Gyroscope (The Devil Is In The Details?)

Something I find a bit sobering about it being 2023 is the realisation that it's now been a full decade since we last had a brand new Boards of Canada album. Are those guys ever coming back?

If Scottish siblings Michael Sandison and Marcus Eion never gift us with another full-fledged package of otherworldly nostalgia and hair-raising subliminals, then we at least can't say that they didn't go out with some semblance of closure, albeit not the kind of closure geared toward lifting weight off our shoulders. I fear this may be a cliched observation, but the current tetrad of Boards of Canada albums appear to correspond perfectly with the different stages of a person's existence. Music Has The Right To Children (1998) explores, in that finest of hauntological traditions, a hazily-remembered childhood, one filtered through the lens of the uncanny but with an unmistakable air of sunniness, echoed in the numerous Sesame Street-sourced samples of giggling children scattered across the album. It plays like the soundtrack to a long lost summer. Geogaddi (2002) has a similarly youthful vigor but comes from a place of heightened disturbance; it is the soundtrack to yet another lost summer, one occurring somewhat later down the line, in which innocence was completely evaporated and the world never seemed quite so idyllic thereafter. The Campfire Headphase (2005), with its heavy emphasis on acoustic strings, represented a new "mature" sound for the duo, after which Tomorrow's Harvest (2013) saw a return to the creeping paranoia of Geogaddi, but with a more meticulously desolate slant. As the title suggests, it is about looking forward, not backward, and the mood of the album implies that the future it anticipates is none too optimistic. It is a meditation on mortality if ever there was one; the final track, "Semena Mertvykh" (Russian for "Seeds of The Dead"), defiantly refuses to offer anything in the way of comfort. Sorry folks, it seems to say, but this is indeed where it all ends. The fragility of existence is evoked, eerily, in the album cover, which shows a ghostly perspective of the San Francisco skyline glimpsed from the defunct Alameda Naval Air Station, an image that conjures up both a haunted past (Alameda was a significant military base during the Cold War) and a haunted future (a world in which civilisation has collapsed, leaving only a wasteland where it once stood). It speaks so much of the way our history could have gone, and where we might well still be headed.

The elimination of barriers of safety (or perceived barriers) is every bit as pivotal to Geogaddi, which occupies an equally thin dividing line between carefree innocence and anxious awareness - its interests lie in teasing out the undercurrent of perpetual unease that pervades all corners of its dazzling soundscapes. The especially spine-chilling short track with the PSA-ready title "Beware The Friendly Stranger" (which would later become synonymous with the web cartoon Salad Fingers) makes it plain that the disruption of childhood innocence is one of the album's preoccupations. Elsewhere, we find references to the occult, the Satanic and to religious cults ("1969" is a continuation of a theme already explored in BoC's 2000 EP A Beautiful Place Out In The Country, which centred around the Branch Davidian religious sect - Eion confirmed in a contemporary interview with URB Magazine that their real fascination with this story was in "the shock of seeing how the US authorities handled it all", suggesting that we're ultimately no safer in the hands of those we are conditioned to see as our protectors). Some of these references could be described as tongue-in-cheek - one of the tracks receives the on-the-nose title "The Devil Is In The Details", while the purpose of the otherwise baffling (even by BoC's standards) closer "Magic Window", one minute and forty-seven seconds of complete silence, is typically ascribed to getting the album to run at exactly sixty-six minutes and six seconds in length. It's here that Boards of Canada seem to be deliberately baiting and lampooning the hysteria about backmasking in music that gained particular traction during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, making Geogaddi as much a parody of our addiction to perceived danger as it is a deconstruction of perceived safety. Numerous tracks and their titles also reflect an interest in mathematics, science and the intricacies of the natural world ("Dandelion", "Dawn Chorus", "A Is To B As B Is To C"). As with much of Music Has The Right To Children, these are nods to one of the duo's most prominent inspirations, evoking the soundtracks found in vintage educational programming, but in Geogaddi they convey a more salient urge to examine the underlying codes and patterns of the universe, from the twitchy perspective that they might reveal something fundamentally sinister about the nature of our being (meanwhile, the short track "Energy Warning", a precursor to the concerns conveyed more centrally in Tomorrow's Harvest, reminds us that the real balefulness stirring in the natural world is that which we are apt to bring upon ourselves). Geogaddi deals with omnipresent forces operating at all kinds of levels - the individual, the institutional, the cosmic and the microscopic - forces that, if not uniformly malign, seem at best spooky and unknowable. Paranoia is key to Geogaddi, but so is curiosity; compared to the bleakness of Tomorrow's Harvest, Geogaddi seems to relish the prospect of awakening to the danger that lies beyond the boundaries of young guilelessness, and the possibility that such danger is what our childhood games and rituals have always intuitively anticipated and prepared us for.

