Record Club Vol. 6: Geogaddi - Boards of Canada (2002)
This shit has got people saying spooky numbers
So far, the non-Tom picks for Record Club have come from members who deeply did not click with my picks. However, this method does not apply this time as King Crimson Red was simply too good and everyone told me how smart I was for choosing it (world record amount). As a result, I just asked Patrick Cosmos to pick something. I know he is a musician himself and when I see him talking about music, I go “now there’s a guy who knows a ton of shit I don’t!” I figured he would have something to share that would really be a curveball for me.
Once again my genius intuitions pay off big time. His pick, Boards of Canada’s Geogaddi, is a musical cryptid that manifests to me as an out-of-focus Bigfoot photo that looks just real enough to make you go insane over it.
Here is Patrick’s pitch:
In the late 1990s, Boards of Canada were a pair of weird guys with no apparent backstory in pastoral Scotland recording music that sounded like it was from educational programming from the 1960s that was also from the future. Their first album, Music Has the Right to Children, had a floating ambience and a heavy hip hop/industrial knock that was hazy and uncanny. It has produced a cottage industry of Lo-Fi Beats To Chill And Study To that completely misunderstand the assignment. There is nothing like it.
Geogaddi followed it up in 2002. It's immediately darker and more off-putting, without abandoning the soothing tape drift that felt unique to them at the time. It also sounds bigger and heavier and more diverse, and there are lengthy riffs and arpeggios, and strange samples, and little side tracks that are like hallways to nowhere. As fully-formed as their first album was, this is a more ambitious and focused statement. You are one Google search away from a rabbit hole of references to numerology and the occult, but you can also chill to it without any of that ever becoming your business. Once again, there is nothing like it.
It's a long album with a lot of songs and it's designed so that even short interludes feel fully formed and purposeful. It is weird but approachable, despite invoking the name of David Koresh. It's got a lot going on and it's only gotten better with time.
I kinda went nutty when I got this pitch. I have known since I was a kid on last.fm that Boards of Canada were da GOATs of whatever kind of music they do—it seems funny to consider now but at the time I fully believed that, yes, Boards of Canada are one of the best artists around while also truly having no idea what type of music they made—but until this week I have not listened to one second of their music. I knew that finally sitting down with their work would be a fascinating experience that would give me a lot of thoughts to chew on. Well, folks: Correct.
I don’t claim to be knowledgeable enough for it to count about any music—my feeling is if I spent every moment of my waking life between now and my death at age 100 learning about music, I would still feel like a beginner (I choose to frame this as the wisdom of a sage knowing that we know nothing rather than pathological self-doubt)—but electronic music in particular is a foreign country to me. This is both due to the mundane fact that I have not spent much time listening to it, and more abstractly, that I don’t have the tools to decode what it’s doing.
Like, when there are instruments playing, I know what is happening. When the piano player plays some chords, I hear them and go, those are piano chords. There is a guy playing those notes on the piano, using his fingers. When there is a guitar solo, I go, there is someone playing the guitar now. I have seen a guitar—you play the strings. When electronic music is playing, I go, these are beeps and boops? They could have been generated by literally any means? Uhh?? Like: when an electronic act has more than one person in it, as Boards of Canada does...what do they do? Is one guy beat only and the other melody only? Do they just both make tracks solo and pick the best from each guy? Like what is actually happening? How is a live show more than pressing play?
I’ve seen a lot of vague praise for Geogaddi focusing on the types of synths and equipment and analog effects they use. Again: I don’t know what electronic musicians use at baseline so I will have nothing to add here. Like, remember on the last Daft Punk album there was that one song where Giorgio Moroder did a bunch of monologues and guys were like, “OMG, the mics they use to record his monologues are vintage, exactly what would be cutting edge studio tech at the time he’s talking about! If you’re an audiohead you’re going to FLIP for this!!” Well I’m not and I didn’t. Same thing here.
Further exposing my ignorance: sometimes friends will mention their synths and keyboards and such and talk about how much fun they have making music with them. Especially now as an early-intermediate piano player, I always perk up and say “oh, keyboards? I’m learning piano, do you know how to play?” and they go “no” and I go “??? then how...???...do you play music... ??...on the keyboard??”
A dumber, more racist man than me would take this impulse and form it into the classic Hater’s Delight where I say electronic music is fake and artificial and lame and can never touch real music played in real life by a real band. However I know that this is false, and I’ll tell you why (and this is a trick you yourself can use for genres you don’t understand or appreciate): if it didn’t have artistic depth people wouldn’t be doing it.1
As a result, you can expect the following writing to be of less insight than usual. A writer with a background in electronic music would be able to better put this music in context and identify what BoC is doing that is unique and special, what is emblematic of the genre, what is conventional, what isn’t, etc. But whatever, that shit’s not my fault. All I can do is react in good faith. Allow me to begin said process with the Headline: Geogaddi is fucking hypnotizing.
As Patrick mentioned, Boards of Canada’s two members, Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin, don’t share much about themselves beyond their music. Hilariously it was not until seven years after their debut album that they revealed they were brothers all along (the reveal sparked by an interviewer asking them, when did you two first meet each other, and they have to go uhh...umm...very early....uhh can we tell? Is it OK to tell?). I know that there is a danger in directly attributing decisions made in a piece of art to specific personal traits in its creator—often this is a self-fulfilling thing that restricts the listener, and more often is based on assumptions rather than facts—but man! This shit sounds like some brothers.
