The ethics of "BoC-alike" production.

[Jonse]

Years ago I was working on a stupidly audacious idea that I knew I could not get right at the time. In early 2012, only three of the tracks from the album I'd completed were carried over what would end up being the actual first thing I'd ever release. Other than those three, much of that album contains sounds and structures you could place in that little group of "BoC-alike" music and while it's not that in its entirety, I didn't like the fact that it was like that at all. I've not released anything like that since and have tried to distance myself as much as I can from sounding like any one particular artist, let alone BoC. I don't think I'm alone here. Turqoise70, well known here and a friend, released an album called Aviation Weather many years ago and it was obviously meant to sound very stylistically similar to BoC. She dramatically changed her sound after that one and released a record called Dos Image, which has a really great example of utilizing elements that inspire you from other artists without stepping into their territory and doing pretty much the same thing. The product is entirely its own.

I listen to a lot of what's posted on This Random Sound even if I don't end up replying. It's safe to say that we're all guilty of producing some tracks that try to emulate some aspect of their sound with some being worse than others. I've never seen anything released by anyone around here that went as far as Tycho with this, nothing that bad but there are still many examples. The question is this: is it wrong to think this is a bit lame or that it shouldn't be so common? I know there are a lot of people who apparently make what they want to hear (can't put myself in that mindset but I get it) and that there are a lot of people who don't mind BoC-alike music and see it as just more of the "nostalgic" sound they get from BoC and the more the merrier. Somehow through thinking about all of that though, I can't seem to justify it. I think there's a clear difference between having influences and lacking original ideas. Doesn't seem right to me.

Your thoughts?

[Techboy]

every successful musician starts by playing covers. i just see it as the electronic version of that, really.

[Cold Birth]

To be fair, Tycho has morphed into a kind of electro/chillwave/post-rock direction that has crystalized into a "Tycho sound", so his recent stuff is cool IMHO, but overall I agree music that's almost just an echo of what they do (like maybe Freescha or something) just makes me want to spin BOC.

[Jonse]

every successful musician starts by playing covers. i just see it as the electronic version of that, really.

That's a good way to express it with those who apply. Where does the line of figuratively "covering" someone end and become just trying to be them?

I guess what I really refer to are those who have years of experience and are still producing something exactly like BoC for that same audience. An analogy: there was this game called Lords of the Fallen that based its entire design around Dark Souls, so much so that its marketing campaign and reviewers all brought Dark Souls up with it becoming so bad that the publisher hyping the game a week before release flat out said "Get ready Dark Souls fans!"

That's what I see when I see people whose music is listened to solely on the premise of sounding like Boards of Canada. They can make whatever they want at the end of the day.

[Cupz]

I used to want to sound like BoC a lot. Especially my first few LP's. I failed miserably though and I moved on pretty quickly.

I agree with Mark, it is a lot like covering songs. There's nothing wrong with coverband, unless the coverband pretends its not a coverband like tycho in an interview pretty much going "BoC who?". Can you imagine a pink floyd tribute band doing that? Yeah, we wrote shine on you crazy ruby ourselves.

Its a cool sound though, very natural, its great people are exploring it and it should be explored. I've learned a lot of cool stuff rewriting boc melodies and creating bocy patches but I would stress that (more) music is to be explored and its pretty useless to just recreate something if you don't add to it.

The problem with Tycho, to me, just to open the wound again, is not his music but his attitude towards it. I'm sure if I didn't know what I know I wouldnt dislike his work as much. And I'm sure a lot of music I listen to is made by assholes, but ignorance is bliss. That's why I don't try to find out what a musician is REALLY like anymore, chances are I'd just start to dislike it. Rarely do I love them more for it (I liked the AskAutechreAnything and syrobonkers). He is also a good embodiment of how getting what you deserve as a musician is not dependent on the quality of music. I've heard a lot better by people that deserve tycho's streetcreds a lot more. Boreal Network for example Or anyone in ThaReaLOLdschooltwoizmzIDMheadzCrEw (you know who you are) really, myself included of course.

