Like many music fans, pre-internet, I thought that Boards of Canada emerged fully formed with Music Has the Right to Children in April 1998. 

I might, I suppose, have been vaguely aware of the Hi Scores EP, which was released by Manchester label Skam Records in December 1996 - after all, I was living in Manchester, at the time - or had some knowledge of the Aquarius EP, which came out on the same label in January 1998. But the first BoC I definitely remember was Music Has the Right to Children, their near-perfect debut album.

It made an odd kind of sense to me that Boards of Canada would arrive fully formed. The music on Music Has the Right to Children sounded so other-worldly, so perfectly insular, that it felt as if the group had been beamed down to earth alive and twitching, a transmission from another galaxy. 

Somehow it didn’t make sense that BoC had been working away at their art; it didn’t feel like it. There didn’t seem to be any kind of logical way to arrive at a sound of such wistful, thwarted nostalgia, a process that would drive the duo towards this bittersweet sonic conclusion. 

The first interview I read with Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin, in Jockey Slut in April 1998, didn’t delve any further back than the Twoism EP, which had been released in 1995 in an ultra-limited run of 100 copies. In 1998, pre-broadband internet, I could no more listen to Twoism in 1998 than I could kite surf to the moon.

I don’t know when I first became aware of the group’s elaborate history. Some information about the group’s pre-Twoism catalogue appeared on the group’s early website, back in the late 90s. But I never visited that. Perhaps it was in another Jockey Slut interview, this time published in December 2000, in which journalist Richard Southern outlines the group’s discography.

Southern mentions three albums, pre-Twoism, all of which he says are impossibly rare, handed out to friends and family in limited numbers. Acid Memories, from 1989; Play by Numbers from 1994; and Hooper Bay, also from 1994. Apparently, an even earlier album, Catalog 3, from 1987, was once listed on the Boards of Canada website, as was a 1992 album called Closes Vol. 1.

These five record are joined in the semi-official BoC catalogue by three compilations of old tracks, again released in small numbers to friends and family: Boc Maxima, Old Tunes Vol. 1 (AKA A Few Old Tunes) and Old Tunes Vol. 2, all released by the group’s Music70 label in 1996; as well as Boc Remii Vol. 1, a CDR of BoC remixes given to friends as a Christmas gift in 1999. All these are flagged as “official” by the authoritative BOCPages website; they exist and are almost certainly legitimate.

Marked as “unofficial” by BOCPages - and even more mysterious - is Random 35 Tracks Tape, a collection of 35 nameless tracks leaked onto P2P networks around September 2004. The band have never acknowledged the existence of these tracks but there is just about enough information online to suggest they are legit.

MDG, a member of BoC’s Hexagon Sun collective who is something of an unofficial spokesperson for the band, apparently responded to a message about Random 35 Tracks on the Twoism forum with a slightly twisted double negative that suggests a positive: “No I'm not saying they're not BOC, but the compilation itself is a mystery, just a mixture.” 

The 35 tracks also include versions of BoC tracks released elsewhere - A11 is the brief vignette at the end of Sixtyten on Music Has the Right to Children, while B10 is a reversed version of Geogaddi’s The Smallest Weird Number - which, yes, could be part of an elaborate fake. But why would you go to such elaborate lengths just to trick a bunch of amiable music nerds gathered around the internet? More importantly, the music sounds like Boards of Canada, in a way I haven’t heard anyone else pull off.

The reason I have been drifting into the BoC back catalogue over the past few weeks was the arrival on YouTube of Some Old Tunes 1985 to 1996, 11 tracks from Old Tunes Volumes 1 and 2 in newly sparkling audio quality. Again, where these songs come from and how they sound so spruced up is a mystery, with some fans suggesting AI remastering and the original uploader promising that they come from a DAT.

This release has sent me on a thrilling breadcrumb trail. I started by checking out Some Old Tunes, went backwards to Boc Maxima, took in the two volumes of Old Tunes and Random 35 Tracks Tape and ended up at EHX, three snippets of songs once released on the old, semi-official Boards of Canada website. 

These three fragments, which weigh in collectively at jus under two minutes, are the real pay dirt for BoC historians, probably the earliest examples of the band’s work to be found online. Duffy is apparently taken from 1989’s Acid Memories album and, while only 26 seconds of it exist, it sounds utterly, divinely, how you dream that BoC would sound in 1989, the song’s eerie synth loops and mossy layers suggesting it could have fit on Music Has the Right to Children nine years later.

Wouldn't You Like To Be Free is said to come from the group’s My Bloody Valentine-ish 1994 album Play By Numbers, its guitar effects and hazy beat predating the treated acoustic guitars of The Campfire Headphase. Circle, meanwhile, is from Hooper Bay, a 1994 album on which BoC first introduced the use of children's voices (although you wouldn’t know it from the 35 seconds of Circle that we get to hear).

I’ve come late to this music - but I got there in the end and the rewards have been huge. The last few weeks have roughly doubled the amount of songs I have heard by Boards of Canada and pushed my knowledge of the group back to 1989. My head is still spinning from the discovery.

