A lucky Record Store Day shopper in New York walked away with 12 inch single featuring a 20 second snippet of new Boards of Canada music. A Reddit user named @ImNoPandaBear posted they found this release at Other Music in New York and uploaded the snippet onto YouTube, which can be heard below.
The 12 inch cover features the text as “—— / —— / —— / XXXXXX / —— / ——“, which led Reddit users to assume this was one of six releases, which when combined solved a puzzle, or completing the sound clip, the 20 second snippet ends with empty space. The snippet features the numbers 9-3-6-5-5-7 done in a robotic voice.
The Scottish duo of Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin started Boards of Canada in 1986 in their teens and released their debut EP in 1995 on Hexagon Sun called Twoism, as a limited run via IDM mailing list. They released their next full length release, Boc Maxima in 1996.
Their first commercial release was Hi Scores in 1996 on Skam Records, followed by Music Has The Right to Children, which ironically was the precursor to Boc Maxima and shares many of the songs on both releases. In January of that same year, BBC Radio 1’s John Peel featured Boards of Canada on his show, featuring exclusive remixes of “Aquarius (Version 3)” and “Olson (Version 3)”, as well as “Happy Cycling” and “XYZ”. The earlier three tracks were released on a Warp Records CD called Peel Session TX 21/07/1998.
Boards of Canada have since released two full length releases for Warp – 2002’s Geogaddi and 2005’s The Campfire Headphase; two EPs – 2000’s In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country and 2006’s Trans Canada Highway. In 2009, Warp Records released Warp20 (Recreated) compilation which featured two Boards of Canada covers – Bibio doing “Kaini Industries” and Mira Calix doing “In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country”. The larger box set also featured two previously unreleased Boards of Canada tracks “Seven Forty Seven” and a 1.8 second sample of “Spiro.”
Their label Warp confirmed in 2012 that Boards of Canada were working on new material, but no official release date was given. The most recent discovery was confirmed by their label was confirmed as authentic but still no word as to whether a new release is on its way or not.
Update: Since the mystery track by Boards of Canada was discovered on Record Store Day via a 12 inch vinyl record purchase at New York City’s Other Music, more information has been unearthed.
2020k reported a second copy was found at London’s Rough Trade East, and also confirmed by Boards of Canada’s label FACT via series of photos on Twitter here, here and here.
A YouTube channel called Hell Interface, which was previously an alias of the duo, features a video titled csch (or the website of the Canadian Society for Circumpolar Health). Watch the video below.
Another three second video containing a different set of numbers – 519225 and placed the numbers and reported the arrangements as “——/——/717228/936557/——/519225″. This news was later reported on Zane Lowe’s BBC Radio 1 show. Watch the video below:
NPR later reported a different set of numbers as 699742 and played a snippet at the end of their show.
A tweet from Iain Stewart, a mutual friend of the band claims a new Boards of Canada record is slated to drop in June. So far no confirmations have been issued by their label. Stay tuned.
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