Boards of Canada probably couldn’t make another album like Geogaddi even if they wanted to—it had come from an infectiously dark mindset, and if it could be captured again, would only be wading ever deeper into the abyss. It should come as no surprise that they would change things up when the next release dropped, and it turned out to be almost a complete 180—The Campfire Headphase really is something different from their previous albums, even if it still thoroughly feels like one of theirs. Excised are the cacophonous walls of sound, pared down to a more efficient selection of electronic and analog sources including, for the first time, acoustic guitar (distorted in the traditional Boards way or not); the shadowy meditations and prankishness found on the whole Music Has The Right To Children through Geogaddi sequence has been replaced with something more serene and meditative; more importantly, I think, is the choice of making the album far more holistic, an extended and sustained pursuit of a single atmosphere and theme. This is not to say that the previous albums were not thematically coherent—I don’t know how I would have written two blog posts about them if they weren’t—but each song still tended to be its own little world; Headphase prefers to have its individual tracks flow more naturally from one to another, which seamlessly drives the listener to each place, even if that sometimes makes some tracks feel like they blur together and lack the individuality of many of the songs on something like Music. There are valid reasons why someone may see all this as a comedown from the eclectic experimentation of their previous music—and, you know, hearing some acoustic guitar sometimes brings up images of the lone douchebag strumming along at a party—which is probably why this never received the critical praise the other albums did. Even so, there’s something affecting about the quiet sparseness of it, and the way it gently guides you to different places within its theme—as the name implies, it is a bit of a trip.
In some respects, Headphase is an album-length expansion of all the nature-based songs found on BoC’s previous releases like “An Eagle In Your Mind” or “A Beautiful Place Out In the Country”, borrowing their more austere production—but the songs here go even farther than those ever did in cutting things down to the bare components. Almost every track here has a lot of space, a lot of openness (especially compared to the intentionally claustrophobic Geogaddi), the synths and samples being made more airy, almost transparent at times. By decompressing the sound on each song, it can even makes their old tricks—like the integration of unintelligible conversation in the background—take on a new light; where those things had a sinister quality on older material, here they seem to just signs of life, something reassuring. That, along with the instrumentation, make the opening few tracks some of the most straightforwardly melodic and pleasant of anything BoC had produced to that point—”Peacock Tail” might be the definition of a pleasant ambient track, a true heir to the early seventies New Age electronic music the whole genre evolved from. You do get a feeling of being away from it all, surrounded by nothing as foreboding as trees, birds, and water, and being mostly at peace with your surroundings (the waterfront of “Satellite Anthem Icarus” contrasts heavily to the waterfront of “The Beach at Redpoint.”)
Then we hit “Dayvan Cowboy” and we things pick up a bit in tempo—this is the first transition point in the album, where the sense of place changes. If the album is meant to evoke the outdoors, part of the process is getting to and from the outdoors—which means some time on the road, which is where “Dayvan” and its rock ‘n roll leanings takes us. It and the three songs following it seem to be a representation of this back-and-forth flight, with more mechanical and static noises blended in with the sunny landscape established earlier—where the “natural” and “modern” worlds seemed strangely at odds in previous BoC albums, here they seem to flow very easily from one to another. The drive is part of the process, part of the trip, and meanwhile you flip through the stations on the radio and hear the ghostly remnants of the civilization you left behind (as in “Sherbet Head”); go into town, refill your supplies, and then it’s time to head back to the woods, all part of Campfire Headphase‘s implied narrative.
This would be a good place to interject with something else: Trans Canada Highway, the EP released a year after Headphase. It’s pretty easy to look at that six-track release as something quickly cobbled-together to re-sell two different versions of “Dayvan Cowboy” when that song proved to have some mainstream appeal, but what it really does is offer another take on the ideas of its predecessor—a detour (har har), one where instead of returning to the camp, you just kept on driving. Beginning with “Left Side Drive”, a perfect piece of BoC with its cascade of automatic and layered synths and clicks, it becomes a survey of endless roads, a glance at roadside attractions, and waiting for nothing in particular. Maintaining the open spaces of Headphase, Trans Canada eschews most of the instrumentation for more floaty, man-made noise, the drones of some sci-fi church organ. Much like Kraftwerk’s Autobahn, it captures the feeling of driving, focusing on the road and peering out at the things you see, with a few brief moments of respite to stare at some billboard or neon sign. As a more condensed take on these methods, the EP carries over the strengths of the previous release while creating a few new ones of its own.
Back in Headphase, “Oscar See Through Red Eye” serves as the second transition point, back to where we started, and seems to be moving the tone slightly downward—this album doesn’t venture into any particularly dark territory, but the tracks that follow do slightly trend towards the plaintive. These last few songs also blend together many of the motifs from the earlier ones: you’ll have the guitars in the foreground of songs like “Hey Saturday Sun” and “Constants Are Changing” supported by the more otherworldly synthesizer sounds that began to creep into the middle tracks. There’s seems to be something on their minds during the last tracks here, more than the there was during the tranquil opening numbers—but at no point does it ever really descend into the internal chaos present on Geogaddi, rather it slows down and takes in several different things in its unhurried way. The final three tracks are like staring into the starry sky, a big wide canvas freed from any of earthly connections (aside from the radio intrusion at the end of “Slow This Bird Down”), just quiet, subtle synthlines—if the first third of the album seem designed to clear one’s mind (as time out in nature is often meant to do), the last third creates a chance for one to use that calming influence for introspection. On Geogaddi, the final track ends with pure silence—Campfire Headphase, on the other hand, drifts towards that silence in “Farewell Fire”, very gradually fading away…much like a campfire does. It’s not a hard stop this time, it’s letting the end come naturally.
(“Farewell Fire” also seems to be a reference to the Twoism bonus track “1986 Fire”, which has similar feel to it, but with BoC’s 1995 sound, obviously)
If there’s one key change to the way Campfire Headphase (and Trans Canada Highway) operates compared to previous BoC albums, it’s that it focuses on a more singular concept rather than a broader range of them. The album is more straightforward/linear and concise in what it’s doing and the kind of sounds it’s aiming for, all its efforts put towards the atmospheres and scenes it wants to create, rather than numerous variations on a mood. While this means that the songs on here don’t have that viscerally alien touch that some of their best stuff has, it still has the same sensibility being used to interpret the whole outdoor experience. One of the things that BoC does is create worlds within their music: the weird re-imagined childhoods of Music and A Beautiful Place Out in the Country, the shadowy internal dialogue of Geogaddi, and in this case, an escapist journey into pure nature (or a man-made simulacrum of it), where your internal and external concerns just sort of melt away and the elements (or the road) become everything. The music is finely-tuned to this sort of scene-setting, and that method of making music is something that the duo would come back to…eventually.
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 