Sunday, April 13, 2008

Scottish Sunday: Boards of Canada


I guess if I had to explain my strange, unconscious fixation on Scottish musicians, it would come down to their uncanny knack for channeling quantum magic into our reality through the processes of recorded sound, often in the unlikely context of the pop song. 

It's certainly not a consistent gift, and many of the same artists who can melt your heart early on in their careers can soon succumb to the worst pantomimes of show business (Annie Lennox and Simple Minds, for instance).

Since we are now in the age of accelerated revelation, it makes sense that Collective Unconscious would summon a band like Boards of Canada, who seem to be the distillation of the Scottish gift for musickal magick. I had wanted to do the Scottish Sundays in chronological order, but I stumbled upon this video while browsing around on YouTube and it synchronistically tied into a post I've been working on (and will be posting next week).

This video is absolutely astonishing, depicting a type of manned, high altitude ballooning and sky-diving I could hardly even imagine existed. This video shows Astronaut Joseph Kittinger's unimaginable skydive from 102,000 feet above the Earth, and then segues into some nail-biting surfing footage. The sterility of space is contrasted beautifully with the majesty of the oceans.

 For some reason, it all reminds me of the Stargate sequence in 2001:A Space Odyssey, a film which we'll be looking at tomorrow. I'm also reminded of the amazing spacewalk scenes in the highly undervalued 2010.


Bonus factoid: The "Scot" in Scotland comes from Scota, the name of an Egyptian princess.