So much is made about the feeling and mood on Geogaddi (correctly), the eerie emotions it evokes, the woozy nostalgia seeping through it all—to me this shit becomes so much more possible to pull off when the guys are brothers. The non-verbal forever connection you make with a close sibling cannot be replicated by any other means—the required volume of shared connections, shared experiences, shared interests, shared context, etc can only be achieved if you start building it up when you’re a little-ass baby.
About half of Geogaddi is “songs” as a normie would recognize them and the other is little weird mood poems, and I don’t think it’s crazy to say that the latter does most of the heavy thematic lifting here. I wondered, how is it that they were able to make so many of these odd sound collages that all worked to further this subtle vibe, never so obvious as to be openly scary or tense but always nipping at the edges of your mood—and to me the answer is clear: these fuckers have been doing this their whole lives. The head start they have on the rest of us can never be made up.
Much is made about the secrets and subliminal shit put in this music. Where are the samples from? What are the distant vocals saying? Why? What do the Branch Davidians have to do with this, why is David Koresh’s name reversed? What happened in 1969? What’s with the numbers? Why does the music sound backwards sometimes? This can and has activated thousands of freaks since the record’s release—I think this is the first band we’ve covered with its own wiki—but the scope of all the hidden layers becomes much easier to understand when you remember these guys grew up together. How do they pull such obscure samples from documentaries by the National Film Board of Canada? Well, duh—they watched a ton when they were kids. How do they come up with secret messages to put in their music? They talk about it to each other all the time, having developed the taste for it together. The intimacy and closeness of family means the walk they need to take to get to this destination is already half done.
At the risk of hedging an annoying amount, I want to be clear: I have zero evidence this is true as I’m describing it. It’s just how I read the music with the context that I have. If I didn’t, I’d still be stuck on “why is there two of them...what does each one do”
I swear I’m going to get to the actual music soon. However there is an issue I must first acknowledge.
This is the third of six records covered that is big smeary dreamy music with a semi-consistent tempo maintained throughout. I can no longer ignore what is obvious to all of us: we must address the Background Music allegations. Previous slow, smeary, dreamy albums in Record Club were repeatedly labeled background music with various levels of stink, from none to a lot. Obviously there is value in background music—it exists as a concept because people perceive a need for it, the entire ambient genre is just that—so I want to explore what it is that makes something background music (good) and background music (derogatory).
Background music’s primary duty is to never feature a moment so wildly different from those around it to demand your attention. Check—on Geogaddi elements slide in and out smoothly and slowly, never jarring da ear. Its second duty is to generate and maintain a mood. Check—I have alluded to this but Geogaddi is meticulously crafted to achieve a sort of hypnotically off-kilter sense of nostalgic dread.
I think the stink comes when music does nothing else other than fulfill those two duties. You will notice neither duty requires the music to be interesting. The reason I couldn’t love Endless was that it did not benefit from a close listen—the more I paid attention, the more annoyed I became at how little there was to pay attention to. Geogaddi does not suffer this weakness.
For one, the actual sounds have a ton of variety. A guy who could identify devices could probably tell you more, but even the beats alone vary from glitchy, crunchy synth hits, to real drums on a rock drum kit, to bongos/hand drums. There’s rarely a time where I feel like I’m bored waiting for something new to happen. For two, these tracks are jam-packed with Stuff. While it never is so cluttered as to fail the two duties of Background Music, a close listen of any song will yield some wild sounds to gawk at or subtle bits bubbling under the surface. The amount of songs featuring distorted samples of faraway children talking/playing is absolutely nuts dude. Extremely just went on The Jaunt voice: More than you think!
I don’t think it’s Geogaddi’s best song, but in terms of just summing up the whole deal in the most efficient way nothing beats Dandelion. The first time I heard this one the only thing I could think of was how the brothers’ tongues must have been wagging when they watched this old documentary and the narrator would not fucking stop saying these sentences absolutely heaving with Metaphor. In a deep, fatherly tone laid with crackles and tape hiss, a voice says “When lava pours out near the sea surface, tremendous volcanic explosions sometimes occur. In time, submarine seamounds, or islands, are formed. When lava flows underwater, it behaves differently.” Like, are you fucking kidding me with this. Do I need to spell this out for you?
It goes on: “a new contraption to capture a dandelion in one piece has been put together by the crew.” Oh my god! You could hardly write a line more on-the-nose about mankind’s hubristic obsession with possessing what is inherently fleeting!! And they just found it!! “The preparation for a dive is always a tense time.” I’m dead. Kill me. I was later informed the sampled voice is Leslie Nielsen. Jesus christ. They must have felt like they won the lottery ten times and invested all their winnings into 1998 Apple stock.
Between the samples there are synth melodies that sound warm and pleasant, calming even, were it not for the fact that this shit sounds backwards. I can’t explain it but it sounds like they finished a song then flipped it—you always feels slightly off-balance. I feel like this track gets close to being too unsubtle, considering my reaction is to clap and hoot and go like “the boys done did it! Haha! They really did it!” But on the other hand: the boys really did done do it. You can’t punish them for that—that’s the whole point.
That out of the way, time to finally reckon with the album as a whole. Given my stated ignorance of electronic music and the absolutely nonsense number of tracks on this, I won’t be going too deep into each song, rather focusing on the overall experience, calling out specific tracks as they do notable things.
I want to first call out how excellent the album art is. I looked at this for ten seconds and was like, I bet I know the vibe this is going to have—and I did!
