I genuinely don't believe the pre-OT albums actually exist.

[Negamuse]

Oh yeah and in case anyone remembers me going on about thinking I'd seen PBN at a record shop in the nineties, I'm now 100% convinced this was my mind stitching together a memory out of events that did happen, but not in that way.

[In Technicolor]

I do believe there is a wealth of early material and otherwise (eg all the other tracks that didn't make the cut on Geogaddi) that has never seen the light of day and I believe 'Wouldn't You Like to be Free', 'Duffy' and 'Circle' are snippets of other unreleased BOC recordings from before they were famous.

If you're already willing to believe this much then why stop just short of believing that those particular five tapes might actually exist? It just doesn't make much sense to me why anyone would lie about having a certain set of unreleased music when they have such a "wealth" (as you put it) of actual unreleased material lmao

I was thinking of a way to answer your question and literally I got kind of stumped on this and kind of started believing again when I couldn't think of a good enough response. I guess one thing that's always made me question these is out of all the tracks that have leaked over the years, why haven't any of them have ever come from any of these albums? Also did they start recording under the name Boards of Canada in 94 or 87?

If people were able to get a JD Salinger book from a vault and an FBI only forensic tool for lower bounties, but NOBODY could fill the higher bid for the BOC albums, that tells you something.

An underpaid government worker leaking some of their tools for a bounty of what.cd data? Sounds entirely plausible to me lmao. Also the vault of which you speak wasn't actually a vault, it was the Princeton university library. According to them this is how it went down:

"The story is probably an unauthorized version transcribed longhand in our reading room," said Martin Mbugua, a Princeton spokesman. "It's also possible that it came from photocopies of the typescript probably made before the mid-1980s when we decided that we would no longer allow photo-duplication for any work by Salinger."

The difference between those two cases and the early BoC tapes is that the people involved apparently have more incentive to not betray their close friends and/or family (BoC) by leaking the tapes than random members of the public would to not go against the wishes of random university and/or government employees.


.

Actually, I was on what.cd the night Salinger's An Ocean Full of Bowling Balls got released, and it wasn't transcribed... someone actually found an obscure copy of a book titled Three Stories on Ebay and An Ocean Full of Bowling Balls was one of the stories in that book. It was just a lucky find because they got a ton of bounty for that particular one. So yeah the real story doesn't help my original point much does it?

More than anything else about what.cd I miss the bounty section, there was a ton of obscure and ultra rare stuff listed from songs nobody could identify, to rumoured pressings to things which may not have even existed at all.

[hexagonFox]

We all be out here ....


Reticulating splines


ya mean?!?!

[Geogandhi]

If you have ever started a band, been in one at early stages and you recorded anything at all, you'll have recordings, on tape, CD, MP3 etc. You might have compiled them onto a format in very small numbers for people to listen to, sell at gigs etc. So these old "albums" may exist, just that they are so few in numbers or maybe because Boards of Canada were nobodies at that time, they couldn't give them away.
I have had various bands where we made tapes/CD's/memory sticks in very small numbers to give away at gigs, who knows where they are now and most I don't even have a copy myself.
These BoC recordings had zero significance back then and are lost to the bottom of boxes or landfill. The people that have them may not even be aware of their significance now or even aware of what the band became.
I really do believe that all these early recordings are distributed around on old tunes etc so lets not worry, hanker and hope for these old things.
It's not a conspiracy that these do not exist, it's just a case of various circumstances in a normal early progression of normal folk making music. Yes, BoC became who they are now, all secretive and mystical which of course has brought lots of fans to get excited in certain ways, but it's us fans that are imposing most of this mystique and lore onto them based on what we know now, not what they were back then. 2 normal dudes finding their way through music for fun and seeing what happens.

[In Technicolor]

If you have ever started a band, been in one at early stages and you recorded anything at all, you'll have recordings, on tape, CD, MP3 etc. You might have compiled them onto a format in very small numbers for people to listen to, sell at gigs etc. So these old "albums" may exist, just that they are so few in numbers or maybe because Boards of Canada were nobodies at that time, they couldn't give them away.
I have had various bands where we made tapes/CD's/memory sticks in very small numbers to give away at gigs, who knows where they are now and most I don't even have a copy myself.
These BoC recordings had zero significance back then and are lost to the bottom of boxes or landfill. The people that have them may not even be aware of their significance now or even aware of what the band became.
I really do believe that all these early recordings are distributed around on old tunes etc so lets not worry, hanker and hope for these old things.
It's not a conspiracy that these do not exist, it's just a case of various circumstances in a normal early progression of normal folk making music. Yes, BoC became who they are now, all secretive and mystical which of course has brought lots of fans to get excited in certain ways, but it's us fans that are imposing most of this mystique and lore onto them based on what we know now, not what they were back then. 2 normal dudes finding their way through music for fun and seeing what happens.

