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: #23560 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

Warning: Not like the last album, not like the next one, either.
I've been belaying this review for a long time. Since the album has been around for six years, I'm already late, but I've only been listening to it for three, so I'm only half as late as some.

I've read some of the lowest rated reviews, and some of them have good points: "This is not Music Has a Right to Children," "It's weird," "It's evil," and "It's garbage." Respectively, my opinion on those four matters are as follows; yes, sometimes, wrong, and that's your opinion.

For those of you expecting the flutey melody lines of Music Has a Right to Children, expect to be surprised. Or disappointed. Whichever you choose. Boards of Canada has yet to duplicate the same techniques in a subsequent album (since the release of The Campfire Headphase, this is almost an understatement). For those of you looking for upbeat lyrics and pop hooks, stop reading this and look up something you could listen to on hit radio.

An octopus would rather solve a puzzle than eat food, and may even starve itself to death trying. For me, this album is a labyrinthian puzzle, with unheard of angles and tortuous progressions. I have listened to it to the point where I wonder why I like it (since my wife definitely does not), and I begin to question what, specifically, creates some of the disturbing atmosphere. I never think of listening to this album as "just" anything. I don't listen to it when I'm cleaning, I pause it if I'm on the phone, and I don't sing along to it in the shower, and I always play it loud, just to submerse myself into it, rather than let it drift up from behind me.

Geogaddi is a deviation from the ethereal, floating space that welcomed the listener in Music Has a Right to Children. In it's place is a distressed and warped journey from Ready Let's Go to Secret Window. It could be mistaken for a destroyed vinyl LP soundtrack from a 1970s horror film.

When I first started listening to Boards of Canada, I remember thinking that Geogaddi had the property of making the listener feel isolated and alone (a contrast to The Campfire Headphase, incidentally). I remember also thinking that the musical movements had a quality of consumption, and not the sweet, slow consumption one might experience while drinking a milkshake. No, this was to be compared with swallowing a teaspoon of hydrochloric acid, feeling your insides burn as they were being eaten away. Of course, this is only a feeling brought on by listening. A graphic example, but I really had nothing else in mind.

I became a fan of electronica in the late nineties, specifically styles branched from the House style, but eventually I started listening to Trance, Rave, and Techno. All of which lose their shine very quickly, and become repititous. What I appreciate about Boards of Canada is that they base themselves in electronica without making it sound like electronica.


If I was to sum up the entire album, I would have to use the word, "Fire." The sound is dry, often crackling, and makes one feel as if they are being consumed. An interesting feeling, considering that this is a musical recording, but these boys have done it. Once I began to think of it in that vein, each track seemed to lose it's individuality, and the album seemed more whole and less of the "all over the board with weird." If you want something interesting, here it is. If you want to listen to something without having to think about it, you should have already looked up hit radio.

Darker Than You Think
Boards of Canada are interesting in that they have a tendency both to fulfill and confound expectations. In crafting their follow-up to what many consider their landmark album, Music Has The Right To Children, a typical BoC follower would have expected one of two things: either a continuation in the tradition of MHTRTC, or some sort of evolution that would take the Boards style to entirely new territory. Instead of committing to either fan, the Brothers Sandison did a little of both.

You can make a checklist of similarities between albums: obscure vocal samples, featuring child's voices? Yep. Fuzzy, warbling modulated analog synths? There. Downtempo bass and beats? Uh-huh. But just as the seasoned BoC listener starts to get comfortable, something starts to feel... off. A track filled with helium-light synths over the sound of crackling vinyl seems cheerful enough until you notice the track name is "Beware the Friendly Stranger". The child's voice on "Gyroscope" seems less playful than neutered, disintegrating, trapped in some horrible alternate dimension barely hidden behind rolls of aggressive tabla-ish percussion.

The more you pay attention to Geogaddi, the more disturbing details can pop out from behind odd corners, only to fade back into deceptive calm, leading to a very unnerving but equally involving experience. This feeling reaches its climax at the very end of the album, on one of the standout tracks, "You Could Feel The Sky". A chorus of halting, gurgling "ahs" provides the backdrop for a simple, propulsive beat as the song clouds over with layers of atmosphere. Towards the middle of the track, this gives way to a peaceful melody on what sounds like a pan flute. Immediately following this is the sound of a man screaming, pitch-manipulated into a surreal, primal two-note melody. It's uniquely disturbing.

