Boards of Canada: Geogaddi : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Boards of Canada, otherwise known as the Scottish duo of Marcus Eoin and Michael Sandison, make the sort of burbling headphone techno that's really worth laying down for: beats that rattle like loose ball bearings, and keyboard melodies that resemble kindergarten records slowed down to eight revolutions per minute, all punctuated with the occasional sound bite of someone who may be Leslie Nielsen holding forth. "Julie and Candy" stomps with drums that have been treated and sculpted until they sound like muddy boots, but high above the percussion, synthetic flutes and woodwinds flutter and drift, evoking backward Beatles riffs or the early-Nineties sample-and-guitar noise storms of My Bloody Valentine. "1969" may be Eoin and Sandison's idea of a pop song, if only because its swirls and gusts of singsongy notes might be Muzak if they weren't so inert and unsettling. Geogaddi is marvelously vague, as unconcerned with the real world as gangsta rap is obsessed with it. It's also a lovely, strangely comforting collection of electronic introspection, mood and shadow.

PAT BALSHILL
(RS 893 – April 11, 2002)