We have the golden glow of the life-giving sun blocked by darker brown-oranges in a weird geometric pattern that upon closer inspection turns out to be a silhouette of a person and some trees, mirrored and flipped six times. This is the whole ball game here: familiar, comforting light obscured by a spiky, dark shape that’s lookin’ spooky...maybe some kinda pentagram…but wait, it’s OK, it’s just trees and a guy...but well, actually, that guy is fuckin T-posing and has zero identifying features...perhaps this is the Hat Man...
And this is all very clear on the first “song” song, Music is Math, setting the tone right away with a sustained synth drone orbited by a wandering melody until a distorted vocal sample calmly intones “the past inside the present.” I laughed at Dandelion but this also is amazingly on the nose. As you’ll see, a number of Record Club listeners found this album nostalgic or reminiscent of old video game music and it’s no accident. Every vocal sample sounds like it’s thirty years old at least, the music always has an ache to it, like it’s trying to be somewhere and never (or, rarely) can reach it.
Music is Math also assures the listener that yes, there will be actual beats on this shit. Sure, there will also be a haunting vocal sample you can’t understand and the distant sound of children playing, but it’s not like this is avant-garde to the point where you have to do homework to enjoy it at all. I guess this is as good a time as any to address the “Intelligent Dance Music” genre label which BoC sometimes gets slapped with. My take: this shit is the funniest shit on Earth. I am imagining the music journalist nerd who came up with this and thinking about how fucking tiresome he must be (and it is a he) to be like, foremost: dancing is not intelligent. But if the beats are weird and low energy, a genius will dance to it. It is a term that makes all humans instinctively get angry the first time they hear it. It sucks that BoC is tarred with this brush, but also, it’s not their fault what other people call them.
After Music is Math, it’s the Salad Fingers theme. Remember Salad Fingers, the early internet phenomenon where the joke is this guy is like freaking spooky? Well, the theme does a lot of the heavy lifting. If I wanted to make a horror cartoon with a lovable but uncanny protagonist doing eerie things, I’d pick this as the theme song too.
Gyroscope is a song that one of the boys dreamed and is reportedly 99% identical to the dream version. This rings true—the beat is perhaps the record’s most disorienting, speeding up and slowing down as it gets louder and softer. Given the song’s title I can be forgiven for visualizing the beat as a wobbling top about to tip over. Meanwhile there’s a tape hiss over the whole thing while we get shifting layers of synth drone over heavily distorted vocal samples of a child(?) reciting a bunch of numbers. Here’s the thing: reciting a bunch of numbers at seemingly random is spooky shit. That’s the shit from Lost. That’s a code and it’s never for something good. Often throughout Geogaddi there will be some ghostly voice crackling over a walkie-talkie saying numbers and it’s always fucked up.
Overall the depth of the music here consistently rewards close listening. There’s always enough space between the components to easily snap your attention to any given bit, and there are always enough moving parts in a track for it to feel like there’s something more to discover if you keep digging. The boys also know how to craft a hook to keep it enjoyable at face value—see Julie and Candy: it’s doing a lot of weirdo shit with shifting waves of hiss and feedback and crunchy drums and backwards-sounding synth strings, but it’s anchored by the weird flute hook (made weirder by being recorded back and forth between two tape recorders until it sounds appropriately crunchy2). It’s both something musically simple to grab onto and a novel kind of sound that appears nowhere else on the record.
I said earlier that the MVPs are not the “song” songs but the little vignettes and the more I listen the more I believe this. The songs are good to be clear, but if this album was nothing but them I feel like I would find it Pretty Good instead of Fascinating3. These are where the boys can stretch their legs and pursue their weirdest creative fixations without being beholden to song structure. Here’s where we get some of the most enduring sounds on the record for me: the echoing organ on In the Annexe, the hyper-compressed sitar(?) at the start of The Smallest Weird Number, the eerie, breathy vocal sample over whirling flutes on Opening the Mouth, the skittering, mushy percussion, chopped-up vocal samples, and weird baby noise on The Devil is in the Details4.
There are two particular vignettes I want to further focus on: the first is Energy Warning, which on its face doesn’t seem like it’d have a big impact. It’s only 35 seconds, has only two main synth lines—the melody and a single crescendoing staccato note. And yet of all the songs on the album this is the one that actually makes me feel emotionally unsettled rather than vaguely pleased that there is an emotionally unsettling vibe for me to admire.
The meat of the track is the vocal sample, again so compressed it sounds like it’s coming from a subway PA speaker, of a child recording a PSA about energy conservation. Right away the nostalgia angle is undeniable—if the past is a foreign country these vocal samples always sound like they come from another universe, a past more past than the actual past. The kid sounds hopeful, happy—clearly struggling with delivering his lines in ready-for-TV diction, but making do—and eventually you realize oh lol, fuck, all this shit he’s saying didn’t happen. No earnest plea for forward-thinking conservation action has been or will ever be answered. Innocence will always be crushed so as to gather more blood for the machine. This gets me most of the way there, but the emotional catalyst that absolutely fucks me up is when the kid says that without conservation, there may not be enough energy “by the time I’m a parent.”
Fuck, man, this phrasing is just gutting. Let me be real with you for a second: I hate the fascist President. I am gripped with big waves of fear that knot my stomach up every single fucking day. I exist at the mercy of an organization millions of times more powerful than me whose primary function is to cause pain and end life. I am finding it very difficult to envision the future beyond a very short span, and I certainly can’t look at it with any real hope. So when I hear this kid say not “when I grow up” but “by the time I’m a parent,” I just crumble dude. To have that much hope in the future—to, as a child, trust that the adults will do what it takes for you to one day have your own children, to conceive of your existence as obviously extending beyond the confines of your own lifetime, to have that much certainty that it’s going to be OK not just for you but for those who come after—christ! Oh my god! It fucking kills me.