The emotional gulf between Music Has The Right To Children and Geogaddi is probably no better illustrated than in the respective tracks "Aquarius" and "Gyroscope", both of which involve voices reciting sequences of numbers (a recurring theme throughout BoC's discography...after all, as Geogaddi explicitly reminds us, Music is Math). The first sounds bouncy and optimistic, the second distinctly ominous. "Aquarius" is filled with buoyant young voices laughing and proclaiming "Yeah, that's right!" while a female voice reels off assorted numbers, initially from 1 to 36, but then she goes off in all directions. The synthesised nature of her speech notwithstanding, the results are entirely non-threatening (although if you add up every number from 1 to 36 you get 666, so...there is that), conveying all the rhythmic energy of a particularly infectious counting game. The vocal sample used in "Gyroscope" could also be construed as having associations with childhood play, sounding reminiscent as it does of the build-up to a game of hide-and-seek, but in a manner that emphasises the more sinister implications of the game in question. The distinction between recreation and pursuit of a less innocent nature is blurred; we sense that, in this case, the sequence of numbers presages some unknown impending threat, from which we have only a narrow amount of time to run and conceal ourselves. The title "Gyroscope", one of several scientifically-themed track names throughout the album, alludes to the disorientating spinning sensation created by the track's drum loop, suggesting a frantic loss of control. The game has not yet properly begun, and yet already the odds seemed stacked against us.

In actuality, the voice heard throughout "Gyroscope" is not that of a child, but an adult woman. The audio has been slightly tweaked, but it's a recording of a numbers station (apparently E05, or CynthIA, as it's more affectionately known), shortwave radio stations used to transmit encrypted messages, presumably from intelligence agencies to operatives working in the field. Historically, numbers stations were at their most active during the Cold War era, but are still in use today, and since anybody with a shortwave radio can tune in and listen, you can bet that they've amassed quite the following across the decades (for my part, I once had The Lincolnshire Poacher as my ringtone). If you've ever listened to "The Conet Project", the most famous compilation of numbers stations recordings, then you'll know that these transmissions, incomprehensible to anybody outside of their intended listenership, practically function as their own bizarre little snippets of hypnotic sound art. But they bring with them with the added discomfort of not being able to say what you're really listening to - for all we know, people were killed on the instructions given out in these enigmatic messages. In terms of Geogaddi, it plays into the overarching narrative of omnipresent forces operating off of our everyday radars; the modification of the sample, to sound more child-like, places it within that distinctly child's-eye awareness of the dangers of the world, as a threat that feels both beyond comprehension and instinctively tacit. It is unknowable, and yet its presence is so intrinsic to our functioning that it warrants no rumination. Our schoolyard rituals are filled with acknowledgements of that frightening other...hide-and-seek is, when you strip it back, a game that utilises our basic survival mechanism to evade a predatory figure by not enabling it to see us, just as tag, another enduring playground classic, tests our ability to outrun a predator - and when we are called upon to be "it", or the seeker, these games prepare us for scenarios in which we may find ourselves the predator and not the prey. In a similar vein, we might ponder what is actually being insinuated in that popular children's ditty "The Teddy Bears' Picnic", which shows up (albeit in reverse) in "A Is To B As B Is To C". We are cautioned that, "If you go down in the woods today, you'd better not go alone," a line that sounds downright blood-curdling when taken out of context. It's already questionable enough within context - do teddy bears, another innocent symbol of childhood comfort, turn into rabid grizzlies when they gather en masse out in the forest? Or is the danger more in the symbolic idea of stumbling across a covert society that's probably not going to welcome uninvited observers?

Something that's always struck me as beguilingly incongruous about Geogaddi is that, while it deals overwhelmingly with undercurrents of darkness and danger, there are multiple tracks throughout emphasising the continual presence of light, eg: "Sunshine Recorder", "Dawn Chorus", and "1969", with its refrain of "Nineteen-sixty-nine in the sunshine". The album cover image, which shows a series of identical silhouettes, kaleidoscopically arranged and with their arms outstretched as though advancing on the onlooker (in play, greeting, or something more ominous?), is nevertheless bathed in an intense orange glow. (Meanwhile, the title of the Japanese exclusive track, "From One Sources All Things Depend", while focussed on audio of children talking about God, makes me think of the sun.) As noted, to my mind Geogaddi is quintessentially a summer-themed record - the images it evokes are unfolding just as the daylight hours are at their longest and the sun is at its most oppressive. This plays into the overall sense of a corrupted idyll; there is warmth and brightness all around, and yet the omnipresent terrors appear to thrive in it as much as anything else. The intensity of that light and heat no longer seem quite so benevolent, leaving us stifled, disorientated and exposed out in the open when gut instinct tells us to hide. I don't know exactly what happened in 1969 in the sunshine, but I have a feeling that it was just as foreboding as everything else on Geogaddi.