It didn’t take long for the recent recipients of a peculiar VHS tape to know where it came from. Who else but the elusive Boards of Canada would fill a piece of old physical media with creepy static and what sounds like a radio show being broadcast from the depths of the North Sea to only a handful of folks? If that didn’t give it away, the famed stamped hexagon logo and address tied to a Warp Records shipping facility surely did.
On Thursday, Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin poked their heads a bit further outside their lair with “Tape 05,” the first new Boards offering in 13 years. The song includes some of the duo’s trademarks: analog detritus, eccentric synthscapes, the overwhelming sense that this wasn’t recorded in a studio but foraged somewhere in the Scottish Highlands. It starts like a visit from a long-lost ghost, with teetering atmospherics reminiscent of The Campfire Headphase opener “Into the Rainbow Vein.” A single droning bass note and what sounds like human nails scraping velcro threaten to turn it all into a full-on nightmare, until a major-key resolution arrives along with an un-Boards-like new age acoustic riff, the kind you might overhear in a day spa. Strings swell, synths bloom, and then …. we’re right back where we started, the music disappearing into a haunted ether of difficult-to-hear dialogue and (I’m guessing here) a pair of plastic cups rattling around a wooden cupboard.
Are the callbacks to earlier material some meta commentary on Music Has the Right-themed nostalgia? Are they channeling the experience of the pros and cons of idolization? (Much of the source material in the VHS—already meticulously documented, of course—is allegedly from documentaries about cults, a possible throwback to themes explored on 2002’s Geogaddi.) Or are they hinting at a completely new sonic direction on their rumored fifth album? Only the brothers hold all the clues. Trying to decipher them is half the fun.