It’s not that he may be a parent—he doesn’t say “by the time I’m old enough to be a parent”—it’s taken as a given! Why wouldn’t I dedicate myself to a new life eager to inherit a new future? Obviously I will. After all, the world is a place of abundance and joy! The way we have rewarded this kid’s optimism with failure and misery is, to coin a phase, extremely fucked. The effect is amplified by immediately sliding into the big opening synth chords of The Beach at Redpoint which sound like they’re from a film score right when our heroes exit their crashed escape pod and the camera pans over the desolate planet they’re now trapped on with no hope of escape. Oof. At least later in that song we get a fun bunch of percussion with bongos and stuff.
The other vignette I want to call out is probably the most striking track on the album, Over the Horizon Radar. There’s not a lot to this: a few whooshes and drones with a slow, simple synth melody. In another context this shit would be not notable at all. But on Geogaddi, after the journey the album has taken till now, it hits like a meteor. There’s no weird chattering vocal samples. There’s no skittering percussion. There’s no eerie wail. There’s no piercing treble. It’s just a warm, mellow, low melody. No weird rhythms, no dissonant intervals, just a breath of air. This is the sunrise. The glow behind the mirrored Hat Man is finally unobscured. There is hope.
The remaining songs feel less tense than all the others—is that actually the case or was I primed to think that by my reaction to Over the Horizon Radar? Who can say. All I know is that the record is much better for developing its emotional tone rather than keeping it the same throughout, and the moment where you realize that for the first time in almost an hour you’re listening to something simple, beautiful, and uncomplicated is my favorite part of this whole thing.
Of course, we end with Magic Window, a minute and 46 seconds of silence. Now this is an odd move. First thought is that by listening intently to silence as you would a song, you transition from the music to your own real life, but now framed as a work of art the same way music is—in a way traveling through a “Magic Window” from Geogaddi world into reality. Further evidence: the vinyl version of Geogaddi is three LPs, with side six entirely devoted to Magic Window, here rendered as a carving of a family on a grooveless vinyl surface.
I dunno though, that shit sounds kinda artist’s-statementy. Others have pointed out that without it the runtime of the album wouldn’t be 66:06. Honestly, I don’t really have any strong feelings about it, but I feel like if an album has a track of pure silence you have to address it.
So yeah, Geogaddi was really enjoyable! I found a lot to love here and will be listening to this and the rest of Boards of Canada’s stuff in the future for sure. Will this start me down the road of electronic music fandom? Probably not. If I had nothing else to fill my time, maybe, but as much as I liked it, I’d still prefer to use my music-listening time exploring genres I have a more fundamental understanding of. But even so, I’ll know that if I ever feel the urge there are treasures to be found in electronic music as well.
But enough from me, let’s hear the Record Club’s takes!
slamdunkrai:
When I first heard this one a few years ago I came away with the impression that it didn't seem as though you're really supposed to listen to it. Obviously you can—formally these are mostly fairly inviting and smooth synth-and/or-drum break-driven vistas and sketches—but as you scrutinise things a little more you start to feel you could risk uncovering some dangerous secret language between the layers of sound that could indoctrinate you into some sort of cult. On closer inspection it's very funny that there's a song called "The Devil is in the Details" that is explicitly riffing on this being maybe the album's main theme! Beyond the very easy rhythm line, the synths on this specific track seem to sound pretty deliberately like the disembodied cries of ghosts calling out from and then receding back into silence, as though you knew of them this whole time but they weren't supposed to really become the subjects of your consciousness.
Fundamentally I think this is an album concerned with things that shouldn't be there but irrefutably are, and the way they seem to transpose themselves onto things you are more consciously seeing. See "Music is Math" ("the past inside the present"; the ultra-processed "yellow ball", as if recalling some subconscious cue that lets you know you're dreaming) and "1969" (explicitly employs backmasking and riffs on the Branch Davidians) for the most pronounced examples, but really, the whole process of dropping these found sound samples onto flickering synthy soundscapes as if to derive some hidden meaning through the dialogue between the two is kind of also about this. It's also striking that many of these found sound samples seem to be taken from adverts, PSAs and documentaries (most notably on "Dandelion", probably the track with the most overtly creepy synthwork).
Which is all to say: Geogaddi is about how the television is ghosts and also summons ghosts. I think that kind of thing is awesome. badass album
Man that’s the shit I said too! I guess we’re both right. Didn’t know they were saying “yellow ball” on Music is Math, that definitely fits into the sun theme that pops up throughout. Definitely an album about ghosts and memory though.
RAChoco:
Boards of Canada is just such a perfect name for this act. I grew up in the 90s in Ontario and I remember assembly and classroom showings of NFB films with the spooky little guy who forms his arms into a terrifying eye.
NFB films often had a weird sense of melancholy to them and BoC’s works hit that for me often. There’s a feeling to a lot of them, kinda offputting but in a way that still feels enriching and enjoyable.
I keep coming back to video game imagery thinking of this one. Sorry for that. Also I think halfway through I felt I should abandon the track by track commentary but I was already in too deep by then. I feel like at a certain point I stop describing what I like about it and shift into Vibes Only mode but I should note I pretty solidly enjoyed this album, even when the vibe I describe suggests otherwise!
When I listen to this album I think a lot about how I would score a TTRPG. Everyone agrees D&D is shit but I keep coming around to the thought that this is how a Far Realm-centric game should sound. Sometimes it soft, sometimes it’s harsh, but it often has a hypnotic tone, and I think a lot about how the Far Realm feels like a kind of cosmic corruption that sneaks up on you. If I wanted to be less nerdy I’d say it makes me think a little of Annihilation if Annihilation was less overtly scary.
