Boards Of Canada - Hooper Bay (1994)

Boards Of Canada's earliest website included a list of their albums, many of which are shrouded in mystery. They included 'Catalog 3', 'Acid Memories', 'Closes Vol 1', 'Play By Numbers', and finally 'Hooper Bay', and these albums were claimed to have around100 copies, or less, made and distributed to friends and family. 'Hooper Bay' is the band's fifth known release, issued on 12" vinyl and cassette in 1994. It introduced the use of children's voices, a technique which would remain a staple of the band's style through the release of 'Geogaddi', and is named after the Alaskan village of Hooper Bay, which is a Cup'ik Eskimo settlement. Of the EP's five tracks, only a 35-second excerpt of 'Circle', posted on the EHX website in the late 1990's, has ever been heard by those outside of the band's friends and family. In the years since, many fakes have gone up online claiming to be these albums, in particular a set of mp3's labelled 'Hooper Bay' but with significantly shorter track times than the actual EP, can be found on P2P networks, but like most of these, this set is mis-labelled and is not music by Boards of Canada. There's always a slight air of legitimacy considering that three additional albums, 'A Few Old Tunes', 'Old Tunes Vol 2', and 'Random 35 Tracks Tape' have been found (see previous posts here), and confirmed by "mdg", the mysterious user who's friends with the brothers, and who comments on matters for the band on the fan-forum Twoism. Recently someone tried to upload a record to the Discogs database, a website cataloguing every piece of physically released music in history, and although initially his submission was rejected, he provided a backstory, additional details, as well as three videos. One of the videos was the snippet of 'Circle' that we know about, but the other two videos were of side A and side B of the 12" vinyl being played. While the quality is poor (a potential strike into the fake column), it's also coming hot on the heels of last year's 25th anniversary of their debut big label album 'Music Has The Right To Children', so did the band leak this as part of the celebration? Here are those two videos, split into individual tracks, and 'Circle' does sound very similar to the clip that we already have, so it's now up to BOC mega-fans to let us all know if this is real or not. The only thing I'll say is that I can't hear the children's voices which are supposed to be an integral part of the music.  

Track listing

01 Seward Leaf 
02 Geiser 
03 Circle 
04 Noatak 
05 Point Hope