Play by Numbers "Numerator" youtube video

[Negamuse]

I just can't see Boards taking Audiotrack 4b, adding a synth line that's half a semitone out (!) and calling it 'done', at any point.

[Dudeman162]

C'mon y'all. This is obviously fake.

[Aerial Boundaries]

I think someone has slowed down 4b and recorded a synth melody over it.

I don't think the synth line sounds like anything they've ever done, and it's too all over the place.

Don't reckon it's them myself.

I have to agree. That synth is ALL wrong for me, I can't see any of their real melodic sensibility in that. In fact that is what gives away most fakes.

[Jonse]

Of all the things that could make this a fake, I can't believe the presence of a synth line in an OLD song is so unbelievable. I still have no idea whether it's legitimate or not, but I'd like to see someone who doesn't believe it is clean up that track that well.

Again - no idea. Just feel statements like "come on, this is obviously fake" are a little too presumptuous.

[Opothecary]

The synth line sounds completely out of place over B04. It would be a really boring "fake" if someone just posted the B04 version online and called it Numerator, so someone sprinkled some incredibly unmelodic synths on top of it to make the "fake" more compelling and maybe in their mind, more like BoC somehow. There's probably a pretty good chance B04 and A07 came from Play by Numbers, they sound exactly like what I'd expect to hear alongside Wouldn't You Like to Be Free? - ie. shoegaze with no badly done synths on top.

This "augmentation" of B04 is totally at odds with the general sound of all those old tapes. They explore a lot of different sounds on those tapes, but they're all of the same musical universe, if that makes sense. The instrumentation may have evolved and changed throughout the early years, but the overall feel of the song writing did not.

Shoegaze was the thing and everyone wanted to be MBV after Loveless, this was their nod to that sound, no other frills needed. Their sound evolved in a major way between Play by Numbers and Hooper Bay toward what we know and love, they applied their own aesthetic to it, but it followed the trajectory of what was musically in favor, their early sound shifted with the times.

Whoever put this up just didn't do a very good job of reading between the lines, the old samples from the old BoC website and their interviews touching on the subject should tell everyone everything they need to know.

They fiddled around on old keyboards and synths and the like as children/teenagers, they took a stab at going with rock instrumentation for awhile when shoegaze was in favor, then musical tastes changed and the rest of the world shifted toward something more akin to what they were doing pre-shoegaze, so they went back to that and here we are today. Wouldn't You Like to be Free? and the rock oriented songs on R35TT give us no reason to believe that they were interested in crossing the streams, so to speak.

[Jonse]

Infinite Lines of Colourful Sevens was exactly described by that old site as taking a more creative approach and standing out from the other tracks. You really think Play by Numbers was all shoegaze-lite? Because I'm almost positive they "crossed the streams". It was also re-released internally on CD so whether or not it sounds like the old tapes is irrelevant.

And again, I don't get the thing about the synth. It sounds fine to me, fake or real.

[Jonse]

(continued due to edit time limit)

I'm not sure I can say that it makes sense that the tracks are all in the same 'musical universe'. Some sound almost like Aphex Twin tracks, some sound similar to the BoC we know now, some are like proto-vaporwave and are all sample-based (if you are talking about the same old tapes I know). All I know for sure (other than that they inexplicably have seemingly new scanned artwork) is that this was released in a manner akin to that Julie and Candy soundboard video on YouTube and is not a cheap sounding fake if indeed fake. No proof from that alone, but again an extra step someone would have to take. The ultimate thing that makes me consider the possibility of this being legitimate (aside from how much cleaner the audio is) is the nature of the R35TT. While I can't say the same for Old Tunes, it's obvious the R35TT was a collection of hand picked favorites someone who had access to their back catalog chose. I just wish I could match some of the track names to the tracks, other than this one possibly being a version of Numerator.

I do wish we could get some sort of confirmation.

[AnalogueDreams]

And again, I don't get the thing about the synth. It sounds fine to me, fake or real.

That's kind of where the problem comes in (yeah, I'm new here, but give me a chance). With the right equipment, anyone can create a BoC like synth. At that point, they can slap together a song, release it with purposely bad quality, and say that it is from an old album of BoC's. Just because the synth sounds alright doesn't instantly mean it's BoC (though I do understand that isn't what you are trying to get at.) The point is this: the brothers are very vague about anything pre-Twoism. We will never know what the tracks really sound like (excluding the samples that were released to the public) until the brothers decide to release the material in some way, shape, or form. Otherwise, we are allowed to be skeptical on any track claiming to be anything pre-Twoism.

Plus, a lot of people have said it already. The track does indeed sound like 04B with a random synth thrown over it. Also, I don't know if anyone caught it, but the synth is actually much better quality than the track behind it (04B?). Don't get your hopes up quite yet.

[Opothecary]

Infinite Lines of Colourful Sevens was exactly described by that old site as taking a more creative approach and standing out from the other tracks. You really think Play by Numbers was all shoegaze-lite? Because I'm almost positive they "crossed the streams". It was also re-released internally on CD so whether or not it sounds like the old tapes is irrelevant.

And again, I don't get the thing about the synth. It sounds fine to me, fake or real.

It's been disputed that the person who claimed to have heard that music really hasn't. I don't remember where I read that, maybe even mdg pointed it out at some point.