Ready Let’s Go - That tone I mention with the NFB, that’s the main thing I think of all through this minute long track.
Music is Math - I like that long droning tone, it has a warm sound to it before the latter part of the track gets spooky. I do like that bit of spookiness though, especially the way it unfolds at the end.
Beware the Friendly Stranger - Classic Saladfingers banger. Easy to see why it got used for that series.
Gyroscope - I enjoy the rapid percussive energy here as it surges in and out. The weird murmurs in the background sound like an alien child.
Dandelion - Pretty sure this opens with a straight up audio sample of an NFB film. I like these bright tones over that voice. It’s a calming voice, something about that old radio voice sound just hits right.
Sunshine Recorder - Perfect track for exploring an extraterrestrial zone. I don’t really have a lot of vocabulary to describe what’s going on but I know it would just be perfect music to vibe along to while driving a buggy on an alien planet’s surface. The weird vocal bits a little past halfway in are odd but not ruining it for me.
In the Annexe - Really feeling that melancholia hit here. Good stuff. It’s silly but I find it very easy to relate to the sounds of this album as video gamey, and this one is like a rest break. Save room in a not-so-safe space kinda music.
Julie and Candy - If the last track is the Resident Evil save room then this is Earthbound’s Coffee Break. I really like this track, I lied about my previous commitment to Sunshine Recorder.
The Smallest Weird Number - Feeling a sad Earthbound vibe here. Liking it.
1969 - I really dig what’s going on in this one. Bomberman Hero vibes. Really love the echoey percussion that kicks in 40 seconds in and the vocal samples not long after.
Energy Warning - Ahhhhh! It’a a vibe.
The Beach at Redpoint - Another one of those tracks that again, feels like a great background track to explore alien landscapes to. At first I struggled with this thought, like what if you were a space guy trapped in the Lands Between, and then I realized I felt like Metroid or Halo
Opening the Mouth - I love that flute-y sound in the opening of this track. So cool…! Then there’s that slow inhale exhale… Really digging it.
Alpha and Omega - I really like the flow from the previous track into this one, and as this one gets going it feels like good “focus” music. I was really vibing with it and then halfway through some strings kick in and I liked that even more!
I Saw Drones - Real blink and you miss it! I dug how the static fuzz flows in.
The Devil is in the Details - That feel when you get spooked by seeing drones on the surface so you retreat to the subterranean caverns. Don’t love the crying baby. If I was listening in the middle of the night my hair’d be standing on end I think. Felt mildly spooked by the feminine voice and then checked the lyrics. Ahhhhhhh it’s the d-d-d-d-devil!! Really it would be nice and meditative in another context but I appreciate how checking it partway through felt like I was ripping myself out of a seductive trance.
A Is To B As B Is To C - Really light start before it fuzzes into that spooky vibe again.
Over the Horizon Radar - Resting in Onett vibe. I like it!
Dawn Chorus - Nice and bright - definitely feels like coming back into the light after being lost in the dark. Feels like something else not entirely welcome woke up too, sneaking around.
Diving Station - Really feels like pulling into the final stretch here. The whale-like echoes start spooky enough and then start to feel all consuming, taking on an otherworldly tone.
You Could Feel the Sky - Feels like everything is cracking apart, like something is chewing away at the fabric of reality. I like the sounds but it feels like something wrong is happening at the edge of perception.
Corsair - Being a space guy on a ship in the middle of a broken galaxy. Feels like drifting peacefully in the middle of nothing. That feel when your spelljammer is busted and you’re waiting it out. I’m impressed how much it can sound the same over three minutes and I don’t feel tired of it.
Magic Window - Really quite cool how spooky just a silent track can be. I keep wondering if there’s something I’m missing, or something my headphones are missing.
First off I love that horrible eye man, he is an absolute nightmare from hell and is so adorable. Good on you, Canada.
The commitment to a track-by-track reaction on an album with this many is nutty but I feel very similar to you. I enjoyed the breadth and specificity of your takes here. Would probably enjoy listening again with this as a guide.
Lindsay:
I finally got some time to myself so I put my headphones on, started this album, and left the house for a walk. It had just passed midnight on a Tuesday morning and the city was quiet and still. I followed the river—through the business district, into central suburbs, to the Red Zone where it's still wild and unlit. This music was a great soundtrack for that. It was ethereal and nostalgic in places but with a beat that kept it firmly tethered to this plane so it didn't all float away into nothing.
There used to be a bar in town whose theme was "under the sea". Not in a Marty McFly way, more like it was dark and murky with touches of polished brass here and there. It was in a terrible location for a joint that relied solely on foot traffic and word of mouth, but they would play this kind of music at high volume all the time and I would sit there, by myself, and let the atmosphere wash over me. That was a good way to spend a couple of pints' worth of time and move on.
I love that the grainy crackle of the old samples is a recurring part of the sound they're cultivating here. Blend the old with the new, an ambient evolution of 90's trip-hop. But overall I think there's a little too much going on for me to love it. Maybe if they stripped one or two layers away from their most complex tracks, that would land right in my sweet spot. But overall this was a really pleasant experience. Thanks Patrick.
Thank you for this, some great and evocative writing here. I would love to visit that bar.
Green:
Never listened to BoC before, and just before putting this on, I'd been listening to the Transistor soundtrack so now the two things are intrinsically linked in my mind. They're not the same, sure, but I could see enough similarities that I wondered if they were pulling from similar influences.