[IanRedpoint]

You can't help but be influenced by the things you love, particularly if you're making music for your own (and your friends) pleasure. There are elements of BoC's sound that are common to my own tunes but they were elements that were in my own taste long before I heard BoC. The wooziness and hazy pads I can trace back to my love of shoegaze and even further back to hearing early Tangerine Dream as a toddler. I've always been drawn to mid-tempo beats. I was well into trip-hop in the early-'90s. I grew up watching John Carpenter films…

What BoC did was draw together a bunch of things I already liked and spun those shared tastes and influences into something new. I was curious to try emulating that when I began making electronic music with Andy as Redpoint. Geogaddi was the thing we first bonded on. I'm less interested in that now but there's always a hint of BoC to my newer tunes as the sounds that presumably inspire them are still similar to the ones that turn me on. I don't go out of my way to degrade tapes or anything like that though, as that would feel like a deliberate conscious attempt to copy them, which I feel is pointless.

I wonder how many of the BoC-alikes are conscious of it when they're producing? I know, personally, that I'm completely unaware of what the influences are when I'm making something. It's only after that I can join the dots and see the influences (usually more Ae than BoC) clearly.

I'm pretty suspicious of something that sounds 100% like another artist, and there are definitely some BoC-alikes that I feel step over that line into plagiarism. A few nods and hints to your influences are fine though - it's almost impossible to find any modern music that has no antecedent and is still listenable. I agree that the Boreal Network stuff is a great example of someone finding a great mix of originality and influence. I can hear and recognise her sound immediately. It's not BoC but it appeals to the same part of me that gets BoC.

Rodheh - It's great that you want to pursue your own unique vision. It's a hard road to take for sure. I do think you're being a bit hard on yourself though. Sometimes a great tune just works with a sound or feel or structure that references someone else. There's a good reason why BoC arrange tracks in the way they do - it's because they work dynamically and musically and they, without doubt, learnt that from the music of others before them. I'd even argue that it's that familiarity and structure that we recognise in their music that allows us to connect with it so strongly.

[Cold Birth]

I've never seriously attempted or been very good at making music TBH, so I could be missing something, lol, but Tycho's most recent album only seems like BOC to me (CFH era mainly) in the emotions of nostalgia/chill/innocence he's trying to evoke, but not so much in the instrumentation/songcraft, I dunno.

Never read/heard any interviews with him, but he was definitely lying (maybe intentionally?) about not knowing of BOC, ha. Artists with obvious influences do that stuff for a laugh sometimes. Dat time Werner Herzog made a movie in the 2000's called "Bad Lieutenant" and during the press run claimed he never knew there was already a movie with that title, lol.

[The Telepathic Kid]

I'm jaded.

I'm definitely of the opinion that if you can make it sound great and write a good song, then how much from an influence you've taken is negligible.
But I also have a bit of a crotchety old man syndrome (as people here probably know) towards the BoC sound.
I like to think that I can base my criticisms on a song/record itself regardless of context, at least that's what I attempt to do now.

In regards to my own music, I don't know what to tell you. I just make whatever comes out of me, there's no rhyme, reason or intended influence or audience. In a sense my biggest influence is Beck's Mellow Gold or The Books' Thought for Food, records which threw everything at the wall, and see what stuck.
As I'm trying to write songs on guitar now, I'm probably gonna be influenced by everything I listen to, from Nick Drake and Boris, to Sly & The Family Stone, Animal Collective, Sonic Youth, Blur and much much more.
I don't know if one influence will pop out more than any others, or they'll all mesh into one singular vision which I can call my own. Although in reference to that great Sweet Boys album that was posted on this forum a while back, that has some obvious influences which you cal pull out, but together these influences hang as a whole and create this entirely new sound. So maybe the key is to listen to a lot of music and broaden your palette? I don't know.

