Did Boards of Canada Create the Weirdest Musical Rabbit Hole Ever?

A casual observer of the Boards of Canada (BoC) numbers station mystery might be either vaguely amused or generally disinterested. BoC fans, on the other hand, are of a different breed. Like Pynchon fans, they've read everything about the Brothers Sandison, from their interest in mathematics and cults to their fondness for psychedelia and the Incredible String Band. The type of people who know that the reversed vocal sample on "1969," a track from 2002's Geogaddi (the duo's best album, in my opinion), is a reference to David Koresh's Branch Davidian rival, Amo Bishop Roden.

To Boards fans such as myself, the Willy Wonka-esque 12” vinyl popping up here and there on Record Store Day, and the online decryption and number theories that followed, all fit the Sandison mystique. BoC are having fun, and so are the fans. In the process they've stolen a bit of Daft Punk's viral thunder, forcing us to wonder, is this the biggest and weirdest musical rabbit hole ever created?

For those who need to be brought up to speed, here is the BoC numbers station project briefing.

On April 20, 2013, Record Store Day (and international 4/20 day), Reddit user lilcakey took a trip to Other Music in New York City. There he found a mysterious Boards of Canada 12” record with a 36-digit key on the cover. When he played the record, pretty music burst forth, followed by six numbers, 936557, spoken in a robotic voice. Lilcakey theorized, quite rightly, that the numbers were part of a larger Easter egg, encouraging fans to help find other records and decode the overall meaning. AtalantaFugiens, an acknowledged BoC account, confirmed that the record was legit. (In the days that followed, a record identical to lilcakey's showed up in Rough Trade East in London.)

On April 22, AtalantaFugiens annotated a video of a “Julie & Candy” soundboard recording with the phrase “ONE GOT FAT.” Popping up rather humorously at 4:20 in the kaleidoscopic video (the same used in BoC's 2001 ATP performance), it was a reference to the well-known “Everything You Do Is A Balloon” fan video, patched together from a bicycle safety film starring kids wearing monkey masks. The video included the blank 36-digit key, and was later altered to read “1977 snow computing amateur footage beards synthesizer.”

Shortly thereafter, the Boards of Canada YouTube account made this video its top favorite. In the video's comment section, YouTube user hellinterface (a known BoC side project) linked to a private video titled “nuevas semillas,” which features graphics from Little House On the Prairie (red herring?). This video in turn links to a fourth video (uploaded by YouTube user tarekeys) that contained the digits 717228.

A day later, the six-number code 519225 popped up in a message broadcast on Zane Lowe's BBC Radio 1. Later that day, another message, broadcast on NPR's All Songs Considered, revealed the number 699742.

In the early hours of April 26, Twoism messageboard user DaveJ noticed that one of the forum banners had been altered with a static-like overlay. Other users found that when the .gif file was opened in a text-editing program, it revealed links to two Soundcloud files, both titled “∑” (the summation symbol). Played together, the two files reveal the fifth code, 628315. And when the Soundcloud's WAV files were uploaded to a text-editor, they revealed coding language featuring “Cosech” (the Spanish word for “harvest”), leading to speculation that the album will be titled Cosech. Others believe it's merely the name of BoC's numbers station project.

Read the rest over at the new Motherboard.VICE.com.