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Boards of Canada Set Bizarre Easter Egg Hunt in Motion With Surprise Record Store Day Vinyl
Mysterious 12-inch hints new material is on the horizon
This year’s Record Store Day brought a treasure trove of exclusive new releases and lovingly assembled reissues — SPIN pointed out 42 essential goodies last week — but the annual vinyl holiday also yielded a surprising new bit of material from experimental duo Boards of Canada.
As Consequence of Sound points out, one lucky fan stopped by New York’s Other Music over the weekend and discovered an unannounced 12-inch vinyl attributed to the Scottish two-piece. According to the record’s owner, who posted on Reddit about the mysterious release, the vinyl contains roughly 20 seconds of audio: some ambient synths followed by a robotic voice reading off the numbers “9, 3, 6, 5, 5, 7.” Listen to it here:
The Reddit poster writes, “Clearly I have one of six similar Boards of Canada records released today and distributed ‘randomly’ around the world (Other Music said they received the record with no word / acknowledgement of its existence, it was just there in a shipment they received). I think that if all of the numbers are gathered and arranged in a proper order, we might be able to figure something out, so we just need the other 5 people who found the record (or maybe they haven’t been found yet) to reveal their numbers and where they fit in the sequence, and then of course, have to decipher what the numbers together mean.”
Just as the above photo (shared by the Redditor via Twitter) confirms, the vinyl’s packaging features the band’s name followed by a series of slashes, dashes, and Xs (“—— / —— / —— / XXXXXX / —— / ——“), suggesting some kind of code or secret message.
What’s more, a music video for the track “Julie and Candy,” off Boards of Canada’s 2002 album, Geogaddi, currently appears in the band’s official YouTube playlist. CoS reports that the colorful clip’s original video description was listed as “——/——/——/——/——/—–-” but now reads “1977 snow computing amateur footage beards synthesizer.” And, as if all this wasn’t complicated enough, that same collection of dashes and slashes shows up in the video (which can be seen at the bottom of this post) at the 4:19 mark.
Could this cypher be a clue to Boards of Canada’s long-awaited follow-up to 2005’s The Campfire Headphase? Or are BoC members Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin just screwing with us?
Anticipation for the pair’s fourth full-length built last year, after the band confirmed that they were working on new music via Facebook, but a Warp Records representative put a damper on the Internet’s hopes by telling Pitchfork, “They are definitely working on new material, but there is nothing in the cards at the moment in terms of a scheduled release.” Seems like that’s changed now — after all, the devil is in the details.
Read the Reddit user’s entire posting down below, followed by the video for “Julie and Candy.”
Hey, so i recently posted something on facebook about a record I got today at Other Music, its a new BoC release from warp, dated 2013. The record is single sided, and has about a roughly 20 second clip of a very boards-of-canada-ey voice with synth backing saying a six digit number once, and then cuts out.
on the front of the record Boards of Canada is written and beneath that a series of -’s, /’s, and X’s, are arranged as follows
—— / —— / —— / XXXXXX / —— / ——
Clearly I have one of six similar Boards of Canada records released today and distributed “randomly” around the world (Other Music said they received the record with no word / acknowledgement of its existence, it was just there in a shipment they received). I think that if all of the numbers are gathered and arranged in a proper order, we might be able to figure something out, so we just need the other 5 people who found the record (or maybe they haven’t been found yet) to reveal their numbers and where they fit in the sequence, and then of course, have to decipher what the numbers together mean.
I don’t work for warp, and am just a college kid who idolizes this group
I want to figure this out