I don't think anyone here is treating this as a "conspiracy", it's just strange that if there are hundreds of these albums out there (as in all together hundreds) how has nothing, not even a picture turned up?

I'm willing to admit, I could be 100% wrong on this, but it's just strange is all.

[Echelon]

Skepticism is a better word. It probably cost them a lot to finance Twoism independently so it's a bit harder to believe they pressed even more copies of vinyl of Hooper Bay and didn't distribute them.

There was also a guy who was cataloging some rare BOC cd-rs a few years ago. I think his name was Electric Ludite but none of the secret albums were included. Surely he's one of their friends who was included in the distribution of the secret stuff. But he didn't even bring new scans

[rodox_head]

I just want to apologize for losing my temper earlier.

We all be out here ....


Reticulating splines


ya mean?!?!

I prefer the Naughty Llamas.

[tonx]

Great, now I’m in my feels for the lost albums AND for the glory that was what.cd…

[Thatch]

Making up a back catalogue definitely fits with their sense of humour and desire to create a cult following in the mid to late 90s.

I am sure they have plenty of unreleased music, but there was definitely no CD, vinyl or cassette pressings of those albums and EPs. Even if there were 20 copies of each on cassette, that would indicate 100+ cassettes of which absolutely none have surfaced, whereas there are probably 20ish AFOT cassettes of which 3 or 4 have been spotted in the wild. Even the one-off CD-R pressings of Peel Sessions and Remixes that they created have surfaced, but not even the slightest hint of a CD-R pressing of any of their pre-Twoism stuff.

That isn't luck or good judgement - it's because they do not exist in any hard format. They were fabricating a discography to give themselves weight and because they themselves love collecting obscure records and tracking down discographies. In the days before discogs.com you'd look up this sort of information in the back of Record Collector and wonder at what they might all sound like. That's what they wanted to create with their own fabricated discography, and the three samples they shared with the Cosmic Crofter could have been from any part of their unreleased back catalogue.

This isn't to say that they do not exist, but definitely not in the formats they indicated. They might exist only in the heads of the BoC lads and on DAT tapes. Anyone who has produced music for their own benefit rather than for an audience has created "albums" and "EPs" and even "radio edits" of tracks without ever sharing them with anyone. But I can guarantee with 100% certainty that Hooper Bay does not exist on a vinyl record anywhere.

[Quadrivium]

My take: The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.

Yes, there’s unreleased early stuff. Most of it is probably shite. Some of it has leaked through R35. There’s probably a lot more.
No, there are no fully fleshed out albums a la Hooper Bay, Acid Memories etc. Any physical albums (mc, cd, lp) would surely have surfaced by now. A photo or scan at the very least.

[Orbited insanitarium]

My take: The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.

Yes, there’s unreleased early stuff. Most of it is probably shite. Some of it has leaked through R35. There’s probably a lot more.
No, there are no fully fleshed out albums a la Hooper Bay, Acid Memories etc. Any physical albums (mc, cd, lp) would surely have surfaced by now. A photo or scan at the very least.

This is the best condensed view I agree with.

[In Technicolor]

Great, now I’m in my feels for the lost albums AND for the glory that was what.cd…

Words can't describe how much I actually miss that website!

If I had the choice between getting a copy of every single one of BOC's early works or getting that website back...

Well I would still take the early works, but I really can't tell you how much I miss that website...

[Wildfire]

Great, now I’m in my feels for the lost albums AND for the glory that was what.cd…

Words can't describe how much I actually miss that website!

If I had the choice between getting a copy of every single one of BOC's early works or getting that website back...

Well I would still take the early works, but I really can't tell you how much I miss that website...

I feel you, what's worse is that I got intensely drunk after a particularly horrible break up with a girl and decided to delete my entire music collection because too much of it reminded me of her. (yeah it made sense at the time). Hundreds of Gb and Years of hard work on what.cd erased in the blink of an eye. F**king whisky.

[Echelon]

Making up a back catalogue definitely fits with their sense of humour and desire to create a cult following in the mid to late 90s.

I am sure they have plenty of unreleased music, but there was definitely no CD, vinyl or cassette pressings of those albums and EPs. Even if there were 20 copies of each on cassette, that would indicate 100+ cassettes of which absolutely none have surfaced, whereas there are probably 20ish AFOT cassettes of which 3 or 4 have been spotted in the wild. Even the one-off CD-R pressings of Peel Sessions and Remixes that they created have surfaced, but not even the slightest hint of a CD-R pressing of any of their pre-Twoism stuff.

