire is seeming like it's getting out of control. the flames are almost licking the ceiling. my friend splashes a pathetic glass of water on the fire to no effect. the filmaker is aroused and after pouring his beer into the smoldering bonfire smashes the bottle into it. now i'm totally frightened bc it seems obvious the entire building is going to burn to the ground. my friend ups the anty and empties the complete contents of his brita carafe onto the criminal flames. nothing. i manage to dampen some towels with which we successfully relinquish the color of the fire, terminating its very existence. our hearts raced as we cracked open beers and hearty laughter commenced as we reflected upon our dangerous adventure and subsequent achievement. fucking geogaddi man. years passed and TCH came out. i had a listening party with some watmmers (skytree lol) and we had a lovely evening. despite the lushness of some of the tracks and my overall sense of admiration for the tunes, i can't say this album ever broke into the sacrosanct realms of previous boc musics. i enjoyed it but no flames were unleashed, no italian establishments were intoxicatingly occupied by the complete edition of my friends. so this one passed over me somewhat and i never truly connected with it, nor did it connect with me. many more years passed and now i am in my 30s (fml). it's like i've lived a lifetime. a new boc comes out. wow. seriously, i kind of never thought this would happen. i spent a fair amount of my shift at work refreshing that fucking bleep page trying to preorder this shit. success at last! NO FUCKING WAY. NEW BOC. i follow all the hype and find that this is indeed a nice little adventure back to the company of my old mystic gurus on the astral plane, the boc brothers. finally it arrives. and i realize, i'm 31. when i first heard boc i was 16. hearing the music was something like seeing your best friend from school after many years of hearing nothing from each other. you've lived your life, so much has happened, how can you ever truly convey the substance of all those years to this person? how can you ever traverse the void and rekindle the geogaddi flames of intimacy, inspiration and mutual awe? and you are confounded by how similar they are and it reminds you of how you once were, which is confusing and somewhat painful. the vibrant and ripe years of your youth have faded and somehow this character from that era can only really disappoint you. bc, that era is gone and right now you feel you need something else, something NOW. sure, sometimes you meet an old friend and it's just like old times but sometimes you just can't escape feeling like your meeting is unnatural or unreal, like you're visiting across time and thus can't truly connect. is TH a good album? hell yeah! but sadly for me i think those profound early years of boc were sealed off in a way, perhaps bc while i continued on my journey i did so without boc there with me. sure, i had the old albums but the longer time went on the more fixed they became in that early era, which became an epoch unto itself with no strand of new material to connect it to the present. so now, new boc feels like an anachronism. i enjoy the music and continue to have the utmost respect for the boys, my astral gurus. perhaps i shall simply need more time to let the new music flow into my life, who knows. but for now i can only say that while TH is a lovely album indeed, nevertheless for me it feels untimely and incongruous with my emotional landscape. 10/10 interesting post but i don't really feel the disappointment. here's why: there's no denying that tomorrow's harvest shares many qualities with film soundtrack work, particularly that of 1970s and 1980s sf films. those kinds of films, environmentally aware, dystopian, apocalyptic, captured a kind of shared mood in the popular culture at the time. this is what film does best; encapsulate the undercurrents of fear and doubt that race through culture and turn them into something entertaining and easy to digest. so in a way, tomorrow's harvest uses this form, that of the imaginary soundtrack, to actually track the arc of boc's own career path, and thus the shared listening experience of their fanbase, rabid and casual. i remember the first time i heard kid for today: it was a rainy sunday and i was 17 and my friend matt and i were driving around rural virginia trying to locate a party we had heard about. we didn't have gps or a map and we were completely lost. all we had was this four track ep on compact disc that i bought on a whim at a best buy of all places. i hadn't heard music has the right to children yet. i didn't have any awareness of who or what boards of canada was. it was just music, and the only attachment i had to it was the memory i was creating of this aimless drive. a few years later, around the release of geogaddi, i'm reading about boards of canada with the same hushed reverence that people reserve for a kevin shields or a richard d. james. a lot of this press already existed, but i was happily unaware of it until i stumbled upon xltronic and watmm. that pre-internet phase of listening, something i also experienced with squarepusher, autechre and afx, is a period i miss. i had a similar experience with every artist; listening to ccec on a sony discman while hiking and thinking "this is what rap will sound like in two hundred years" ; trying to finally "crack" music is rotted one note and then, later, having a kind of musical epiphany while listening to "my sound" that put the rest of the album in perspective ; the first gliding notes of xtal as it slides into focus. these are