24 Sept 2020

This is Hexagon Sun

This is Hexagon Sun: A Video on Boards of Canada sat in my recommended list on YouTube for about a month.

It was there for a while because an 80+ minute fan video for one band is a bit of an ask. Yet, footloose and fancy-free on a Friday evening - and two cans deep into the Champigneulles - it was time to give it a go. And I'm happy to say it was worth the time.

It thankfully eschews voice narration (bar the odd snippet from John Peel) and lets Boards of Canada's sublime music breathe, with details and insight shared in captions. Visually it's very BoC, all grainy archive footage and fractals, and as such, you can slip it on and let it stream, drifting in when a sample catches your ear. 

As well as a relaxing slow TV-like watch, This is Hexagon Sun is also thoroughly researched. I learned a lot on a band I thought I knew quite well. For while I own all the main Warp albums, I didn't know that BoC has been active since 1989 nor how convoluted the campaign was for 2013's Tomorrow's Harvest.

This is Hexagon Sun is clearly a labour of love, so it's a little bit of a shame that it only has 40,000 views. So why not crack open a Champigneulles and give it a go?

Related post: Boards of Chinook

Original image: model's own.