Old Tunes Volumes 1 and 2, Random 35 Tracks Tape and EHX have 104 songs between them, only small fragments of which have been officially released. 

Most of the 20 tracks on Boc Maxima were later released officially, between Music Has the Right to Children, Hi Scores, Twoism and the Aquarius single (sometimes in slightly different versions). The compilation is also home to six songs from Old Tunes Vol 1., again in different versions, as well as four songs that only appear on Boc Maxima.

What’s remarkable about some of this new / old Boards of Canada music is how perfectly it sounds like BoC. I mentioned Duffy’s guitars but there is also 5 9 78, a brilliantly realised ambient number whose broad synth sweeps, bell-toned melody and shuffling hip hop beat would have easily fit - and even excelled - on Music Has the Right to Children; the detuned swirl of House of Abin’adab suggests Geogaddi’s devilish ambience; and the fuzzy acoustic guitars of B04, from Random 35 Tracks Tape, looks forward to The Campfire Headphase, among many other examples.

Not all of the music is gold, of course, but the quality is alarmingly high at times, particularly on Some Old Tunes 1985 to 1996, which seems like a de facto best of from the group’s earlier catalogue (suspiciously so, in some fans’ opinions.) Spectrum, Finity, Sequoia, Alpha Rainbow and Northern Plastics match any of the band’s properly released work.

(Naturally, fans also have other favourites from the Old Tunes compilations that don’t appear on 1985 to 1996. A brief scan of Reddit suggests Staircase Whip, Mukinabaht, Kiteracer 2 and Buckie High all fit this category.)

Perhaps even more interesting, though, are the songs that don’t sound like Boards of Canada as we know them. BoC are far from a one-trick pony, having evolved their sound over their four official albums to explore new nuances of tone and rhythm. But these examples are something else.

Blockbuster, for example,  on Old Tunes Vol. 1, is nothing more than a collection of slightly murky samples from the kids TV game show of the same name, which will be familiar to anyone who grew up in the UK in the 1980s.

Sure, nostalgia has long been a part of the BoC emotional palette. But the way the samples are stitched together to suggest that Bob Marley’s backing group was called “The Waltzers” suggests a childish (and possibly rather stoned) sense of humour that has little to do with Michael and Marcus’s mystical reputation.

Trapped, on the same compilations, is essentially large chunks of the Colonel Abrams’ song of the same name, over which BoC have layered some murked up synths, the whole thing apparently done as a joke. The Way You Show takes an even more unlikely sample source - the very un-Geogaddi-ish Celebration by Kool & The Gang - and plays merry hell with it. I can’t imagine BoC even being aware of Celebration, let alone sampling it and recording the results.

(This, incidentally, is another reason why I believe this music is genuinely by Boards of Canada. Who on earth would think of making a fake BoC track that samples Kool & The Gang and expect us to believe it?)

B19, from Random 35 Tracks, has a clattering drum & bass rhythm that has few parallels in the BoC catalogue; King of Carnival sounds like progressive house; and Up The March Bank resembles a brass band on a misty Scottish moor.

The effect is bewildering but in a happy, intoxicating way, like discovering your dad used to write poetry or your mum once had blue hair. 

BoC become simultaneously more and less mysterious to me through these experiments. On the one hand, they reveal themselves as mortal, two brothers who have been making music together for nigh-on 40 years and got really good at it over the years.

On the other, the questions only expand outward: when did BoC make this music? How much of it is in the vault? What the hell else is in there? 

Did the brothers want us to hear this juvenilia? And if so, why? What does it tell us about BoC music new and old? Who on earth remastered it? And how did it get out?

This music shows Boards of Canada at their most perfectly imperfect, their incredible talent for melody and texture shining through the grit of old demos and ill-fated experiments. Yes there are flaws and missteps. But these, for me, are like the cracks in Leonard Cohen’s classic song Anthem that let the light in; imperfections that point to perfection. I thought I couldn’t love Boards of Canada any more; but it turns out I could, in all the band’s wobbly historical glory.

Jeff Mills

Jeff Mills is bringing his Live at Liquid Room 30th Anniversary Tour to Spain. He’s playing Studio Club in Malaga on February 13, Metro Dance in Alicante on February 14 and Nitsa in Barcelona on February 20.

In Barcelona and Alicante, club doors will open early for a special screening of Mills' Live at Liquid Room video-mix, which features never-before-seen material from the original Tokyo performance. This isn’t an advert. No money has changed hands. I am writing this because it will be awesome and I want to interview Jeff when he comes to Barcelona!

Some listening

Terrence Dixon - Mono Collapse

Mono Collapse reminds me slightly of Carl Craig’s remix of Theo Parrish’s Falling Up, in its absolutely relentless use of a simple synth line, which the producer pushes way beyond repetition into something more profound, as if this synth line has always existed and always will exist and Terrence Dixon has just uncovered it.