I haven’t listened to the Transistor soundtrack so I can’t speak for the accuracy of this comparison, but I think it’s interesting that this is the second time Geogaddi has been linked with video game music—will it be the last?
けに ひめ:
Guess its up to me to be the Hater of the Week. People are making really smart observations about the album and I see the genre is called "intelligent dance" but unfortunately I am an idiot with two left feet so this went badly for me. When I saw the album title and cover my first thought was "oh no" and then I hit play and was immediately greeted by a big fart sound. I looked back at the album cover and noticed it looks kind of like an anus. Many of the tracks were too esoteric, upsetting (especially "Devil..." which I think was written and performed by Eraserhead Baby), or sounding like butt noises ("Diving Station," "You Could Feel the Sky") for me to enjoy. Apparently this album was influenced by 9/11 but they don’t even once mention sticking a boot in Saddam's ass??? Maybe that’s what all the fart sounds are. overall, 7.8/10 (too much fart). Don’t want to yuck anyone's yum, but this wasn’t for me, though I have enjoyed reading the different ways people appreciated the album.
Insane to give a 7.8 to an album you call yourself a hater of. That said, you reclaim hater status with your insistence there are fart sounds on this—I only recently learned that people are using “farty” as a non-derogatory adjective for synth/bass sounds and I wanted to hurl—I personally think you are out of your mind to think these are fart sounds. That said I think you have reverse-engineered why Intelligent Dance Music is the worst genre name of all time—if you take it at face value the only thing it can do is frustrate you and lower your opinion of the music.
Will you remain the Hater of the Week, or are more incoming? We’ll see…
magwhich:
I have listened to this record and dang does it seem like everyone has a totally different take on the feel of this one. It sounds like the entire album was made by two guys fighting for control over some music production software with one guy trying to make early PS2 menu music and one guy trying to make the nastiest synth noises Robert Moog could dream of. Overall it makes some fine falling asleep music. Most of the album just felt like some kind of early 2000s take on easy listening. I need video of how anyone is dancing to this because I just wanted to lie down.
Nope, more haters incoming. What I am interested in here is the perception of two creative entities at work—I still have no idea what two guys in a group do when you make music that doesn’t need two guys to make! I never got the impression that there were two voices at work here and I kinda wish I could.
Also, another video game music reference. They should have put the Resident Evil typewriter room song on this.
holymountainman:
On a long rail journey today and put it on. I'm not well versed in electronic music and it's a pretty big gap in my listening. Found that I was enjoying this more when I got a bit bored and started reading while listening rather than giving my full attention. Although some of the beats did get my finger tapping. Gyroscope is the standout track for me.
Geogaddi not beating the background music allegations, but I don’t think it really tries to?
fretzl:
My take on the IDM topic is that it seems like a term that went through a similar definitional drift as RPG. Why does Playing A Role necessarily entail "turn based combat system" and "spreadsheets?" It feels more like there was just was a general type of game in a general lineage and it was named something that seemed to make enough sense at the time and then that general lineage evolved a bit beyond what the label said on the tin while still maintaining a coherent throughline to the original entries in the genre.
Oh, I also see RAChoco mentioned Resident Evil! Okay the Playstation read is here to stay haha. Not that anyone meant it this way but I don't feel like that's a cheapening comparison either tbh. I've always felt that there's a hard to place quality to the Playstation's music/graphics that's like, more muted and dark than other consoles. This music feels dark to me not necessarily in a grim way as much as in a sort of desolate dusty gray way (positive).
Also the PS2 was released while this album was being recorded so take whatever you want away from that.
I actually also thought I heard a good chunkful of Kid A era Radiohead in here, and apparently at the time they were particularly into the music coming out of the record label that Boards of Canada put this album out on, so that tracks. It feels like something like Alpha and Omega leads directly to Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors
I would be absolutely shocked beyond belief if Radiohead were not huge Boards of Canada sickos. If I did not think gambling was Satan’s work on earth I would put big money on it.
The video game music connection is becoming a trend now—I think this is a total slam dunk personally, there is so much thematic work on the album re: nostalgia, memory, the past, and technology, it only makes sense.
Duffo:
This is a really compelling album, and I’m glad it garnered the kind of obsessive fans who catalogue all the samples because there’s so much to dig into. Looking through the wiki for this confirmed something I’d suspected as I was listening—very little of what’s happening here is actually computer made, and it’s a better album for it. I love all this tape deck and analog stuff! It gives it that real collage feel, which is exactly what you want when you’re trying to pin down something about a culture at a point in time.
The bright but eerie flute-driven jam of Julie & Candy, the thumping minimalist “why are we counting oh god why are we counting” paranoia of Gyroscope and the atmospheric hardware soup of Music is Math make them the stand outs of the album, but I also felt really compelled by tracks like the thickly textured and weirdly erotic Dawn Chorus, the cyber-jungle jam on Alpha and Omega, the watery chops and swells of The Beach At Redpoint, and the punchy absurdism of Energy Warning. The Devil Is In The Details gets a shout-out for being aural hell, specifically the circle of hell you get sent to for watching flirty ASMR roleplay Youtubers. The silent breather of Magic Window is a nice relief, right up until you realise that it’s been added to bring the run time up to 66 minutes, 6 seconds. The devil is real and we just invited him into our record club.
Put this blurb on a big sticker on the cover IMO, this is my essay in miniature. I didn’t spend too much time on the wiki because I didn’t care to, but I wonder what non-computer based means. Like just not on a DAW? Like is a keyboard making sounds in real life analog? Or no because it’s electric? This is how ignorant I am folks.
