Hi Scores at 30: Boards Of Canada's first wide release still sets the terms

Hi Scores is thirty years old and still the clearest way into Boards Of Canada: six tracks, two brothers, no tour, next to no interviews. Downtempo and ambient, built on vintage synth tones, analog gear, samples and slow hip hop drums. It has held up. The reissue is worth it.

Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin are brothers, raised on the Moray coast, making music together since 1986. The name comes from the National Film Board of Canada, whose documentaries they watched as children. Before Hi Scores came cassettes on their own Music70 label. Then Warp, and Music Has the Right to Children in 1998, Geogaddi in 2002, The Campfire Headphase in 2005, Tomorrow's Harvest in 2013 and Inferno this year, their first album in thirteen years. No live shows since 2001.

Hi Scores was their first wide release, out on Skam in 1996. Two of the six tracks had other lives: 'Seeya Later' had already appeared on the self-released Twoism, and 'Turquoise Hexagon Sun' was carried on to Music Has the Right to Children. Remastered from the original tapes for a 2014 reissue, it lands on Warp on 20 November: gatefold 12-inch, four prints, black vinyl and a limited Coke Bottle Green pressing, a new CD, two T-shirts, pre-order via Bleep.

The record does what the catalogue does. Synths that sound older than the people playing them, and samples that arrive like something half-heard from a schools broadcast. The beats come from hip hop, slowed until they sit behind the melody instead of driving it. Memory, childhood, science, landscape: a six-track EP has no room for an argument, so it states the terms instead.

'Hi Scores' opens it. 'Turquoise Hexagon Sun' is the best travelled of the six, the one that earned a place on the 1998 debut and the name people know first. 'Nlogax' is the long one, six minutes forty-nine, closing side one. Side two starts with 'June 9th'. 'Seeya Later' is the shortest and the oldest, a Twoism holdover. 'Everything You Do Is a Balloon' ends it, nearly seven minutes, and it is the other track the release leads with.

It is for listeners who found the duo late, on Tomorrow's Harvest or Inferno, and want the room before the house. Play it low, in the evening, with no chorus to wait for. Anyone who needs a chorus should start with Music Has the Right to Children instead.

The soft spot is 'Seeya Later'. A track that already existed on Twoism is a sixth of a six-track EP, which makes it the thinnest part of the anniversary case. The prints and the shirts are packaging, and the music does not care. Hi Scores is a 4.5: six tracks, no filler, a set of rules written early and never fully repeated. Thirty years on, it explains everything after it without explaining any of it away.

The tracklist

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