Boards of Canada: Rare Transmissions

After being AWOL for over a decade, the Scottish masters of IDM hauntology are stirring up the internet again

Update/Edit (17 April 2026)

A clip of images and music titled “Tape 05” has been uploaded to the BoC YouTube channel a few hours ago. Neither BoC nor Warp have released any statement about the clip and whether it’s new music from a new album (or if a new album is even actually coming).

Update/Edit (7 April 2026)

After 13 years of no new material, there’s been some movement in this matter, as mysterious VHS tapes with hexagons on them have been found. They contain analogue visuals, shortwave-style audio and layered voice fragments:

Resident Advisor reports that “one user claiming to have received the tape said it arrived ‘randomly (…) from the same address that Warp and Bleep use for shipping’ in the US.”

“Multiple users suggest that more than one tape may be in circulation, echoing the kind of cryptic pre-release campaigns that preceded previous Boards of Canada projects, including their 2013 album Tomorrow's Harvest. Speculation ranges from a new album to a wider archival box set rollout, potentially timed around Record Store Day. If verified, the campaign would mark the first new music from Boards of Canada in over a decade. Resident Advisor has reached out to the group's representatives. Warp were, unusually, unavailable for comment.”

Let’s see what happens in the next weeks.

Original article (23 Nov 2024)

After eleven years of silence, a random YouTube upload can appear like big news – even if it’s just an old music video.

The surprising activity happened last week in Boards of Canada’s YouTube channel: The video for “Dayvan Cowboy”, the lead single off their 2005 album The Campfire Headphase, was uploaded – apparently to celebrate crossing the 100,000 subscriber mark. So far, it had only been available on the Warp channel, but in lesser quality.

A short clip with four snippets of older music has been added at the end; the clip has been been floating around for ages as well.

So far, so good. No big deal, right?

Well, the excitement in the comment section was real.

Actually, this could mean something remarkable.

Let me try to explain.

“We’ve never been into dance music,” Marcus Eoin of Boards of Canada said around the time of the last upload in their YouTube channel, in a rare interview for a long-defunct German magazine.

He clarified that in their early days, the duo was influenced by 1980s industrial, new wave and post-punk.

“We’d begun making very experimental music ourselves in the mid eighties, and then by the start of the nineties we were making melodic ambient electronic music, and it felt to us that almost nobody else out there at the time was interested in melody."

Correct: Almost nobody else.

After they’d released their first two vinyl EPs in small runs in ‘95 and ‘96, they got an offer from Sheffield’s Warp label.

A few years before, Warp had started Artifical Intelligence – a series of compilations and albums dedicated to electronic home listening music.

For me and some of my peers, that series was eye-opening.

I never liked going to clubs – I can’t remember feeling anything but stress and anxiety in these environments.

But I always loved the sounds of electronic music, and that’s why I gravitated towards Warp’s Artificial Intelligence – and Boards of Canada.

Like some of their label peers, Scottish brothers Marcus Eoin and Michael Sandison created an ambient strain of electronic music not aimed at the dancefloor, but suited for deep listening and zoning out.

Don’t misunderstand the a-word though: The Sandisons got drums, crunchy ones even. No four-to-the-floor bassdrums though. The typical BoC beat is a mid-tempo hip-hop groove.

The music journalist Simon Reynolds counts BoC among the originators of ‘hauntology’. A lot of heady essays have been written about that concept – it basically boils down to music that sounds like a transmission from a bygone era, evoking memories of a distant past, almost like blurry analog photographs.

While it can entail different styles and techniques, it will usually mean to reject contemporary trends and aesthetics of popular music.

At the time, UK electronic music was defined by an uptempo mix of breakbeat hardcore, jungle and techno. BoC’s music was very different, slower but not quite as chilled out as the downtempo breaks on Mo Wax or Ninja Tune. It sounded analog and psychedelic, as if played on old, worn-out cassettes. There was something uncanny about it.

Some people think that BoC’s 1998 debut, Music Has The Right to Children, remains their quintessential album – but I heartily disagree.

I’ve actually become an even bigger fan with each of their records.

Sure, I deeply enjoyed Music’s moody, vintage hip-hop sound.

But its dark and twisted follow-up, 2002’s Geogaddi, captured me even more with its esoteric references to numerology, paganism and doomsday cults.

When The Campfire Headphase came out in 2005, everyone seemed disappointed that the band pivoted again – not me though. That roadtrip soundtrack felt like the best thing they’d ever made, pastoral and apocalyptic at the same time.

In 2013, they released what I regard as their magnum opus: Tomorrow’s Harvest, an album influenced by 1970s horror soundtracks, early synthesizer music and collapsology literature. This one’s a 10/10 classic to me.

