Track Listing

1. Ready Lets Go
2. Music Is Math
3. Beware the Friendly Stranger
4. Gyroscope
5. Dandelion
6. Sunshine Recorder
7. In the Annexe
8. Julie and Candy
9. The Smallest Weird Number
10. 1969
11. Energy Warning
12. The Beach at Redpoint
13. Opening the Mouth
14. Alpha and Omega
15. I Saw Drones
16. The Devil Is in the Details
17. A Is to B as B Is to C
18. Over the Horizon Radar
19. Dawn Chorus
20. Diving Station
21. You Could Feel the Sky
22. Corsair
23. Magic Window

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5168 in Music
• Released on: 2002-02-19
• Number of discs: 1

Album Description
Special edition CD with hardbound cover and 12 page booklet.

Amazon.com
Geogaddi, like Boards of Canada's 1998 debut album, Music Has the Right to Children, drifts its way into consciousness, rolling a fog of dark-hued psychedelia over slow-burning, lullaby melodies. Having led a reclusive existence in their Hexagon Sun studio, shunning interviews and live shows in an effort to escape the shrill, loud praise that accompanied Children's release, the enigmatic Scottish duo has stayed focused, creating another tour de force in the process. Geogaddi opens with no fanfare, with the bare hum of "Ready Lets Go" blossoming into the soporific, hypnotic chimes of "Music Is Math". But for the next 65 minutes, it's clear that while BOC move slow, they do so with the power of shifting glaciers. All their old influences--the noise-as-melody drone of My Bloody Valentine, the brave futuristic synths of Neu!--remain, but more than anything, Geogaddi is about the vivid sense of warm melancholy that lingers when the music fades out. It's another slow-burner, but Geogaddi is as utterly essential as its predecessor. --Louis Pattison

From URB Magazine
And so, with fear of IDM on the one hand and the potential for hype on the other, Boards of Canada debuted their sophomore album, Geogaddi, at the gorgeous Angel Orensanz, a converted synagogue that has sat in New York's Lower East Side for over 150 years. There were no promos and no advances. "We wanted it to be a religious experience," you can almost hear Board #1 explain without the slightest hint of irony, or maybe so much irony that it becomes post-ironic and thus utterly sincere.

Boards of Canada are all about community, a card they played on the title track from last year's splendid In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country EP. Skip past the laughing infants and wavy schlieren and fix on that murky vocoder. Now unpack the words "Come out and live with a religious community in a beautiful place out in the country." Ah. So that's what they're talking about. This. A roomful of journalists and college-radio types, confirming their places on a guest list and preparing for that first beat. This is my community.

We spied the neighborhood from the mezzanine and studied all the clashing bodies sitting where the pews should have been: a pair of serious men with sunken eyes, massaging their sockets and temples; a team of college radio kids spread like wounded angels on the floor space in front of the speakers; serious journalists everywhere scribbling and cribbing notes and muttering about song titles. It was a weird guest list, humanists attracted to Boards' playful sense of nostalgia ("1969") mixing with drum tweakers hailing Boards' Marley Marl kicks mixing with nerds turned on by precise, orchestrated skips and ticky-tack aesthetics ("Music Is Math"), all waiting for that holy communion. Dare we say it deserves the bandwidths of praise it will likely receive, and perhaps it's one of those unlikely Warp releases that manages to pair technical precision with an all-too-rare feeling of humanity. The synths? The tiny roils of conversation and grass, the childish snatches of pink? It's all a lot warmer and affecting than their classic 1998 debut Music Has the Right to Children, and at the risk of getting all David Koresh (see: sleeve art for Beautiful Country EP), there are moments that are simply heavenly.

At a certain point, though, the only real thing to do was play hooky, so my +1 and I skipped across the street, resolved to revisit Boards after a primer of beers, smoke and a jukebox. "They should have at least hired strippers," she complained as we headed toward the nearest non-synagogue. We got back too late for the second playing, but no worries - the stony hipsters said it all, as though the utopian goodness of these otherwise cold, alien tunes was all they needed to stay warm. Community is great, but nothing beats a dear friend footing for a pair of Coronas while Let It Bleed blares on the jukebox.

Hua Hsu

Customer Reviews

dark, soothing, mysterious... disturbingly beautiful
geogaddi is dark. very dark. extremely dark.

subtly dark.

what kills me is that some of the people negatively reviewing this album have totally missed the point of the record. the argument usually falls on two extremes:

1. that the album is too similar to mhtrtc
2. that the album is too dissimilar to mhtrtc

people seem to make more out of the fact that the album is 66:06 long than actually describing the music within (and not grasping the concept that its a joke played on people obsessed with the hexagon sun mythos). if youre familiar with their work already than you know that boards of canada is one of the most unique bands, electronic or otherwise, on the face of the planet. the fact that this is similar to their earlier works should come as no suprise, seeing as none of their other cds sound particularly different from one another.

i could go off at length about how much of a concept record this is. while mhtrtc was more about the blissful ignorance of childhood, this is about retaining innocence in a world full of evil. while we all have our childhood memories of abstract, fuzzy summer days outside, we also have our childhood memories of unease; the monster under the bed, the terror of being seperated from ones parents...

