The reclusiveness and mystery surrounding Boards of Canada has never been of much interest to me. When music possesses such an uncomplicated immediacy, the story of how it was made and by whom is less crucial. The macro of Boards of Canada's music is so well ordered, so complete, that the stories of the constituent parts are incidental. I never much cared for Easter eggs anyway; with art like this I prefer to let my subconscious do the work of sorting things out. So I find this band's records easy to take at face value.
Geogaddi was three years ago, and since that time Boards re-issued Music Has the Right to Children as well as early records like Twosim. With that small flood of material on the market at the same time we were able to digest Boards' career output as a whole and it became clear how deeply committed they are to a core sound that was quite well formed from the get-go. As long as Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin are making music together they will always sound like Boards of Canada.
Geogaddi was a few shades darker than what came before, but the grim hints of violence that record suggested are nowhere to be found on The Campfire Headphase. Instead, the latest record offers perhaps the dreamiest vision of the band yet. The first time through Campfire, I found myself wondering whether Stephen Wilkinson of Bibio had been offered a guest spot. Bibio got a small blip of buzz last year for Fi, his beguiling album of queasy four-track experiments with processed guitar. On the record he was promoted as a "discovery" of Boards, and, after listening to The Campfire Headphase, it's clear why they were so taken with his sound. Boards use of guitar on tracks like "Chromakey Dreamcoat" and "Hey Saturday Sun" makes explicit something about the band's sound that was always just beneath the surface: the connection of the music to the pastoral tradition of British folk. That feeling of nature's green as gold, the stream of sunlight through fluttering leaves, the communion with the environment that always involves a confrontation with death. There's a reason people bring weed with them on camping trips.
Of course, this being Boards of Canada, the guitar is first a sound tool, the familiar timbre of which is loaded down with the weight of emotional memory. So it's bent, stretched, spun in with the thick swirl of sound (The Campfire Headphase is a anything but minimalist) to become another ingredient in the record's stew. It bugs me that most of the songs here with guitar use one very simple picked chord and basically bring the loop in and out in predictable fashion. Perhaps because of the instrument's familiarity it naturally draws attention to itself, and there's no getting around that there's not very much happening with the guitar on most of the tracks where it appears. It adds nice twist, sure, but nothing more.
In terms of mood, Campfire is a sluggish record, weary, pointed edges dulled as if by the march of time. Boards could previously be counted on to offer a display of crisp, forceful drum programming to jar you out of your narcotic haze ("Telephasic Workshop" and "Gyroscope"). The Campfire Headphase is all midrange, the mid-tempo shuffles putting the mind-boggling array of instrumental processing front and center. In the sound generation department, at least, they're still hitting. The best thing Campfire Headphase has going is its unnamable synthesizer sounds. As copied as their aesthetic has been, it's amazing that after all this time they're still flat-out better at coming up with cool noises than just about everybody. The pure exercises in texture, like the minute-long between-track interludes like "Ataronchronon" and "Constants Are Changing" are among the record's high points.
These blissed-out narcotic interludes don't come quite often enough, though, and in fact this feels like a step down from the last two albums. It would be very hard not to step down from the heights scaled by those records, but by subtly altering their approach and adding bits of guitar The Campfire Headphase never really seems to give it a go. The Campfire Headphase is a good album and it's almost, but not quite, a good Boards of Canada album.