And that’s it – that’s the whole catalogue. Four albums, some EPs and loads of inofficial bootlegs of early material and unreleased stuff.

Fans have been waiting for some sign of life of the band ever since – just a tiny straw to clutch.

But the Sandisons never wanted to stay in touch with their audience. They have no individual accounts on social media. Their band accounts appear like they’re handled by their team. They never reveal anything even remotely private; their Instagram channel has 14 feed posts in total, most of them old press photos and short snippets of fan-made videos.

They haven’t played live since the early 2000s, and they haven’t given an interview in over ten years. You won’t even find any recent photos of them on the internet.

Press shot on Warp’s official band page, dating back to 2013

Having read through all available interviews online, the impression I get is that the Sandison brothers’ reclusiveness is not a marketing strategy.

They’re really not into social media. In fact, they have been heavily critical of it, even citing the author Jaron Lanier (“Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now”) as a major influence.

My best bet is that they’re two ageing gearheads that read a lot of gloomy historical books and lead regular analogue lives in the Scottish countryside with their families. Let’s not forget they’re both in their early 50s by now (Michael was born in ‘71, Marcus in ‘73.)

They were fortunate enough to find initial success before the music industry decline of the 2000s; their albums still sold very well physically, and they always stayed independent. For the past decade, they should’ve made some good and steady digital income as well, as their catalogue seems to stream consistently well.

What I’m saying is they might have been financially independent for a while – if they’ve invested smartly and don’t live a lavish lifestyle. Which I don’t expect.

Until 2013, they’ve actually operated from a farm in the Pentland Hills, southwest of Edinburgh, which housed their main studio full of vintage hardware.

Maybe they’re still there. Nobody knows what they’ve been up to for the past decade – or at least, those that do, they don’t talk about it.

Even if you speak to people at their label, it’s almost like they’ve sworn an oath never to talk about anything related to Boards of Canada.

That monk-like reclusiveness is the reason why every single movement on their social channels is monitored painstakingly and will usually provide a reason for wild speculations and conspiracy theories.

In 2022, a Reddit user claimed to have received confirmation from a source close to the band that a follow-up album to Tomorrow’s Harvest was finally on its way.

In 2023, an official BoC account on Threads was opened with a generic welcome message.

Other than that, nothing. Radio silence.

Until last week.

This is why that YouTube upload is kind of a big deal.

And yes, it could mean a new record is coming at some point. It probably won’t be as simple though.

Their last album, 2013’s Tomorrow’s Harvest, came after a seven-year hiatus.

The announcement started with a cryptic campaign, distributing six strings of six-digit numbers through various channels, including radio and network sites, a fansite, a series of six physical 12-inch singles that popped up randomly in record stores all over Europe, and a YouTube video on an obscure account in which a part of the number flashed for a fraction of a second.

Then a new website was launched, Cosecha Transmisiones (Spanish for “Harvest Transmissions”), where you could enter the combined codes as a password to get access to an exclusive trailer video and link to pre-order the new album.

You see, if a new BoC album was on the horizon, it would not be announced simply by a boring YouTube upload of an old video.

That might be an early sign of activity, something that is supposed just to say: Listen up. More things could happen soon.

It could also just foreshadow something like a 20th anniversary reissue of The Campfire Headphase next year.

Right now, I’m not holding my breath.

Societas X Tape cover (2019)

Bonus Beats: Societas X Tape

Boards of Canada have not been completely silent since 2013.

Apart from some remix work, the duo took part in Warp’s 30 years anniversary celebration in 2019 and contributed a two-hour mixtape broadcast on NTS Radio: Societas X.

The swarm intelligence quickly began filling up spreadsheets, but still not all tracks have been identified. Rumours of some unreleased BoC tracks buried in the mix persist.

Societas X sent us down some rabbitholes. It should most likely be understood as a mix of highly influential music and more recent discoveries of the band; a wild ride through all sorts of psychedelic avant-garde sounds from the 1960s until today.

There’s Indian carnatic music, Spanish industrial, a TV PSA for the Swine Flu vaccine shot from 1978, some seconds of Pauline Oliveros’ electroacoustic composition “Bye Bye Butterfly”, a track from a Colombian Soundcloud beatmaker, and a brilliant blend of Imagination’s “Just an Illusion” with Grace Jones’ “Slave to the Rhythm”.

Buried deep in the mix, I’d discover this addictive darkwave-meets-italo-disco workout from 1983, this perfectly weird Dutch experimental electronic tune from 1985, or this super atmospheric track from the same year by Greek composer Lena Platonos that recalls Laurie Anderson’s best work from that era.

Years later, I’m still exploring some of the musical galaxies that Societas X opened for me.