Boards of Canada – Geogaddi (Warp)
by Dominic Pettman

The year is 1978.
It is still 20 years until the Boards of Canada will release their first E.P., but they are already here in spirit, like a floating aura of anticipation which permeates everything. They suffuse the Rollerball font which designates all things science-fiction. They surround a dog-eared copy of J.G. Ballard’s High Rise, which is sitting near a stack of old National Geographics. A Lorne Green nature documentary is quietly talking to itself in the background, but I’m not watching TV until Aquaman, still 45 minutes away. An eternity for a kid. Plenty of time to play with my new Battle-Star Galactica mother ship, which utilizes the largely untapped power of rubber-bands to shoot plastic cylon-cruise ships across the lounge-room . . . . And everywhere, just out of earshot, are the Boards of Canada: the magnificently named recomposers which have now blessed us with their second sublime album. With Geogaddi they continue the sonic mission of Music Has the Right to Children, to capture the washed-out, yet-vivid era of a past which still lies before us. It is a completely unsentimental, and somewhat creepy form of nostalgia. It is 1970s newsreaders wearing pre-ironic square plastic glasses. It is the sounds of an alien race trying to understand the 20^th century through its own artifacts. It is the layered, mesmeric, head-nodding sound of 66 minutes of goosebumps.
Far beyond essential.