...blah blah blah. while this makes the album accessable and relateable to everyone since we all share similar memories of childhood, what really matters is that, while more meloncholy, this album is a staggering work of art thats both enjoyable on casual listens and extremely complex on closer ones. some tracks are both ferociously innovative (alpha and omega, the devil is in the details) and others wonderfully, and humourously, retro (sunshine recorder, 1969). also, am i the only one around here who thinks gyroscope is an awesome track? dark, brooding drones with a pummeling beat aimed directly at the distorted child counting off from deep within the song. brilliant stuff. the "filler" tracks work well i think, and help keep the album cohesive without being overly deriative.

mhtrtc is like a state forest in the daytime and geogaddi is the same woods at near-dusk. while during the day the trees and scenery are beautiful, at night everything is cast in shadow. the beauty is still there, but theres a dark undercurrent distorting all the elements that youre familiar with. a must listen.

It's... alive
If you have heard the previous full-length Boards of Canada album Music Has The Right To Children, you at least have an idea what to expect with Geogaddi. Boards of Canada produces music filled with colourful reversed synth washes, hip-hop flavoured beats, and downright creepy sampling of vocals (particularly children) and sounds from nature. BoC fits somewhere into the Intelligent Dance Music (IDM) sub-genre of electronica, but it's impossible to nail them down into anything but their very own category.

Geogaddi is a huge change from its predecessor LP. There is no question that it is the work of Boards of Canada, but it is not as claustrophobic as MHTRTC (the previous album was very much "headphone" music, whereas Geogaddi just pleads to be unleashed upon the world), and is also more complex musically and rhythmically.

The album opens with an otherworldly tonal blanket, accompanied by an insect-like wave in the background and slightly-warbling musical pings. This first track sets the mood for the rest of the journey: dark, emotionally charged, and unsettling.

Geogaddi's beats are not terribly unique or rhythmically complex, but the sounds themselves are very much one-of-a-kind; you may at times be hard-pressed to separate the melody from the beats. The sounds used are extremely visceral, and seemingly twisted like sonic toffee to achieve the desired effect. Many of the percussion tracks make me think of crushing a gigantic bag full of potato chips in a bear hug underwater.

The album's most memorable elements are the sensations it induces, rather than the melodies within it. It is unlikely you will find yourself humming the tune to a Geogaddi track, but you might begin associating certain feelings in your life with those present in Geogaddi's music. The album's melodies are rarely prolonged, and usually consist of a series of singular and brilliant musical moments composed of BoC's atmospheric synthesizers, bizarre beats, and disconcerting samples. The album also seems to have a unique organic texture to it; it is not the static that permeates so much IDM, but closer in nature to the spattering of sonic paint from a toothbrush onto a squirming sandstone wall.

Geogaddi is surprisingly accessible music; I have found that many of my friends who are not particularly interested in any unconventional or electronic music enjoy Geogaddi a great deal. It offers something to a wide range of listeners: it can serve as a colourful acoustic backdrop to whatever you may be doing in the meantime, it makes a fantastic soundtrack for travelling, and rewards the careful listener with its rich supply of subtlety and detail.

Geogaddi's most significant flaw may not be a flaw to all, but many listeners may find the shorter "filler" tracks like "Dandelion" or "Energy Warning" annoying or disruptive.

In short, Geogaddi is epic in its depth and impact. It is alive. As you listen, it will grow on you... and IN you... as long as you will let it.

Music Has the Right to Autumn
Like a few reviewers before, it pains me to think of unjust bashing this album will get given the state of music criticism today. All this focusing upon "what's new about it" and "how daring is it" is really getting out of hand. What would make them like Geogaddi? Distorted metal guitars, maybe? A violin section, perhaps? Or what if Boards of Canada had incorporated gabber beats into their music?

Thankfully, BoC do none of these things. The same tools that created Music Has the Right also create Geogaddi, and there is nothing wrong with this. All those who would so desperately search for "what's new" need only look to where "what's new" really need be asked: What is the emotional intent?

Honest listeners will undoubtedly detect this difference: Geogaddi has an entirely different agenda than Music Has the Right. Whereas MHTRTC was Summer-like, warm, and comforting, Geogaddi is a dark and windy place. There's an evil hidden in it, in the distorted vocals whispering about Branch Davidians (1969), in the mentionings of a "God with Horns" that are found in backwards playing. Like MHTRTC, Geogaddi contemplates childhood, but, again, a different, and wholly less pure aspect of it.

Children live in a world that is full of evil they cannot directly recognize, and so it follows that if Geogaddi is chronicling this aspect of children's lives, that its darker patches must not be immediately recognizable, either. This is not, in my opinion, an attempt to appear clever on BoC's part; it's part of the work of art they've created here, a part of Geogaddi. As they once said in an interview, "we always think of the listener as the most intelligent person on Earth." The silent track, "Magic Window" is simply the period at the end of the statement they're trying to make; I'm sure they know full well of 4'33's existence, so there's no need for anyone to point it out to them (or their listeners.)

As for the quality of the album itself-there's five stars sitting up there. They're there for a reason. It's every bit as affecting and draining as MHTRTC, a fitting Autumnal followup to its Summer. Listening to Geogaddi for the first time was like listening to Selected Ambient Works, Vol 2 for the first time, or Ambient 1 for the first time. "The Devil is in the Details" is the stuff of my nightmares, and "Music is Math" nearly brings me to tears with every listen. It's one of the few, that I believe with all my soul, and anyone who's still disappointed at the lack gabber or distorted guitar incorporation or whatever can go back to listening to Venetian Snares.