____twoism

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the only non believers are the ones who weren't around to see the old website...those covers sitting there teasing you every time you visit the page.

Track A9 on the 35 Tracks Tape always haunted and puzzled me with its strange, church-like feel, those sweeping organ/string chords and that high-pitched weeping melody. It sort of freaked me out, and I couldn't get out of my head that there could be some sort of religious subtext to it. Then it struck me:

Could 09A be Godever, from Closes Vol. 1? The title seems related, and the track lengths are pretty much exactly the same. The only thing that bugs me is that it doesn't seem very adequate as the second track in an album. It sounds too cathartic to come up so soon. But the possibility still intrigues me nonetheless.

FernieCanto wrote:Track A9 on the 35 Tracks Tape always haunted and puzzled me with its strange, church-like feel, those sweeping organ/string chords and that high-pitched weeping melody. It sort of freaked me out, and I couldn't get out of my head that there could be some sort of religious subtext to it. Then it struck me:

Could 09A be Godever, from Closes Vol. 1? The title seems related, and the track lengths are pretty much exactly the same. The only thing that bugs me is that it doesn't seem very adequate as the second track in an album. It sounds too cathartic to come up so soon. But the possibility still intrigues me nonetheless.

This sounds very reasonable to me. I wouldn't put much weight on the second track thing, whatever way you look at the Closes tracklist it's pretty unorthodox. Maybe Treeline is intense, or they just wanted to have two interludes before a real one.

chronical wrote:

EnforcedNo wrote:weren't these up on their old website? i don't get all the doubt here

Exactly

agree

7113(18|3) wrote:I originally had the thought they could have been removed due to the band saying once they didn't adopt the name Boards of Canada up until 1994, but then this wouldn't justify why Closes 1 (from 1992) was left-out. (unless, b.o.c. was originally different from Boards of Canada...)

Yes I considered this too.

EnforcedNo wrote:weren't these up on their old website? i don't get all the doubt here

Well I think if you take into consideration the above quote(that the band didn't use the name till 1994) the doubt is that they were actual releases. Could be that Catalog 3/Acid Memories/Closes Vol. 1 were tapes without a name credited to them distributed to close friends and the artwork and Music70 catalog numbers, maybe even the titles, were retroactively added when the old website was made.

Of course it all comes down to what you consider a release. Personally I don't think they should be on Discogs, partly because a bunch of idiots claim to own it when they don't, and partly because nobody has actually photographed a copy of any of them like the Old Tunes tapes and BoC Maxima. I'm sure they exist but there's no point in something being on Discogs without any proof it exists.

Theeeeen again this could be related.

http://www.windishagency.com/artists/boards_of_canada

During the late 1980’s whilst working on a series of film and photographic projects, the group decided to create a studio of their own. [...] Soon the band was producing cassette EP’s and even entire albums of demo material, some of which have since gone on to become legendary collectors’ items. It was during this period that the name ‘Boards of Canada’, initially an EP project title, became the name of the band.

Buckle Higher wrote:Could be that Catalog 3/Acid Memories/Closes Vol. 1 were tapes without a name credited to them distributed to close friends and the artwork and Music70 catalog numbers, maybe even the titles, were retroactively added when the old website was made

This was my kind of thinking when I started the thread. And what actually constitutes a 'release'? Back in my own early days of music making I compiled and re-compiled many tapes like proto-albums - seeing what worked where. Some I gave out to friends etc and some I didn't. Some even had proto-cover designs. Had the internet been around at the time of my first 'proper' label release I may have been tempted to elaborate my history, and add some depth to myself as an artist by including a few in my discography

If we want to be sceptical about it, I find it weird if not impossible that they'd have over 50 friends who in 25 years' time haven't uttered out a single word about these releases, or pictures, save for Old Tunes/Maxima. I still believe they exist, but it's damn weird no more info on any of these early tapes has leaked.

And thinking about it more, this circle of people is probably more than 100, if you count in the friends and family members of those friends who own these releases. It'd be a tough job to keep them all off places like WATMM and this forum, if they're into the music too. And some might not even know the releases are friends-only things, so they could in theory pass on pictures/the tapes themselves without feeling any guilt.

Perhaps the truth is more modest than they tell, ie. they handed out less copies than printed, say to their family and maybe a couple of very good friends.

Basefree wrote:If we want to be sceptical about it, I find it weird if not impossible that they'd have over 50 friends who in 25 years' time haven't uttered out a single word about these releases, or pictures, save for Old Tunes/Maxima. I still believe they exist, but it's damn weird no more info on any of these early tapes has leaked.

And thinking about it more, this circle of people is probably more than 100, if you count in the friends and family members of those friends who own these releases. It'd be a tough job to keep them all off places like WATMM and this forum, if they're into the music too. And some might not even know the releases are friends-only things, so they could in theory pass on pictures/the tapes themselves without feeling any guilt.

Perhaps the truth is more modest than they tell, ie. they handed out less copies than printed, say to their family and maybe a couple of very good friends.

well lets use Catalog 3 as an example. they handed out like 50 cassettes in 1987, and Boards of Canada started to become famous around 1997-1998

I'm pretty sure most of those friends would have lost their tape in 10 years time.

Vostok wrote:well lets use Catalog 3 as an example. they handed out like 50 cassettes in 1987, and Boards of Canada started to become famous around 1997-1998

I'm pretty sure most of those friends would have lost their tape in 10 years time.

Might be true, but weren't there CD represses for some of these, like Closes?

Basefree wrote:Might be true, but weren't there CD represses for some of these, like Closes?

