____twoism

I see many comments on tracks such as New Seeds etc. etc. from people who seem to hear a natural earthiness or some kind of tangible relation to nature and the forest in TH. Are they just mistaking TH as akin to their earlier work which certainly did have a true relationship with nature or am I honestly missing something here. Tomorrow's harvest sounds almost devoid of any life but humanity to me. It is drawing an entirely human-centric, cold, atheist metalic and plastic landscape where the forests are a memory and technology/ artificial intelligence is the only god. To me it draws a picture of a future that could be stopped, but people are undoubtedly going to be unwilling to stop it and that is part of my personal analysis of the album. It also has a place in the present and how alien this all seems once you take a step back and really ask yourself what it is that is happening around you.

The most popular fan made video for New Seeds is Eskimo Ice fishing. Are my ears broken?

I think you're right about the album in general. Even when they get close, like in Nothing is Real, probably their most beautiful piece of music since something like EYDIAB or Olson, they intentionally stick a fork in your eye in the middle of the proceedings. On a surface level, this is not the followup album for fans that came on board with TCH.

I look at 1995-1998 as the blueprint of their sound - it doesn't matter what album EP or whatever you're discussing, I think that era in general is THE BoC sound. Ever since then they have been pushing and pulling against that sound - on certain tracks on Geogaddi, but on a full album scale on both TCH and TH.

I think your enjoyment of TH relies heavily on your ability to embrace and respect the concept of what they chose to do, which is subverting their formula on an album length basis. They could have easily done Nothing is Real without the spoken word piece, back on Geogaddi they could have not reversed Dandelion, that's one of their best pieces of music, but 99% of people will never hear it "the right way".

A big piece of their aesthetic since 1995-1998 has always been self sabotage. The times they find that sweet spot, they'll do everything in their power to distract you from it. It's my one complaint aside from their insistence on building full albums around a particular concept - sometimes even if it's not clever approach for them, once they find that sweet spot, I'd like to see them embrace it every now and then.

So what is natural? Metal, plastic and atheists all came from earth at the end of the day.

Opothocary: Really good insight into their music actually and something that I had only subconsciously noticed.

Chronical: But it isn't alive, is it? Every tree, every plant has its living energy and we as a race are actively avoiding their presence.

My impression is that TH is an album of extremes. Like the desert, in both searing heat and biting cold, (reach for the dead/cold earth) a place where few things can survive. It's about overpopulation and the changes we've made to carry that overshoot. (Collapse/Jacquard Causeway) "I Overflow Man" despite being an anagram for "owl of minerva" is I think on point for a theme.

I just want to say I miss the discussions about the deeper meanings in the music... I've noticed a trend of people just making jokes about the messages they think is in TH, when really I see this as a puzzle album of theirs, even more than Geogaddi is... I've played this album fast, slow, forwards, backwards, isolated certain frequencies, looked at the spectrograms, mulled over the meanings of the track titles... but it's usually other people's finds that are the most insightful.

I'm still hearing new things in Geogaddi and I started listening to it in '06-'07 back in high school. I think TH will have the same effect after another release or two from the brothers.

PS: Think they ever went and visited this place to develop their concept?
http://fusion.net/interactive/361728/no ... e-prairie/

Wow what an interesting monument !
Here is me finding hidden messages in twoism by playing it on a five pound note (not really)

But in all honesty, yes. Other people's ideas on TH are as valuable to me as my own and the ability to build up a much larger, more intricate picture on the album through sharing it with hundreds of others is a really unique one.

Music isn't natural

Except for the trillion examples to the contrary.

Peacock Tail wrote:Except for the trillion examples to the contrary.

We are living in a post-truth society. Didn't get the Google alert?

Valotonin wrote:
Chronical: But it isn't alive, is it? Every tree, every plant has its living energy and we as a race are actively avoiding their presence.

So what defines your "living energy"? Even plastic and rusty towns are part of the grand scheme of things. They came to be from nature and are still there thanks to energy, be it from a tree or not.

chronical wrote: So what defines your "living energy"? Even plastic and rusty towns are part of the grand scheme of things. They came to be from nature and are still there thanks to energy, be it from a tree or not.

It is not about being from a tree but being a tree. The energy emitted by living, breathing trees is a presence humanity on the whole has been robbed of. We are evolved to live in that environment and in the last several hundred years even in the last one hundred years, our habitats have changed dramatically to such an extent that it is making people unwell, alongside all of the other synthetic side effects of modern society that we are exposed to that make us unwell.

let's wait and see that BOC might release next and then compare what is natural and what is not, maybe TH is pretty natural compared to what comes next

Are we referring to the production or the concept?

In terms of production there seem to be elements that are a lot less natural, like the arpeggios and bit-crushed effects, for example.

On the other hand, New Seeds sounds like one of the most 'natural' tracks on the album. It reminds me a lot of Campfire. You can tell that it was jammed and they even said it was in some interview.

Conceptually, TH feels as natural to me as anything else they've tackled. Nostalgia, subliminal stuff, dreams, and now future dystopia. To me it fits right in with the rest of the material.

Yes, nostalgia, dreams but in an entirely different setting.

Maybe some of what you're seeing was people's ears influenced by the past. It's a cool topic though, for ex. lots of the mechanisms they use seem to evoke connections to nature, purposefully or no. For me, some of it is my association of certain sounds with visuals of nature from media, near the heart of their namesake. Some of it is inherent in the sound itself. I wonder what the bros think if anything about that when it comes to subject matter like TH's--pre-existing associations that might differ, or somehow complement.

