Sunday, January 08, 2006

Musical Interlude


What is it about Scotland? With Boards of Canada, it raises the number of Scottish bands I dig to "a lot." Let's see:

Arab Strap
The Pastels
Mogwai
Travis
The Jesus and Mary Chain
Beta Band
Belle & Sebastian/Isobel Campbell
Camera Obscura
Life Without Buildings

and now Boards of Canada.

For a country with a population that totals, like, in the hundreds, that's quite a lot of good music.

This Boards of Canada record is just killing me right now, though I've never been a huge electronica fan. It has this distant, muffled sound that I just realized reminds of what I hear when I am driving on the highway with the stereo off. It's November, or March, and there is no snow on the Indiana corn fields and your car is filled with that lo-fi noise mixture of wind and whatever. Who'd have thought that a flat landscape could have echoes but that's what it is, leftover sound from all the heavy trucks rolling their tires over the sad highway. It really does sound like landscape music, something you can only hear from far away.

Man, I've had way too much tea this morning.

2 comments:

Tito said...

No list of brilliant Scottish bands ("if it's not Scottish, it's crap!") is complete without the Trash Can Sinatras -- the greatest of 'em all. I'm sure it was just an oversight, Scott.

Mr. Hill said...

Oh, duh. Yes, that was merely a clerical error.

TCM. They shimmer so much, they're shimmery. It's like they heard early REM and thought to themselves "hey, let's be like that but instead of being all jangly, we will be all shimmery."