If we're talking about Tycho, I just feel he's become more and more bland. I mean he started out with a BoC/Ulrich Schnauss inspired electronic sound (intentional or not), but now with his chill soft rock grooves, his music makes me think of the deepest colour of beige wall paper that I've ever seen. If there was any spark in his music, for me, it's all disappeared.
So, that really takes it back to the issue at hand, because I thought Past is Prologue was actually pretty decent for the most part, the melodies were there, and the song writing was kinda there.
The sound didn't bug me with decent tunes behind them.

[Negamuse]

Electronic music has the potential to sound like anything, so it's kind of ingrained into the ethos of making it that you're SUPPOSED to find a sound that is all your own - to actively try and sound like something that already exists is seen as being lame in a way that rock music doesn't suffer from as much because of the more limited (but still huge) palette of sounds available.

The problem I have with that is twofold. Firstly, just like in rock, a good tune will always be a good tune. If someone sounds stylistically like someone else but they manage to make something that still gets your feet or your mind moving, then so be it. The world is littered with unexciting music that sounds so much like other stuff because it not only apes the production but also the music itself, but that doesn't mean that all imitation leads to the same end points. Secondly, BECAUSE electronic music can sound like anything, and the motive is (or should be) to explore, people break new ground and uncover sonic possibilities that they then move on from, without ever exhausting or even fully developing those areas of sound. For every artist that blazes a trail into the unknown there are huge areas off to the side of where they've gone that are ripe for exploring, and we'd all be missing so much if someone didn't go there and fully explore those places too. Someone's going to be the first person to land on Mars - and they'll probably move on to more distant planets afterward. But that doesn't make going to Mars, exploring it, and all of that stuff meaningless for everybody else.

So they have a production technique that lends itself to describing nostalgia and they've used it to frame memories from their past in their music, and that's why it works for THEM. It was kind of inspirational to take forward-thrusting music and invert it to look backwards in the way that they did. Everybody can learn from that I think. Where I draw my mental line with BoC-alike-ing is when people use the same techniques to point to the same reference points that BoC do. When it's contemporaries, well, I guess if you grew up with the same influences it's questionably honest, but for people who were born 10, 20 years later and WEREN'T surrounded by those things, you're not describing your own memories you're aping theirs. Its like finding an old picture and going to the same place to retake it and throwing an instagram filter on it to look aged. But I mean, it's not all about age, even for people who are of an age with BoC it raises an eyebrow if all the reference points are too similar, it's suspicious that different people all grew up with the same memories.

So yeah, there's an honest and a dishonest way to do these things and I think it's a blurred line sometimes but you instinctively know when someone's making personal music or trying too hard to be something they're not. But a good track that sounds like someone else can shine out in any case, and it's not like I demand 100% originality from everything I listen to. It's just that when it's an original story told in an original way, it's golden.

[IanRedpoint]

Really interesting points from everyone on here. TTK's post brings up the point that it's very subjective. Each of us has our own set of parameters within which we're OK about the amount of recognisable influence present, and only we know when we step outside of that. I've definitely recorded stuff where afterwards I think there's not enough of myself in it and too many of the ideas are ones I've borrowed, both consciously and unconsciously.

I've read a lot of interviews with the Ghost Box artists, who are the ones I would consider closest to BoC (and myself) in age and shared reference points. It's alarming how similar their childhood experiences are to my own. I think there might be something in the fact that there was such a lack of content in '70s Britain compared to now - only 3 tv channels, a handful of radio stations, no video games or internet. So many of us experienced the same things at the same times. We all watched the same TV because there was nothing else on offer. We all heard the same records and followed the same pop charts. We all had the same 'Schools and Colleges' educational programmes and public information films shown to us, which is where a lot of the warbly synth nostalgia comes from. It's unimaginable now that a whole generation could have such a reservoir of shared references given the atomised nature of modern society. It still weirds me out a bit that so many of my peers grew up with the same strange experiences that I did. It's almost like we were brainwashed by boredom!

