YMMV / Boards of Canada

• Eclipsed by the Remix: Several of the remixes they have done are of lesser known songs ("Trapped," "Sometimes," "Sisters" and "Dirty Great Mable" to name a few).
• Epic Riff: The guitar sample that "Chromakey Dreamcoat" is built around.
  • The riff which comes in at 1:43 in "Dayvan Cowboy" definitely counts. That effect!
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • BOC fans tend to also be fans of Leyland Kirby, whose work has a similar "hauntological" quality. The duo collaborated with Kirby long before he became famous on the Internet, with the Hell Interface track "Soylent Night" being released on Kirby's V/Vm Test Records.
  • And of course, almost any discussion of BoC eventually leads to (usually) favorable comparisons to Aphex Twin, another electronic musician known for experimental sounds that can range from melancholy to nostalgic to terrifying.
• Funny Moments:
  • This bit, from their only recorded interview (with John Peel)
    John: Right, well, what are you gonna do now? Back to your secret lair for more tunes?
    (Mike or Marcus):^note It has never been said which voice is which We're off to the pub, actually!
  • Really, the fact that so many of their samples come from Sesame Street of all places, is funny in and of itself. What's really funny is that practically all of them come from the same episode (specifically, episode 2852).
  • Many of their songs make use of backmasking. The song "Happy Cycling" features a particularly long sample at the end...which is a sample of an interview with Jeff Lynne where he talks about their use of backmasking on the song Eldorado.
  • The screaming at the end of "You Could Feel The Sky" is scary. The realization that it sounds a little too much like Wheatley is not.
  • The sentence mixing at the end of "Concourse" (taken from Home Again with Bob Vila), especially since it comes out of nowhere.
    I notice that you ... well it's another one of these ... right! that is correct. that's interesting! great! right! uh we, now, those, uh, looks like full-dimensional ... right! that's correct. yeah, mm hm, uh, right, that's correct." ... ... "well, it makes a lot of sense!"
• Genre Turning Point: In the 80's and 90's, electronic music tried as hard as it could to be hard edged and futuristic to the point where a lot of it sounded immediately dated the moment the 21st century rolled over. Music Has The Right To Children changed that. The warm, pastoral and nostalgic 70's inspired sound of MHTRTC inspired underground electronic producers to experiment with themes of childhood nostalgia and "organic" sounding analog synths, paving the way for "folktronica" as well as other retro-futurist genres like Vaporwave.
• Misattributed Song: As alluded to in the main page, a lot of deliberately mislabeled "fakes" have circulated online, seemingly produced by amateur electronic musicians trying to troll fans and/or capitalize on Boards of Canada's name. One of the more infamous of these was "Chameleon" by Skeptical, which somehow ended up for sale on iTunes and Amazon listed as a Boards Of Canada single .
• Overshadowed by Controversy: The band complained about people going nuts with overanalysing Geogaddi in a 2005 interview, and have stated it as the reason they put out the less ambiguous The Campfire Headphase:
  "All the mystery and magic and all this kind of nonsense that built up around the last record [Geogaddi] got to a point where it was just silly. People were understanding things from our music that we didn't put in there and were saying there was an evil undercurrent to everything. And we are not like that at all. It was a theme that we wanted to pursue on that record but people have understood from that that we always put secret, dark, sinister, and satanic things in our music. And that became more important than the music itself."
• Refrain from Assuming: "Sunshine Recorder" contains the Looped Lyrics "an eagle in your mind... a beautiful place." The band seems to have been deliberately trolling here, because this makes the song very easy to confuse with the previous BoC songs "An Eagle in Your Mind" and "In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country."
• Signature Song: "Roygbiv"... not that it's the only one that can be called that: "Dayvan Cowboy," "1969" and "Music Is Math" also are contenders.
• Song Association:
  • To most who have been on the internet for a while, hearing "Beware the Friendly Stranger" will only bring to mind Salad Fingers.
  • Many Chileans associate "Roygbiv" with ads for Santo Tomás University. Expect to see tons of comments referencing the university and its commercials in YouTube uploads of the song.
• Sweet Dreams Fuel: Pretty much all of In a Beautiful Place Out In The Country, as well as many tracks on Music Has The Right to Children and The Campfire Headphase.
  • The lullaby-sounding opening minute of "Everything You Do is a Balloon." Soothing for some, tear-jerking for others, lovely to everyone.
• Vindicated by History: For a long time The Campfire Headphase was considered a disappointment compared to the first two albums, due to its' lighter, more stripped-back acoustic sound. The response from fans and critics have become much more favourable in recent years.

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