CD Review

CD Review of Boards of Canada’s The Campfire Headphase

Music entertains us, touches us emotionally, yet at its deepest level, has the power to speak into existence, that which cannot be formed through words and images. Evoking memories in the collective human psyche, electronica group Boards of Canada in their album The Campfire Headphase has achieved that rare blend of wistful reminiscence and tapped into base human emotions, a potent combination that is sure to affect any listener.

Hailing from Scotland, brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin began experimenting with tape recording techniques at the ripe age of ten. In 1986 Sandison and Eoin formed Boards of Canada in high school. Inspired by the National Film Board of Canada’s documentaries, Joni Mitchell, The Incredible String Band, and the Beatles, among many others, the group drew upon the antiquated sounds of analog recording techniques, samples of natural sounds, smooth beats and signature guitar sounds to evoke a 1970s playful and memorable quality to their music.

In October 2005, Boards of Canada released its fifth album The Campfire Headphase, which signals their induction into the highest echelon of electronic music and widespread notoriety. Previous albums, such as Music Has the Right to Children (1998) and Geogaddi (2002), were beautiful in their own right, but only hinted at the evasive quality that The Campfire Headphase retains. As a concept album, The Campfire Headphase is a childhood summer camp musical metaphor and each phase of the album is a different mood associated with the memories of those experiences, which are expressed in the collective human database of familiar sounds used to invoke nostalgia, the continuity in the compositional form of the album, and the repetitious and non-repetitious elements that shift backwards and forwards, giving the listener a sense of displacement in time and space.

Tied together through a combination of vignettes, short tracks 30 seconds to two minutes in duration that set the mood-scape for each section, and full-length tracks, which never seem rushed to finish or arrive at any sense of conclusion, the album’s architecture is a seamless thread of emotions and memories. “Into the Rainbow Vein,” the first vignette, paints the backdrop for the first portion of the album. A children’s toy box or music maker, which is then played backwards and then filtered to create a textured, grainy quality. Nostalgic, warm bouncing beams of sound and light that have no beginning and no end, cascade in a wash of comfort and whimsical nonsense. More over, this opening track alludes to the camping metaphor by using indiscernible, happy melodies from children’s toys, the listener is brought back to that first bus ride to summer camp with playful laughter and the all possibilities of friends and new experiences awaiting your arrival.

Full-length tracks, such as “Satellite Anthem Icarus,” are anywhere from four to six minutes long and employ a series of repetitious and non-repetitious elements. In “Satellite Anthem Icarus,” the opening is just the sound of waves washing up on the shore and an acoustic guitar playing a low, folk melody. The acoustic drum beat enters at a slow, strolling pace and as the track progresses, whizzing and whirling synthetic sound effects bubble to the surface and ambient washes of consonant harmonies shift in and out of the foreground. The repeated elements, such as the beat and the guitar ostinato in two to eight bar loops, provide a pulsing motion to the track, which is in keeping with the natural sound and pace of the ocean wave’s ebbing and flowing. Changing elements, like the samples, electronic effects, and various synthesizers are temporal and constantly in flux, which renders a sense of dynamics and shifting from present to past. Probably the most subtle and significant element in every track on the album, are the sustained sounds or even “white noise”, i.e. synthetic drones, harmonious washes of sound, and static samples, which are the glue, the common thread that unites each track to one another and is the backdrop for the passage of time; without it all elements would seem transfixed, motionless, and gray.

As the listener travels through the album, the tracks become progressively more involved and more emotionally complex. In “Dayvan Cowboy,” the guitar sound is electronic and gritty, the beat is faster and the shaker is on the front edge of the pulse, and the friction between constant elements and differences between timbres create tension. The pitch and harmonic content remaining relatively consonant, the main dissonance and tension occurs between different timbres, such as pure, clean, acoustic sounds versus synthetic, filtered and distorted sounds. When track reaches its climax, the wind-swept ambient sounds against the constant ostinatos and beat are at their highpoint, until the a full desperado electric guitar enters and the beat morphs into a take-no-prisoners series of sampled crashes that are played backwards and forward to add an element of grit and grim to the pristine sustained sounds in the background. After this point, the vignette, “A Moment of Clarity”, releases all the emotional tension and woe. Served as ginger after a spicy meal of sushi, “A Moment of Clarity” is a palette cleanse for your ears, the sounds are pristine and smooth, pure and refined. Thus the each track, while having its own sense of climax and tension and release within its microcosm, has a rightful sense of purpose within the fabric of the entire album.

In the final phase, the vignette “Constants are Changing,” much like its name, is a shift of emotion, happy and consonant, but also sad, it signals that point in which you have had the time of your life and then you suddenly realize that you will be going home soon. It’s inevitable - the end is near. The descendent from the clouds of this dream is slow and gradual. From the tracks “Slow This Bird Down” to “Tears From the Compound Eye,” the beats become slower and eventually non-existent, the quality of ambient sounds is thinner and wispy, and the harmonic progressions are descending and slowly revolving.

The last track “Farewell Fire” is without doubt one of my favorite endings to an album ever. Remorseful and thoughtful, this track is the ultimate expression of nostalgia and the overwhelming feeling of emptiness that fills you as you are leaving. Eight minutes and 26 seconds in length, the first half of the track is a Bach-like chorale of vertical harmonies composed of distorted, filtered, and textured sounds, which move at the same unyielding pace as a dirge, and very gradually decrescendos into almost nothingness. As the track continues, you strain to hear the distant melody, probing the darkness, and finally you discover a faint shadow of the mournful tune, which lingers in the abyss for what seems like an eternity until it eventually fades away forever.

Boards of Canada’s The Campfire Headphase is one of the best electronic albums I have ever heard. Often lyrics and song are necessary to evoke such abstract and ambiguous emotions. However, through their use of familiar sounds, natural and unnatural, acoustic and electronic, Boards of Canada transports the listener to the lost memories of childhood, often cast aside in the throws of adulthood, allowing us once more to recapture the happiness and simplicity of youth.