The Pentland Hills, toward Carnethy Hill. Photo: Neil Williamson, CC BY-SA 2.0, cropped
A trolley rolls into the classroom. On it, a projector with two reels like ears. The blinds come down. A calm voice explains the forest, or the sun, or the way a river makes its bed.
You were seven. You have forgotten the film. You have not forgotten how it felt.
Boards of Canada make music out of that feeling. For more than thirty years two brothers from Scotland, Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin, have built a world out of faded colour, warped tape and voices heard through a wall, and the strangest thing about it is how familiar it sounds. It is homesickness for a place you never lived. Nostalgia for a memory you never had.
This year, after thirteen years of silence, they came back. So this page is built like the strip of film that runs before the picture starts: a countdown leader, eight frames down to one. The photographs arrive sun-faded and develop as you reach them. The tapes are the records themselves, if you want the music while you read.
The name is borrowed. The National Film Board of Canada has made documentaries and animation for Canadians since 1939, and the boys grew up on its films, on television at home in Britain and, for one year, in Canada itself. In 1979 the family moved to Calgary, where their father worked on the building of the Saddledome. Mike was eight.
Nature films. Science films. Films about the sun, narrated by voices that sounded certain of everything. That grammar went in early, and it never came out.
One of those films runs straight into their records. Circle of the Sun, made by Colin Low for the NFB in 1960, follows the Kainai, the Blood Nation of southern Alberta, and one of the men in it is Pete Standing Alone. Thirty-eight years later his name became a song title on their first album.
Years later, the Film Board returned the favour. “Only recently did we find out that they had used our music on some of their films,” Marcus told Pitchfork in 2005. “So we took that as approval.”
They grew up in Cullen, a small town on the Moray coast, and by the mid-eighties they were living near Edinburgh. Their studio sat out in the Pentland Hills. In the summer of 1995 they gave it a name, Hexagon Sun, and the name stuck to everything they made there.
Long before anyone outside Scotland had heard of them, they were making a world. From 1989 they put on outdoor happenings with projections, films and tapes of strange recordings. From 1992 they held bonfire nights at a ruin near the studio and called them Redmoon. They released self-financed tapes on a label of their own, Music70. The mythology came first. The audience came later.
“Collage tapes of demos we’d deliberately destroyed, to give the impression of chewed up library tapes that had been found in a field somewhere.”Marcus Eoin, on their early tapes, Pitchfork, 2018
For years they wouldn’t say they were brothers. When they finally did, to Pitchfork in 2005, Mike asked for the recorder to be switched off first. They hadn’t wanted to be filed as another pair of electronic siblings, next to Orbital. The name was the point. The faces were not.
Music Has the Right to Children came out on 20 April 1998, on Warp with Skam. Electronic music that year sounded like the future arriving at speed. This sounded like the future remembering something it had lost.
Look at the sleeve and you know before you hear a note. A family on holiday, standing at a mountain lookout, the colour bleached out like a print left in a window. Their faces are gone, wiped away. Nothing violent is happening. Something essential has been taken.
The photograph was taken in Banff, in the Canadian Rockies. In 2014, fans matched the view to a lookout on the road up Mount Norquay. The band never said. Of course they didn’t.
“We’ve always loved the sound of things that are a little sad and broken-sounding,” Mike told the Dutch magazine OOR in 2002. You can hear it in every bar of the record. The beats are heavy and patient. The melodies wobble like tape left on a dashboard. Nothing hurries.
If the first album was memory opening, Geogaddi was memory turning round to look at you. It came out in February 2002 and the sun had gone down on the playground. The same warm synths, the same children’s voices. But a loop runs on too long. A chord smiles the wrong way.
Mike told OOR exactly what they meant by it: “a record for some sort of trial-by-fire, a claustrophobic, twisting journey that takes you into some pretty dark experiences before you reach the open air again.”
Hexagons run through the whole catalogue, from the studio’s name to the song titles. Even Saturn has one, a six-sided storm at its north pole wider than the Earth, as if the universe had read the liner notes.
One track from Geogaddi found a second home. “Beware the Friendly Stranger” became part of the soundtrack to David Firth’s Salad Fingers, an early web cartoon that plays like a children’s programme gone badly wrong. It fitted so well it was almost suspicious.
The Campfire Headphase arrived on 17 October 2005, and with it, guitars. The dread loosened. The signal walked outside and found a wider sky. It still sounded like something you had found rather than something you had bought, but now it was warm enough to sit in.
“Part of our aim has always been to destroy the sound in a beautiful way,” Marcus told OOR in 2002. It might be the most useful sentence an artist has ever given us. Damage, done with love, is a material.
The video for “Dayvan Cowboy” says it without a word. Joseph Kittinger steps out of a balloon gondola nineteen miles above New Mexico in August 1960, and falls. Then the big-wave surfer Laird Hamilton rides water the size of a building. A man and the sky. A man and the sea. Scale, and how small we are inside it.
Record Store Day, 20 April 2013. In Other Music, on East 4th Street in Manhattan, a short walk from the theatre where RIOT would start two years later, a fan found a one-sided 12-inch record with no name on it. Twenty seconds of music. A distorted voice reading six numbers: nine, three, six, five, five, seven.
The sleeve showed it was the fourth of six codes. The record was one of six identical copies; others turned up at Rough Trade East in London and Avalanche in Edinburgh. The other codes came through YouTube, BBC Radio 1, NPR, an Adult Swim ad, a fan forum and a website. Strangers all over the world, piecing together a key. When it turned, it opened Tomorrow’s Harvest. (The Guardian followed the hunt.)
It wasn’t a campaign. It was the music, teaching you how to listen.
The record that came out in June was dry and wide and frightening, the soundtrack to a nature film about the end of nature. “We’ve become a lot more nihilistic over the years,” Mike told the Guardian. “In a way we’re really celebrating an idea of collapse rather than resisting it.”
Then nothing. Not for a season. For thirteen years.
Most artists fade when they stop talking. Boards of Canada grew louder. The fans kept the archive, mapped the samples, argued over every second of every tape. The silence became part of the work, because the work had already taught everyone to listen to what wasn’t there.
The feed hates a gap. It wants proof of life every day, a post, a face, a reason to stay. We’ve written about what that does to taste in Rage Against the Algorithm. Boards of Canada are the counterargument, made in real time. If the work is strong enough, the wait becomes part of the story.
In April 2026 the signal came back the way it always had: through the post, on a wall, in the static. From 6 April, VHS tapes started arriving in the post. From 10 April, posters appeared in London, Los Angeles, Tokyo and New York, on the Lower East Side and in Chinatown. On 7 May came the opening pair, “Introit” and “Prophecy At 1420 MHz”, with a video by Robert Beatty.
1420 megahertz is the hydrogen line. It is the frequency at which hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, gives off its faint radio glow, and it is where astronomers tune when they want to map the galaxy. A band raised on public science films named its return after the sound of hydrogen itself.
On 22 May they played it to rooms of strangers in seven cities, Tokyo, Berlin, Barcelona, London, Glasgow, New York and Los Angeles, a week before anyone could buy it. Inferno, their fifth album, came out on Warp on 29 May.
Not everyone was moved. Pitchfork gave it 8.6. The Guardian called it a big disappointment. Both are the sound of people who cared enough to wait thirteen years.
What we keep from them, at RIOT, is short.
And the circle keeps turning. This year Hi Scores, their first record on a label, turns thirty: made in a studio in the hills by two brothers who wouldn’t say they were brothers.
Three. Two. One. The blinds come down. The film you half remember begins again.
Picture start
The leader has run out. Lights down. The rest is the music.
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