That isn't luck or good judgement - it's because they do not exist in any hard format. They were fabricating a discography to give themselves weight and because they themselves love collecting obscure records and tracking down discographies. In the days before discogs.com you'd look up this sort of information in the back of Record Collector and wonder at what they might all sound like. That's what they wanted to create with their own fabricated discography, and the three samples they shared with the Cosmic Crofter could have been from any part of their unreleased back catalogue.

This isn't to say that they do not exist, but definitely not in the formats they indicated. They might exist only in the heads of the BoC lads and on DAT tapes. Anyone who has produced music for their own benefit rather than for an audience has created "albums" and "EPs" and even "radio edits" of tracks without ever sharing them with anyone. But I can guarantee with 100% certainty that Hooper Bay does not exist on a vinyl record anywhere.

This is a great post and probably the truth. Weren't there also some biographies that said they started in 1995?

I think we can look at it this way. MDG said they were curating a back catalog boxset. If these albums really existed in physical format, they could have quickly bundled them together and released that within the last 17 years.

[Thatch]

Well I do believe that some of side A from OTV2 is from the mid to late 80s. Some of it reminds me of my early attempts of making music by creating loops out of other songs and layering them on top of each other. The sound fidelity is clearly lower than AFOT (notwithstanding the noise reduction being applied as well). However I expect that this is what their music sounded like in the 80s rather than any kind of long drone tracks.

Some of the material on the OT cassettes and R35TT comes from the early 90s - some of it has a sample heavy breakbeat rave sound similar to some of AFX's stuff from that era. They do also use guitars on some material, but definitely nothing in a band setting. I expect the early Boards stuff was all Mike and Marcus, with the odd bit from a friend every so often. Any idea of them being a collective stems from their love of the communal 60s music scene like the Incredible String Band and I don't think is grounded in reality.

Then in the mid 90s there's a sharp step up in production quality, especially the drum programming. I remember reading that Chris Horne showed them how to do more complex drum programming so that might explain the difference between AFOT and, say, Chinook.

No one starts their musical production journey with something as polished as Twoism. It's the result of years of trial and error, and AFOT, OTV2 and R35TT show the best attempts at honing the process along the way.

I bet the Bocset referred to back in 2005 was a tidied up version of the AFOT and OTV2 cassettes, on CD format, hence the material being registered for copyright, and all the unknown live tracks are from the Geogaddi outtakes.

[rodox_head]

This interview lists BoC's discography and doesn't mention Catalog 3 or Closes Vol. 1.

[Jango9]

I'm with Thatch, Quad, and Geo on this one. If anything's bullshit about the old website it's probably the number of copies, I still believe that the tapes themselves are real.

Well I do believe that some of side A from OTV2 is from the mid to late 80s. Some of it reminds me of my early attempts of making music by creating loops out of other songs and layering them on top of each other. The sound fidelity is clearly lower than AFOT (notwithstanding the noise reduction being applied as well). However I expect that this is what their music sounded like in the 80s rather than any kind of long drone tracks.

The liner notes say that the oldest tunes on OTV2 date all the way back to 1985 (two years before catalog 3!), it's definitely the oldest era of BoC we have access to apart from maybe some R35TT stuff where it's impossible to tell for certain.

This interview lists BoC's discography and doesn't mention Catalog 3 or Closes Vol. 1.

That's the same article I've linked to multiple times throughout this very thread lmao, I can explain that absence too. This magazine was published in 2000, which was around the time the EHX site (which also only mentioned AM, PBN, and HB) was still live. The oldest surviving surviving capture of the BoC site that mentioned Catalog and Closes is from a year later, in 2001 after IABPOITC was released. Seems like at one point before the leaks they were actually on a trajectory to reveal more of their old stuff but then they made a hard u-turn on that, it's pretty unfortunate.

[rodox_head]

This interview lists BoC's discography and doesn't mention Catalog 3 or Closes Vol. 1.

That's the same article I've linked to multiple times throughout this very thread lmao, I can explain that absence too. This magazine was published in 2000, which was around the time the EHX site (which also only mentioned AM, PBN, and HB) was still live. The oldest surviving surviving capture of the BoC site that mentioned Catalog and Closes is from a year later, in 2001 after IABPOITC was released. Seems like at one point before the leaks they were actually on a trajectory to reveal more of their old stuff but then they made a hard u-turn on that, it's pretty unfortunate.

Shit, my eyes glossed over that, you're right. I think I'm losing brain function, don't get old.

[pigammon]

reckon a decent portion of the early stuff is on R35TT. especially play by numbers

[Burning Shadow]

That makes sense. If it’s a mixture not compiled by BOC themselves (as RDG stated) it has to be from recordings they have privately distributed, which matches the description of the early albums