Oh well, at least I’m not going to flirty ASMR roleplay YouTuber hell.
WretchedBee:
Other people have already said my thoughts on this better but, I started writing this one off at first as being like a halfway point between versions of things I enjoy, where a lot of it I’m like “yeah of course you’d do that” in terms of samples used or pulling back from certain elements etc — they’re so established now that the spooky elements are just comforting to me, but the more I’m able to get over that and let the thoughts and paranoia in, the more I enjoy it and it can get its hooks into me.
Like it’s very restrained and deliberate but so much so as to almost not be there for me most of the time, and that’s really good for minute things to pay attention to — leaning in to try and hear, but because it’s so familiar I’m not leaning in any more
One thing I do love is 35 second tracks, I feel so accomplished after 12 minute songs. I liked Opening the Mouth on headphones, for the panning left to right stuff. It definitely feels like the kind of album where there’d be something in the ID tags or something from the CD
Now this is the kinda take I’d love to hear more about! I have been wondering all week if I’m taken by Geogaddi on its own merits or if I am so ignorant that bog standard stuff is novel to me. I think we end up in the same place but obviously the journey is different for the more experienced listener.
raccoon picnic:
There's some neat stuff in this album but it's overall not a hit for me. I find myself liking the repeating underlying melodies/sounds, but not really wanting to follow along when it tries to do something more complex than that. It feels a bit like the background music of an indy game that everyone else loves and you're having a hard time getting into. So the music is really cool at first, but you're stuck on one part trying to figure out what the game wants you to do with the banana and the ferret and you really don't think the Icarus metaphor is as profound as everyone else does, and by the third or fourth time the track loops it's starting to wear on you a bit.
Not the first response that wishes there was less complexity—baffling considering other responses criticize it for being too much of background music. But it’s not my job to understand, so carry on! Note yet another video game connection—at this point it is simply the facts. This is VGM officially.
Forgetful Man:
This album reminded me of my buddy that built a Lenox machine in a pizza box when he was in high school (complimentary). This album is what I want to hear when I’m watching a pro yo-yo person do a sick yo-yo routine. This album made me think of those crazy Computer Generated Graphics videos that I would watch in the 90s that was just vector images constantly cycling into themselves. This album was cool as hell.
Dude I wish we still had a cultural ecosystem that supported goth ponytail yo-yo teens. Talk about nostalgia. Also, what the fuck is a Lenox Machine? I wonder if it’s anything like a Van Der Graaf Generator…
Ben:
As a person who mainly honks on horns to make music, I struggle to describe electronica. I sure do like listening to it, though.
I liked this one! I liked all the bleeps and bloops, okay? I liked the warm, round synth bass sound that balanced out the creaky (and wet-sounding somehow??) drum loops. Hearing the crackly and warped samples reminded me of an old university job where I was digitizing and archiving reel-to-reel recordings that had a lot of bleed-through and other haunted sounds. I loved that job but it paid essentially zero dollars.
Music like this, with 6 to 8 things going on at all times, is nice for my brain - I feel like all my bandwidth is occupied with a series of simple tasks that I can hang up like laundry. This part of my brain follows along with the bass, another tries to source the samples, yet another gets distracted by the backwards-sounding cymbal crashes, and so on. None of this is hectic, mind you, it's just laundry. I didn't find myself searching for anything extra, or feeling overwhelmed by how much was there. I'll be adding BoC to the rotation for sure.
Really relating to a lot of this here—especially the appreciation that there are never too many layers at any one time. I always feel like I am probably not going to miss anything critical because 15 other things are happening.
cellobuster:
This album rules. It makes me feel like I'm a foil-wrapped baked potato rotating inside a microwave oven. I think a lot of the problem people may have with both this and previous pick Endless is trying too hard to Listen to the music rather than Experience it; this is music that fills the gaps in the room and your brain while you do your little menial tasks. It's doom metal but made by vacuum cleaners
DON’T PUT FOIL IN THE MICROWAVE!!!
I was wondering if anyone was going to compare this to Endless—it also got a lot of background music allegations but I was a lot less generous with it there than I am here. Maybe it’s unfair to want music to be able to pull double duty like that, but whatever. I can live with being unfair.
Also I just googled it and it looks like you can put foil in the microwave? What the fuck
Mr. Emotion:
Funny you compare it to Endless because this is sliding off me.
I actually like it but it’s hard to feel much other than “this is cool enough to have on.”
I do think there is a commonality between this and Endless and Goodbye Enemy Airship and Murmur which is that big chunks of all of them feel emotionally liminal, in a single moment conveying not quite one feeling and not quite another and maybe not quite several more.
Normally Mr. Emotion’s takes make big question marks shoot out of my head but I actually get this one. Especially if you get distracted or interrupted midway through (as he did) I can totally see this sort of all mushing together.
Great observation re: this/Endless/Murmur/Goodbye Enemy Airship. I love the liminal emotional vibe! Nuance and subtlety and room for personal interpretation! To me, that’s fun and good. Not all the time, obviously—sometimes you just gotta put on Pawn Hearts. No ambiguity there.
Wizard (Former Lizard):
Could be a side effect of it being a busy week but I’ve been racking my brain to come up with more to say about Geogaddi other than “hello hello, member Salad Fingers?”
OTOH, the Wikipedia page mentions The Wicker Man as a vibe anchor for this album and I can kind of see it—nevermind that the band didn’t make the comparison, rather the wiki reference is from a Guardian review of Tomorrow’s Harvest (2013) where reviewer Kitty Empire compared Geogaddi’s ambiance to “The Wicker Man with machines.”