all musical sense memories that that no amount of hype or press or made up stories about the artist can take away from me. tomorrow's harvest feels like one of these memories in pill form, the sum total of a thirteen year relationship with this artist. i can load up my ipod with dozens (hundreds?) of boc songs and go for that same drive. i'm pretty sure i know where the party was, although there's probably an office park there now. i could listen to kid for today again and drive around thinking about how much my life has changed in a little over a decade. but i don't want to. i'll go to my modest crate of vinyl, pull out the torn up copy of tomorrow's harvest that bleep sent me and then refunded anyway, and listen to boc's own recollection of the past. and if i'm relying too much on my nostalgia to find value in this record, well, this is boards of canada we're talking about. i really miss that pre-internet period of music discovery and i'm grateful that my first experiences with electronic music (including boc) took place in that kind of environment. to be sure, i don't think i would describe my feelings about TH as disappointment, but rather as a kind of disconnection. i really like your comments on the record and i have to say i find the cinematic element really well done and compelling. i'm almost willing to conclude that it very well may be the case that i need to just give it more time to open up and make that connection, and that the intensity of my earlier relationship with their music is obscuring my receptivity to TH. i will continue to explore the record, no doubt. for now it feels like they've cooled down a bit but perhaps that's just the right temperature for such a comeback. maybe this is just a cooler, more subtle side of boc, i don't really know yet. it hasn't stirred me as previous albums have but that is a complex situation for which i do not fault the band. Both sides expressed with the utmost honesty, A-Z, Alcofibas to Zaphod, case closed. *CLOSE THREAD* (Final thoughts: We can still experience things with new eyes. I did something I've never done in a place I had never been [riding around on a rental bike for miles and miles on an island that was frozen in 1998, and the whole time I was listening to Tomorrow's Harvest on my pod. Then I would swim in the ocean]. Those types of experiences are what seem to accompany those imprinted first experiences with BoC. If you are fortunate enough for one of these situations to present itself to you, I think that is the prime climate to experience an album like TH. Those situations force you to be open because you are venturing out. You have to let yourself come into new being, for a time.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
solarion Posted December 10, 2013 Share Posted December 10, 2013 edit: i hate not being able to delete posts Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Candiru Posted December 10, 2013 Share Posted December 10, 2013 Overly-familiar BoCisms dressed in slightly different clothing giving you a limp handshake, avoiding eye contact. Trying to set your friend up with a nice girl, but he keeps messing it up. A renowned Italian restaurant opens back up and when you get your food, it's basically the Olive Garden now. Writing smug music reviews to finally impress your weird disciplinarian Indian parents and then writing elevator music. ART. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lumpenprol Posted December 10, 2013 Share Posted December 10, 2013 Overall, I feel like it is one of their weakest releases. It has a stale feeling, like they had an idea of what they should be making and just stuck to that. very well said Overly-familiar BoCisms dressed in slightly different clothing giving you a limp handshake, avoiding eye contact. A renowned Italian restaurant opens back up and when you get your food, it's basically the Olive Garden now. yeah, lol Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sheatheman Posted December 10, 2013 Share Posted December 10, 2013 Whether or not we like a given album probably says more about us than the music. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lumpenprol Posted December 10, 2013 Share Posted December 10, 2013 not really, I think you can read a lot about the mental state of the artist in the music they make. It (tends to be) a very emotional medium. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Candiru Posted December 10, 2013 Share Posted December 10, 2013 Whether or not we like a given album probably says more about us than the music. Assuming artists are infallible geniuses with windows into OUR souls specifically and not theirs. You're putting it on a pedestal. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joyrex Posted December 10, 2013 Share Posted December 10, 2013 It will be interesting a few years from now to revisit this topic... I would imagine a few people changing their minds ultimately. Of course, whether or not BOC comes out with anything else in the interim will obviously affect that outcome. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Candiru Posted December 10, 2013 Share Posted December 10, 2013 That might be true. It could be there were some tracks left off the album that pointed to a more fleshed out BoC and that they were sacrificed for the concept. As artists' careers go on, lots of times they are less concerned with "wowing" you and more about a certain presentation. I hope they don't leave so much on the cutting room floor next time, if that's what happened. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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