Of course, Geogaddi has its flaws. The album could have used some trimming: some tracks such as "Alpha and Omega" and "The Beach at Redpoint" are short on ideas and fail to stand out, but these pale in comparison to two tracks which threaten to give the entire game away, "The Devil Is In The Details" and "A is to B as B is to C". The former features a repetitive synth pattern treated with delay, combined with a repeated sample of an infant wailing and a granulized monologue which could best be described as New Age medicine going demonic. The latter is a mess of goofy vocal sampling and filter sweeps without any real structure. The subliminal messages were probably intended as a joke, but combined with the 66:06 running time those tracks are too blatantly obvious to be either creepy or funny.

Of course, it's hard to argue with value. Anyone with iTunes can pick out the tracks that don't work for them, and anything that can be considered filler is easily balanced out by the highlights, such as the magnificently warped "Dawn Chorus". A wave of warm static merges with pitch-bent, ever-so-slightly out of tune chirps and a manipulated sample of a woman crying out to create an indescribable mix of elation and uncertainty. When off-kilter strings enter the picture is complete; the song is the cracked-mirror image of mainstream electronica songs like "Porcelain" by Moby.

If, as BoC have said, Geogaddi is a journey, it's something akin to a voluntary bad acid trip, disturbing and thrilling in equal measure. Set in the background it could make bizarre easy listening music. Listen to it closely and it might devour your soul. It may not be for everyone, but for me it's more effective than either MHTRTC or The Campfire Headphase, striking a perfect balance between pretty and sinister. A defining album for the artists.

Best of Boards
I found Boards of Canada on pandora.com, when creating a song list based on the music of Brian Eno.

I was immediately astonished by 'Satellite Anthem Icarus', one of many superb tracks off of the Boards' latest LP, 'The Campfire Headphase.' Campfire is a milestone for modern music, featuring layered samples, synths, reverb, acoustic and electric guitars. 'Dayvan Cowboy' from Campfire is one of the greatest single pieces of electronic music ever recorded (and the video found for this track found on the band's website).

After some months of plumbing the pleasures of Campfire, I delved into Board's first LP, 'Music has the Right to Children.' No complaints here - this is another tasty set of electronic delights. At times, though, Children drifts a little too far in the direction of house, a tad too meaty on the beat and bass, with the sublime complexity one craves from Boards to be somewhat lacking, especially with the latter tracks.

As luck would have it, my Volvo CD Changer ate Children, and I had to ship the whole unit (w/ the CD in there) to the manufacturer. The dealer promised I would eventually get the CD back but, in the meantime, my brain was bugging me to get on with more Boards.

Really having no choice, Geogaddi found its way into my neural net and - sans doute - this is the Board's consistent best LP to date. The shear creativity that went into creating Geogaddi inspires awe. And, no, this is not machine music. It has warmth, and weirdness - including bizarre samples (including Leslie Nielsen's (?) voice on the track 'Dandelions'), and infant voices.

'Sunshine Recorder' features a shuffling beat, recorded loops, and multiplying synthesizers which culminate in a child's voice, insisting that the listener "give us the place." The context of this sample makes one's skin crawl. It is utterly weird, yet tuneful and, somehow (after a few listens), accessible.

Other reviewers have noted other standout tracks, such as 'Julie and Candy', '1969', 'Beach at Redpoint', 'Alpha & Omega.'

'The Devil is in the Details' features a distorted sample of some sort of self-help guru, whose voice seems to bubble up through mud, juxtaposed against an infant's plaintive wailing. Another oddly compelling, totally original, composition.

There are 23 tracks here but the odd numbered tracks, for the most part, are little bridge songs. Most of these are decent. There are a few throwaways ('Dandelion' being among them). But the shear number of great tracks makes this CD a 'must have' for anyone who digs electronic music.

After just a few years, Boards of Canada has established a catalogue of some of the best produced electronic music ever made.

Geogaddi stands as their current masterpiece.

5 Stars all the way.