After a really lengthy, very cryptic teaser marketing campaign, Boards of Canada are formally again—type of. A mysterious, three-minute piece of music, titled “Tape 5,” appeared on the Scottish duo’s YouTube this morning, with corresponding uploads on the social channels of their longtime label Warp. No data—and even formal affirmation that it’s new BoC music—is at hand, nevertheless. Take heed to “Tape 5” and resolve for your self beneath.
Boards of Canada’s outsize affect, psychedelic sound palette, and sideways worldview by no means went away. In a really actual sense, nevertheless, Boards of Canada did go away—for 13 years. Since their fourth album, 2013’s Tomorrow’s Harvest, intermittent indicators of life have appeared within the type of seemingly random remixes, archival reissues, and an NTS DJ combine.
True to type, the Boards of Canada resurrection has murmured to life so quietly that solely essentially the most obsessive of code breakers twigged it early on. Final Could, Pitchfork acquired an e mail tip from a fan pointing to an internet site as soon as used for BoC clues—however latterly condemned to 404 errors—that had been revived with the next message: “no person residence… /// -. — -… — -.. -.– / …. — — . .-.-.- .-.-.- .-.-.-” That’s the phrase “no person residence” in English and morse code.
The rumor mill fired up in earnest on April 6, when a handful of followers—first on Discogs and Reddit, then throughout social media—reported receiving VHS tapes imprinted with BoC’s hexagon-mesh brand. In line with the obsessive archivists at BoC Pages, the tapes include audio for an advert for a Christian bible faculty journal that stopped publishing in 1991.
A poster marketing campaign adopted, with designs paying homage to the paintings for the band’s 1998 landmark Music Has the Proper to Youngsters showing in London, New York, California, and on the fabled Liquidroom venue in Shibuya, Japan. Although Warp stays tight-lipped, the label posted an Instagram carousel of the posters on April 14 (one exhibits them facet by facet with one other cryptic comeback marketing campaign’s), adopted by at the moment’s add, which you’ll watch beneath.