I’m listening again; it’s two minutes in and it already feels like the synth has gone on forever; I think it might send me mad; but I am also enjoying it. Is this techno Stockholm Syndrome? Perhaps. But it’s also taps-aff techno at its most physical and it fascinates me.

Alan Braxe and Fred Falke - Intro (Fred Falke remix)

How do you remix the un-remixable? How to create a new take on a tune that was basically perfect, when it bobbled into life 25 years ago? Well, if you’re Fred Falke and the tune is Intro, you lay down a new version of that iconic bass line and blast the song off into a psychedelic disco wonderland, the mid-song breakdown like a stairway to heaven without all the Hobbit nonsense.

Gregory Uhlmann - Lucia (feat. Alabaster DePlume)

After the immaculate Anna Butterss album and SML’s wonkily brilliant debut How You Been, guitarist / composer / producer Gregory Uhlmann is the latest LA jazz-adjacent weirdo to step up to an album.

Lucia, with Alabaster DePlume, is a fantastic introduction to his world of ambient jazz-not-jazz: Uhlmann puts in place a charmingly understated foundation of guitar pulse, rickety mellotron and electric organ, over which DePlume lays scurrying trails of saxophone, the result creating the indelible impression of what it must be like to live in a bouncy castle, overlooking the Californian coast, all warm, wobbly and welcoming.

JB Dunckel - Ballade Oiseau (Version for flute and string quintet)

After Thomas Bangalter’s excursions into ballet, is everyone in the French Touch going classical? The good news is that Air’s JB Dunckel is better suited than most: not only is he a classically trained pianist, but Air always had something of the classical in their sweeping, elegant melodies and general grace. 

Paranormal Music Chamber is Dunckel’s string quintet album and, while it won’t cause any Stravinsky-esque riots at its innovation, it is pleasingly melodic and very drift-away-able, as well as a reminder of the slightly boffin-ish talents behind Air. Ballade Oiseau is as light and playful as the birds in its title, effectively Air played out on flute and strings rather than vintage synthesisers, the result about as fluffily gorgeous as you might imagine.

M-Beat - Surrender

This 1994 ragga jungle hit certainly isn’t new but boy does it bring me back to my youth and the local record shop, which was always playing things like this; and it is kind of new, appearing on Junglist!, a compilation released by the wonderful Soul Jazz people this week, alongside the likes of Krome & Time, Poison Chang, Bizzy B & TDK and Lemon D. Besides, do you really need an excuse to lose your mind over three and a half minutes of densely packed rave / soul / hip hop / reggae / hip hop madness, which packs more invention and bare-faced adventure into its grooves that you might think possible.

Things I’ve done

Line Noise podcast - With Busy P and DJ Falcon 

This week the Line Noise podcast gives you two French house legends for the price of one: Busy P and DJ Falcon. Busy P is Pedro Winter, producer, DJ, founder of Ed Banger records and - yes - once manager of Daft Punk, the lynchpin of Parisian dance. Stéphane Quême is DJ Falcon, whose very first productions became the brilliant Hello My Name Is DJ Falcon EP back in 1999; he later formed half of Together with Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter and is currently working with Alan Braxe.

I spoke to them at the Nitsa in Barcelona ahead of their DJ gig about their relationship, DJing back to back, Falcon’s first productions, the birth of Ed Banger and so much more, including Pedro Winter giving the full background story to that night on October 25 at the Centre Pompidou when Thomas Bangalter returned to DJing alongside Fred Again and Busy P.

RANKING Panda Bear’s Albums (Tier List) | From Person Pitch to Sinister Grift 

Johann and I decide to rank every Panda Bear album, from his eponymous debut to Sinister Grift, using a (perhaps foolish) bear-based ranking system. (Paddington Bear is the best, obviously.) We also argue about how the Americans say “buoy”. What more could you want from a video?

ONE MINUTE REVIEW: 'Don’t Be Dumb' by A$AP Rocky

What unites Tim Burton, Doechii and rumours of Morrissey? It could only be Don’t Be Dumb, the fourth studio album by A$AP Rocky. You can watch my One Minute Review of it. Because who needs longer than a minute?

Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements on “THIS Album…” with William Hann

As we get closer to the release of my Stereolab book - that’s Space Age Batchelor Pad Music: The Story Of Stereolab In 20 Songs, for those asking, out March 20 - I’ve been hitting the podcast promotional trail, including talking to the excellently welcoming William Hann on “THIS Album…” which is a podcast I thoroughly recommend, whether or not I am there. Topics of conversation include the crushing disappointment of being a Morrissey fan, reading French books to look cool and robots wearing wellies.

The playlists

It’s 2026 and that means A NEW PLAYLIST, cataloguing the best new music of this year: you can follow that on Apple Music here: The newest and bestest 2026.

And on Spotify here: the newest and bestest 2026.

The old classics remain in place, too: 

Apple Music: The newest and the bestest

Spotify:  The newest and the bestest.

Paid subscribers get bonus podcasts, you know.