Catalog 3 and Closes 1, both in 1997.
And Play by Numbers was originally released on both CD and cassette, and Hooper Bay was released on both vinyl and cassette.
Which leaves out Acid Memories as the only early release to have been released in a single format and never reissued.


It boggles my mind how Hooper Bay with it's total quantity of 200 in two different formats, to this day remains unleaked/unreleased with no actual physical photos of it available anywhere.

It boggles my mind how Hooper Bay with it's total quantity of 200 in two different formats, to this day remains unleaked/unreleased with no actual physical photos of it available anywhere.

+1

That is why I think they might be exaggerating the truth. Maybe 50-200 of these were indeed pressed, perhaps because it's a minimum for anything(?), but only few of them were actually handed out. If I wanted to be even more sceptical about it, I would also question the authenticity of the Hooper Bay and Acid Memories samples, because anybody could have come up with those. I think however that 'Wouldn't You Like to Be Free' is a very legit one. And I'm sure the background of all these samples has been checked anyway, so I am not challenging the truth here, just playing mindgames.

A funny and maybe also relevant quote on how protective Boards is about their music:

"We actually gave him Chris Cunningham an hour and a half's worth of music, of which he used one 20 second fragment. He was just really excited to have new Boards of Canada tracks that no one else has heard, that's why he likes working with us. But we trust him. We know he wouldn't do anything else with it. He also knows we'd break both his legs if he did."

http://bocpages.org/wiki/Quiet

I think its more than likely that the close friends and family have been told not to distribute the earliest releases on the internet or to sell/trade them. Its not unreasonable to assume that this small circle of people could be trusted to do that, family members especially.

What I find especially curious is the alleged 1997 CD reissues. Is it more plausible that they were "made-to-order"(not that I think they were sold mail order) CD-r's and not full blown professionally pressed CD's? Which would be more economical in 1997? Its possible they didn't care about that considering Twoism was limited to 100 copies, but why go through the trouble of having several releases pressed on CD, even in batches of 100-200, only to keep them out of circulation?

Also, what's the source of the claim that Hooper Bay came out on vinyl? I've seen it written on wikipedia and I think that Spanish site that has the write ups on each of the early releases which has been debunked as fake. Did the old site indicate there was a vinyl pressing? Had anyone ever talked about it on the idm mailing list?

Basefree wrote:If we want to be sceptical about it, I find it weird if not impossible that they'd have over 50 friends who in 25 years' time haven't uttered out a single word about these releases, or pictures, save for Old Tunes/Maxima. I still believe they exist, but it's damn weird no more info on any of these early tapes has leaked.

And thinking about it more, this circle of people is probably more than 100, if you count in the friends and family members of those friends who own these releases. It'd be a tough job to keep them all off places like WATMM and this forum, if they're into the music too. And some might not even know the releases are friends-only things, so they could in theory pass on pictures/the tapes themselves without feeling any guilt.

Perhaps the truth is more modest than they tell, ie. they handed out less copies than printed, say to their family and maybe a couple of very good friends.

A "friend" distilled the essence of these releases into R35TT. No one knows what they have their hands on, which is a nice compromise between what the Sandisons want and what the "friend" who compiled it feels we deserve as a fanbase.

Also, I can confirm that the Duffy/Wouldn't You Like to be Free?/Circle samples are quite real - I can remember listening to them as RM (RealMedia - remember those?) files on the official website circa 1998. Unless somehow BoC subconciously implanted those memories in my head via their music? Tough to say!

Opothecary wrote:A "friend" distilled the essence of these releases into R35TT

I like the idea, but how do we know R35TT consists of material from these releases? We only have the intuition, afaik. They also mentioned in a recent interview that they have boxes full of cassettes containing their own tracks, which adds to the puzzle. What if R35TT is just one of those countless tapes?

The idea that some of the songs on R35TT are from the early releases, something I'm not even convinced of, brings up another question in my mind. Could it be proven that all the tracks indeed did come from the same tape through spectral analysis? If that is the case then why would someone who had the early releases and wanted to rip and share those tracks go through the extra step of dubbing them to another tape? Seems more likely, if they are tracks from the early releases, that the owner of the releases made the mix for someone else and that's the person who ripped it. While I'm not convinced that the tape was sourced from the early releases(although its highly possible there some overlap) the official response to the tape seems uncertain of how all those tracks made it onto a leak together, which I think indicates that it wasn't a single tape made by the band for someone they were corresponding with personally.

R35TT is all over the place - weird segues, songs cut off midway at odd times; all meant to obfuscate track lengths. There's some Old Tunes on there (She is P, I Will Get it Tattooed, etc) and lots of other stuff we don't know.

The odd way it was compiled seems to point to it being a compilation of known material from a variety of sources, at least in terms of track lengths. mdg has confirmed it as legit, and called it a "mixture" (I believe, or something along those lines) indicating there was no rhyme or reason to it.

I don't really care as much about the old stuff as I do all the tracks that didn't make their main albums.

They said they record hundreds of tracks, they cut ones that don't fit the mood. Of course this means that many of those tracks are probably great in their own right, yet we may never hear them.

"We actually gave him Chris Cunningham an hour and a half's worth of music, of which he used one 20 second fragment. He was just really excited to have new Boards of Canada tracks that no one else has heard, that's why he likes working with us. But we trust him. We know he wouldn't do anything else with it. He also knows we'd break both his legs if he did."

sounding like the Scottish Kray Brothers, and perhaps food for thought on why there have been no leaks.....