In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country

Official Review

Released between Music Has the Right to Children (1998) and Geogaddi (2002), the Scottish duo Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin work with the same method of slowed-down samples, dusty textures, and slightly warped childlike melodies that characterizes the rest of their output — but here the record introduces, for the first time explicitly, a reference to Waco, Texas: the 1993 tragedy in which the FBI siege of the Branch Davidian compound led by David Koresh ended in a fire that killed dozens of people, including many women and children. In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country, the track that gives the EP its title, samples a radio recording that explicitly mentions Waco, set inside an almost idyllic pastoral arrangement — warm synths, rural field recordings, a melody reminiscent of 1970s children's educational programming. Amo Bishop Roden, the second track, takes its title from the name of a follower of the Texan religious group involved in a legal dispute following the tragedy, while Zoetrope closes the EP by returning to a more abstract register, free of direct references. The connection to the Occulture/Chaos Magick dossier here is direct in content: Boards of Canada grafts material tied to a real religious cult — with its dynamics of isolation, charismatic authority, and state violence — into a sonic aesthetic that absorbs its unease without ever naming it explicitly in sung lyrics, since the duo almost never sings intelligibly. The connection to Mark Fisher instead concerns the overall compositional method: samples from a specific media past (television coverage of Waco, the aesthetic of 1970s educational programming) treated until they produce an affect — nostalgia, unease, both at once — that none of the original materials possessed separately. The EP remains one of the most cited documents for understanding the Boards of Canada method in its most compressed form, and the point at which the duo first introduces that interest in occultism, numerology, and conspiracy that would later structure the following full-length, Geogaddi, in a far more extensive way.