[Aerial Boundaries]

but now with his chill soft rock grooves, his music makes me think of the deepest colour of beige wall paper that I've ever seen..

That made me laugh hard.


Oh and Ian you mentioned Ghost Box artists, and one of them I've recently gotten into is The Advisory Circle. I think they are fantastic, similar in some ways to BOC but quite original. 'Other Channels' is the album I'm familiar with.

[jcnporter]

I've read a lot of interviews with the Ghost Box artists, who are the ones I would consider closest to BoC (and myself) in age and shared reference points. It's alarming how similar their childhood experiences are to my own. I think there might be something in the fact that there was such a lack of content in '70s Britain compared to now - only 3 tv channels, a handful of radio stations, no video games or internet. So many of us experienced the same things at the same times. We all watched the same TV because there was nothing else on offer. We all heard the same records and followed the same pop charts. We all had the same 'Schools and Colleges' educational programmes and public information films shown to us, which is where a lot of the warbly synth nostalgia comes from. It's unimaginable now that a whole generation could have such a reservoir of shared references given the atomised nature of modern society. It still weirds me out a bit that so many of my peers grew up with the same strange experiences that I did. It's almost like we were brainwashed by boredom!

I think that hits the nail on the head for me, anyway - the fact that there is such a shared experience and that those experiences are so vivid and distinctive - following the narrative of hauntology, the 70s/early 80s was the peak of true 'modernity', the last period when we truly looked forward as a society - it's only natural that their influence (and the need to look back) seeps into the art produced now.

[Lens Larque]

Is it ethical that someone produces a chair with similar features to an Eames?

This is a concern only for bedroom doodlers projecting their fantasies onto "eps" that no one cares about.

[Negamuse]

Wow

[Mexicola]

No, come on now Lens. Don't hold back, say what you really think.

[Jonse]

Is it ethical that someone produces a chair with similar features to an Eames?

This is a concern only for bedroom doodlers projecting their fantasies onto "eps" that no one cares about.

That reminds me - your soundcloud tracks are getting a bit numerous now. Not particularly interesting to me with the exception of that one track but numerous enough for a 4 track release nonetheless. What will you name yours?

[IanRedpoint]

Is it ethical that someone produces a chair with similar features to an Eames?

This is a concern only for bedroom doodlers projecting their fantasies onto "eps" that no one cares about.

You shouldn't be so self-critical….




I actually like both of these, particularly synth-sketch.

[The Telepathic Kid]

yeah Lens you're what I'm talking about in terms of the song surpassing the influence, those little doodles are quite good,

Even if they do lack an original voice there is a lot to enjoy about them otherwise, it seems to be the only area for improvement because you've got melody writing, production and atmosphere down pat.

[Valotonin]

I think we can take some lessons from BoC and incorporate it in to music without it ever having to sound like them. If you read through interviews there is a lot of talk about analogue purity that one can take something away from. The problem with the digital generation is you can't modify your equipment. You can't take apart a laptop and fuck with its guts to get a personal sound out of it like you can with analogue gear. Just a thought.

[Lens Larque]

Is it ethical that someone produces a chair with similar features to an Eames?

This is a concern only for bedroom doodlers projecting their fantasies onto "eps" that no one cares about.

That reminds me - your soundcloud tracks are getting a bit numerous now. Not particularly interesting to me with the exception of that one track but numerous enough for a 4 track release nonetheless. What will you name yours?

There will not be as I am not delusional.

Perhaps we should be discussing the ethics of utilizing the largest Boards of Canada message board as a platform to spam home-made event "releases" year after year after YEAR in the hopes that it will somehow become something. Everyone is nice about it though, but it gets old. The same 3 or 4 people promoting each other in a tight circle for an audience of themselves.

And speaking of future releases, I await a product from you and your pals that exceeds Tomorrow's Harvest, as you have insanely stated that you could in a third of the time turn out the exact same record!