Opothecary wrote: back on Geogaddi they could have not reversed Dandelion, that's one of their best pieces of music, but 99% of people will never hear it "the right way".

Thanks for this, I never listened to it backwards, I didn't know how pretty it was at that pace - unfortunately I think it's mind-reading to suggest they intentionally messed it up, perhaps they just found it more interesting that way? But it is beautiful-

Maybe this has already been covered in spades but...I read an excellent review of this album (sorry, can't remember where I found it) that drew attention to the fact that it was BOC's darkest album, and that it had a focus on apocalypticism/survivalism (Reach For The Dead, Come To Dust); an impending destruction of civilization that would (ostensibly) usher in a new era--rebirth...tomorrow's harvest.

So yes, I think this is partly a narrative about a hyper-consumerist headlong plunge into self-destruction, with nature very much being its victim. Natural order, as I read it, will be restored.

Joseph Marie Jacquard's (Jacquard Causeway) work on the programmable loom played a role in the development of programmable machines, including computers. My guess is there are many references to the economic-industrial complex throughout the album (no doubt comprehensively catalogued somewhere by a BOC fanatic).

Opothecary wrote:I think you're right about the album in general. Even when they get close, like in Nothing is Real, probably their most beautiful piece of music since something like EYDIAB or Olson, they intentionally stick a fork in your eye in the middle of the proceedings. On a surface level, this is not the followup album for fans that came on board with TCH.

What do you mean by "they intentionally stick a fork in your eye in the middle of the proceedings"? "Nothing Is Real" sounds pretty typically BOC to me.

Opothecary wrote:I look at 1995-1998 as the blueprint of their sound - it doesn't matter what album EP or whatever you're discussing, I think that era in general is THE BoC sound. Ever since then they have been pushing and pulling against that sound - on certain tracks on Geogaddi, but on a full album scale on both TCH and TH.

I think some of the Old Tunes stuff best fits the description of the BOC "blueprint." With every EP and LP subsequently released, we have been treated to a measured, yet somehow organic variation of that paradigm.

I've never been very precious about any band's sound. Perhaps its due to the fact that most of the musical artists I like don't adhere to any particular genre or sound. I like the artists that I like because of their artistic sensibilities—experimentalism being chief among those.

BOC has a pretty homogeneous sound across their oeuvre compared with many of the other artists whose music I enjoy, and I wouldn't be at all disappointed if they decided to dramatically change their sound—in fact, I'd be thrilled. I have immense faith in their talents as musical artists no matter what they decide to do. That said, I enjoy their music so much, I also wouldn't care if they did essentially the same thing ad nauseam. I don't extend this courtesy to many other electronic music artists, as most seem to be one-trick ponies. In fact, BOC is the only electronic music group/artist that I'd call a favourite of mine.

Opothecary wrote:I think your enjoyment of TH relies heavily on your ability to embrace and respect the concept of what they chose to do, which is subverting their formula on an album length basis. They could have easily done Nothing is Real without the spoken word piece, back on Geogaddi they could have not reversed Dandelion, that's one of their best pieces of music, but 99%
of people will never hear it "the right way".

This sounds like pretentious nonsense to me.

I don't see why you see "embracing" and "respecting" the change as some sort of prerequisite to enjoying TH. I don't think the change is significant enough to warrant anything like that. It's probably barely noticeable to someone new to BOC. But even if it was a significant change, I think that would be refreshing to most fan's ears, rather than a kind of devotee barrier to entry.

To say the reverse of "Dandelion" is hearing it "the right way" and that it's one of BOC's "best pieces of music" makes little sense to me. I find its reverse akin to an 80s keyboard preset song. To each his own and all that, but I think it's going a little far to call it "the right way" of hearing the song. I really don't think that was BOC's intention at all. Also, I don't get why you're singling out the "spoken word piece" in "Nothing Is Real" as if it's some affront to what you call their "formula." It's hardly the first time they've done such a thing and I find it works well in the song.

Opothecary wrote:A big piece of their aesthetic since 1995-1998 has always been self sabotage. The times they find that sweet spot, they'll do everything in their power to distract you from it. It's my one complaint aside from their insistence on building full albums around a particular concept - sometimes even if it's not clever approach for them, once they find that sweet spot, I'd like to see them embrace it every now and then.

Are you listening to the same group I am? Everything you say here is, in my opinion, absolutely wrong, and yet you say it with such conviction and overstatement. BOC is not about self-sabotage or distracting from “sweet spots,” they're just trying to make good music—and if it means tweaking their formula every so often, they're going to do it. If they were into self-sabotage and distracting from “sweet spots,” what do you think their reason for doing that would be? Culling all the non-devotees? Not their style. Fucking with people just for fun? Don't you think if BOC wanted to fuck with people in that way, they'd go a little further than that? I mean, when they want to fuck with people with references and allusions to the occult, cryptic messages, and such, they go all-out. If anything, I'd like BOC to explore some territory outside of their sweet spot for once.

Also, what's wrong with building albums around a concept? That's one of the things that makes the album format so enjoyable.

Echo the Sun wrote: Also, what's wrong with building albums around a concept? That's one of the things that makes the album format so enjoyable.

Agreed. Any idiot can string together some tracks and call it an album. Artists understand that their expression isn't relegated to a single medium but may span several disciplines--music, poetry, history, culture, society--and, if properly employed, will incorporate these to inform and underscore their narrative. Film and literature work the same way; there's often a lot more to read between the lines, if one studies it.

And that's the art that stays with you.