The guy who’s trying (again!) to sell his Boards of Canada RSD 12-inch on eBay says that he wants to use the proceeds to finance a move abroad, so it’s ironic that Boards of Canada’s promotional campaign for Tomorrow’s Harvest now moves abroad. At a few minutes after midnight, local time, passersby in Tokyo’s Shibuya neighborhood were treated to — well, it’s hard to say, exactly, because for those of us watching via the cryptically titled Ustream channel, “Unofficial Boards of Canada Shibuya UST,” it just looked like a whole lot of blurring lights on an LED screen affixed to a building. (The fuzzy picture quality no doubt has much to do with the fact that the videographer appears to have shot the footage on a camera phone; the fingers periodically dipping in front of the lens were a dead giveaway.)
There was a minute or so of plinking music that could, indeed, have been new material by Boards of Canada. It was followed by ambient crowd noise (overheard, in an English accent: “Some guy’s saying it’s finished now”) and images of a small group of people milling around expectantly. Perhaps the whole thing was a Cagean experiment designed to attune us to the sounds of our surroundings? A sort of 4’33” for the social networking era? So many questions. (Another one comes to mind: Don’t Boards of Canada know that Kanye already did this?)