Also, Play by Numbers is an interesting story - the CD version is NOT a re-release. If their website is to be believed (and that's all we have to go on, really) that's the only one of the 5 releases to have a CD version released when it first came out. Catalog 3 and Closes Vol. 1 were reissued in 1997. You've got people here who claim to have either seen that CD in the wild at UK record shops around that time, or someone knows someone who did. The fact that a short run was made on CD at the time of release would tie into people claiming to have seen it in shops. It sounds like it was just a very limited release by a local indie band. The sort of thing you see every day. It's only remarkable because it's BoC. I'm sure it's something they didn't talk up a whole lot in interviews since they'd moved on from that sound by the time people were interviewing them.

Based on interviews, I'd also say this was the first release where they used the BoC name, so all the hubbub awhile back about the covers of Catalog 3/Closes Vol. 1 somehow being "fake" never made sense to me. They weren't using that name back then, so its easy to figure out those are the covers for the 1997 reissues. I've mentioned before, the only really interesting one is the cover to Acid Memories. It has their name and has CD cover type dimensions - maybe that was pressed to CD in 1997 too, but the website didn't mention it. That's totally possible because the "old" discography was originally just Acid Memories/Play by Numbers/Hooper Bay, the other 2 that had CD versions reissued were added to the website later. That change in the discography is so old even archive.org doesn't have a version sans Catalog 3/Closes Vol. 1, but I remember seeing it many times and I remember being surprised when 2 more releases were added later on - that were supposedly pressed to CD.

So long story short, Play by Numbers is probably the first time they really called themselves Boards of Canada, and their first real legitimate run at making music in a semi-professional way, thus the limited locally available CD run that faded into obscurity.

From the Virgin Megaweb interview in mid 1998:

Have you always had the name "Boards of Canada"?

"No; officially, only for four years. But the name existed for years before that, as the title of one of our tracks, before it became the name of the group."

Hooper Bay is a lot more interesting to me since they claimed to press it to vinyl - I wonder if that was somehow a test run for Twoism, but thats speculation for another thread I guess.

[Mexicola]

Do you have a link to that interview? Don't recall seeing it on BOCpages. Cheers.

[Opothecary]

Do you have a link to that interview? Don't recall seeing it on BOCpages. Cheers.

http://bocpages.org/wiki/Two_Aesthetes_ ... onic_Music

[Mexicola]

Thanks. Clearly I'm losing the plot!

[Aerial Boundaries]

Of all the things that could make this a fake, I can't believe the presence of a synth line in an OLD song is so unbelievable. I still have no idea whether it's legitimate or not, but I'd like to see someone who doesn't believe it is clean up that track that well.

Again - no idea. Just feel statements like "come on, this is obviously fake" are a little too presumptuous.

It isn't the presence of the synth per se. Just the way it is done, it has nothing in it of the clear and strong musical sensibility that they have displayed throughout their whole catalogue, released or unreleased.

That sensibility of theirs is what draws most of us to them in the first place I think.

[Jonse]

Of all the things that could make this a fake, I can't believe the presence of a synth line in an OLD song is so unbelievable. I still have no idea whether it's legitimate or not, but I'd like to see someone who doesn't believe it is clean up that track that well.

Again - no idea. Just feel statements like "come on, this is obviously fake" are a little too presumptuous.

It isn't the presence of the synth per se. Just the way it is done, it has nothing in it of the clear and strong musical sensibility that they have displayed throughout their whole catalogue, released or unreleased.

That sensibility of theirs is what draws most of us to them in the first place I think.

I (not that it matters) really don't see the synth as being so out of place. If it's not "Numerator" then whoever got the source audio must have a higher quality rip of R35TT.

I mean, we could discuss this to death. I do understand that if something is not totally confirmed in this community then it is dismissed as fake until that point, even if there's reason to believe it could be real. Discussion about the synth doesn't change the things this has going for it in that regard. There's higher resolution artwork that wasn't around before with a seemingly real staple in it. There's a much cleaner sound to the track. Ultimately I don't think someone took the time to take what parts of Play By Numbers' cover they could scale and then recreate the entire thing bit by bit to print it and scan it in again with it looking that much better and that's the whole reason (other than track length and all that stuff we can't prove) it was suggested this may be Numerator.

So pretty much back to the thing that was said originally: if this is fake, it's a really good fake. I have no reason to believe it is or isn't though with the knowledge of what R35TT is.

I'd find it funny if this track is legitimate and someone added that synth (which btw might be a sampler, who knows) to invoke a sense of doubt. The uploader was clever. I can give them that much.

[several]

i'm stumped on this one.

i think it may be real because: would someone go to this great of a length to just fake a BoC song?
and i think it may be fake because: probably.

personally, i'm gonna wait for MDG to say something about it. i'm not saying "real/fake" to it before then.

[Cupz]

what I want to know is, if this is indeed a fake, where did he get the high quality art from, and how do I get it?

[AnalogueDreams]

I'd find it funny if this track is legitimate and someone added that synth (which btw might be a sampler, who knows) to invoke a sense of doubt. The uploader was clever. I can give them that much.

The funny thing is that the track is technically real. It exists as 04B in R35TT. So, if the synth line was added by the person, then they did do a pretty good job of creating some doubt and argument in the Twoism community *cough* this thread *cough*.

[Skimming Stone]

But the name existed for years before that, as the title of one of our tracks

I would love to hear a track called 'Boards of Canada'.

[Torn n Frayed]

Somewhere I have the song without the obviously added lead synth, fake.

[Kilroy the Killjoy]

what I want to know is, if this is indeed a fake, where did he get the high quality art from, and how do I get it?

I'm fairly certain it's just an upscaled version of the original with remade text slapped on there and ran through a median filter to smooth it all out. If you look around the eyes (particularly the left one) you can see what appears to be a bit of pixelation still present from the upscaling: