Eight years after The Campfire Headphase, Boards Of Canada is teasing a new album. Probably. What is definite is that the group released a single 12-inch record for this past weekend’s Record Store Day—that is to say, it released one, single, solitary record, only made available in one store in the entire nation. An employee of Boards Of Canada’s label, Warp, reportedly hand-delivered that record to New York’s Other Music on Friday, and it got slipped into the racks for Saturday, when a lucky fan snatched it up. Five other copies of the record were covertly placed in stores in other countries.
The 12-inch contains a short clip of a new track, heard below, overlaid with a computerized voice saying cryptically, “9-3-6-5-5-7”—whatever that means. Adding to the mystery, the record is titled —/—/—/xxxxxx/—/—. BOC-obsessives, of course, have a number of theories about what that means. The best lead hails from the Twoism message board and notes that, if the numbers are converted to ASCII text, you get the letter “M.” And if the xxxxxx space in the title is meant to be filled with those numbers the voice is reading, then that could mean the “M” is intended to be the fourth letter in a hidden word—a word that may or may not be “summer,” which may or may not be when a new Boards Of Canada album will be released. Or, maybe the band’s just messing with everyone now.
Back in early 2012, Boards Of Canada did seem confirm via its Facebook page that the duo was working on new material. So as with the last eight years, we'll just have to wait and see.