THIS IS ALL TO SAY we’re talking about the 1973 Wicker Man and not the 2005 Nic Cage one; the latter is a hurly-burly of its own value while the original is one of my favorite movies and probably peak folk horror for folks who don’t get much out of jumpscares.
Like Sgt. Neil Howie in the Hebrides, I spent my wandering through Geogaddi not wholly sure of what I should be looking for, turned about track-to-track by the layering of vocal snippets and electric textures. His aim was finding a missing child. Mine is… enjoyment? Understanding?
Closer listening helps with grasping the scope of the album but to echo other record club folks, this strikes me as very fine background listening, which isn’t something I seek out much. It feels like a soundtrack missing its movie
Sorry you weren’t able to find much to savor here, I can imagine this shit gets very boring fast if you’re not drawn in by it. That said: OG Wicker Man is so good, goddamn, if you haven’t seen it you gotta
Dai Duck:
I was listening to this while working and it was OK as background music. The second to last track really fucking threw me off and then the last one was just silence. The cheek.
I think the last actual song was designed to be Not Good. I can respect that if I know the impetus but I was completely fucking lost and slightly annoyed.
My favorite electronic background music has gotta be Carpenter Brut's Trilogy. I listened to that after and had a way better time. That whole album is really memorable earworms but I cannot recall a single thing about the other BoC songs after the first listen - I know I had a favorite and I can't even remember the beat.
What If A Bootleg VHS Wanted To Kill You
Damn! Now this is the Hater of the Week. Sorry all previous haters. If by “the last actual song” you mean You Could Feel the Sky I just don’t know where you’re getting “this sounds bad on purpose.” Is it the like stretching sound? I think it sounds cool! Oh well. That last line is accurate though.
skelly:
I think where Endless felt like a bath/sauna/hot tub, Geogaddi felt like a bowl of tasty oatmeal that got cold that I would reheat, forget about, let get cold again, reheat, forget, etc. I felt engaged with the start of each track then it quickly fell into the background of my mind, maybe because I was listening to this album at work. It feels like an album that the girl from Whisper of the Heart would listen to while doing homework. This probably wouldn't be on my regular playlist but I could see myself returning to it for some background listening. Favorite track from the album goes to Julie and Candy, can't resist the beat when it comes on. My enjoyment of Electronica seems to be leaning towards the more dance-focused artists/albums, but I don't regret listening to the album. It's fun to dive into the unfamiliar, especially with fellow geniuses. I also gotta hand it to them for including a track of silence to make the entire album 66 minutes and 6 seconds. Absolute masterstroke.
So odd to have a lot of Record Clubbers say this stuff is only good for background music and others say I couldn’t get anything out of it because it was in the background. Once again I think there’s some scholarship to be done (or let’s be honest, has been done and I’m too lazy to look for it) re: the goals different listeners have for music and what role they want it to play in their life. Personally I never listen to background music. I don’t put music on if I’m not prepared to give it my attention. But I’m also an annoying guy so don’t listen to me.
Overall, is this the most divisive album yet? Pawn Hearts no longer qualifies as its standing goes up more and more every week (hell yeah). I guess I could count positive/neutral/negative takes on all of these but I don’t want to and I’m tired. It takes forever gathering all these snippets and writing these reactions!!
Anyway, that’s Geogaddi in the books! Thanks again to Patrick Cosmos for the pick. Definitely a singular work with a lot to talk about!
So what are we listening to next week? We’ve had a big run of weirdo shit, stuff with no lyrics, stuff that’s hypnotizing and repetitive, etc etc. I think it’s time we have an album that’s nothing but Normal Songs.
Thus, I put forward the excellent Magnolia Electric Company by Songs: Ohia.
I imagine a lot of you are familiar with this album. It was a huge darling of the 2000s indie crowd, and rightfully so. Jason Molina’s writing is unbelievable. It’s like if Titus Andronicus was less manic and more melancholy. If you haven’t heard this, I think you’re in for a real treat.
I recommend considering the bonus tracks “The Big Game is Every Night” and “Whip Poor Will” as part of the record. Whip Poor Will is nice—it doesn’t fit as the album closer, but that’s just an artifact of it being the second of two bonus tracks tacked onto the end—but The Big Game is Every Night is 1000% a song that should have been on the album, it is insane it wasn’t on there all along, and must be understood as Part of It.
Anyway, that’s all from me this time. See you next week homies!
Do not be a bitch and be like, “uhhh, are you saying vapid pop has depth?? I beg to freaking differ!!” You bitch. Obviously there are works that are themselves worthless tripe but worthless tripe knows no genre. A genre does not appear and establish itself unless there is something to it
Another “oh these guys got this way on account of brothers” anecdote is when they were first making music together they would build full-band tracks by recording one instrument on a tape recorder, then playing it back while recording on a second tape recorder and playing the next instrument, etc etc until the whole song was done. It’s a fun “musical kids” story but also this is definitely when their third eyes opened re: weird manipulation of recording equipment
It goes without saying but if it was all vignettes and no songs I would find it Distantly Admirable instead of Fascinating
It has been frequently noted that this album is 66 minutes and 6 seconds long, has a bunch of bits that seem to be symbolic or code for something, and then a song called The Devil is in the Details—for me, trying to actually “solve the puzzle” is beyond what I am willing to do, but still, interesting that there’s even the suggestion of a puzzle.
nice write up. 7.8/10 is an old meme btw https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/too-much-water