The mystery of ‘Magic Window’: How two minutes of silence exemplified Boards of Canada
Considering that it has been more than a decade since the release of their last proper album, 2013’s Tomorrow’s Harvest, the ever-enigmatic IDM pioneers Boards of Canada have only seen their stature and mythology grow with each passing year of silence. Coincidentally, there may be no more enduring example of the Scottish group’s cult of curiosity than the obsessive analysis still surrounding one particular track from 2002.
‘Magic Window’ is the 23rd and final entry on BoC’s second full-length studio album, Geogaddi. It clocks in at a mere one minute and 46 seconds, but it’s always felt much longer for fans listening for the first time. That’s probably because ‘Magic Window’ is one of the all-time “silent tracks” of the CD era, sitting eerily and uneasily at the end of an hour-long journey through dark clouds of electro nostalgia, occult spookiness, Leslie Nielsen voice samples, and post-9/11 existential terror (as well as plenty of lovely melodies, as is typical of the Boards of Canada cookbook).
Since Scotland-born brothers Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin started making music as Boards of Canada in the late 1980s, their “brand” has always decidedly leaned in the opposite direction from what would become the 21st-century norm. Rather than appeasing fans by meeting them at the bottom of each newly dug rabbit hole, they’ve preferred the David Lynch approach. Most of the countless unsolved mysteries of the BoC thematic universe–including everything from rumours of unreleased records to numerological references and hidden messages in their artwork–are still sitting there in the proverbial deep, dark woods, leaving each individual listener to glean their own meaning…or to try to convince thousands of other fans online to join them in one specific gospel interpretation.
In the case of ‘Magic Window’, you might think the discussion would be a bit more subdued, considering the track literally contains no sound (even if you blast the speakers, trust me). Instead, the BoC fan-boards see some very heavy messaging potentially at work here, with theories only ramping up in the two decades since its release. Some noticed, for example, that the silent track stretched out the total length of the original Geodaddi CD to exactly 66 minutes and 6 seconds (666!). However, comments at bocpages.org have since established that the actual length is a disappointing 66:04. Not to be outdone, though, one fan did note that a ripped WAV file of Geodaddi has a file size of 666MB.
Moving the analysis to the album’s vinyl version only opens up more fun. Here, the entire final side of disc three is devoted to ‘Magic Window’, and contains “no groove on that side, just a basic outline picture of a family: parents and two children,” as described on bocpages. “It’s a bit similar to the plaque on the Pioneer space probe, an image that appeared briefly on an older version of the BoC website. Where the speed (33rpm or 45rmp) would usually appear, instead, we have the cryptic ‘162.225 MHz’.” That frequency, according to a couple of BoC sleuths, is supposedly used by the military, as well as some private mobile radio services.
Of course, the decision to title the track ‘Magic Window’ opens up plenty of speculation, as well. Potential references range from an old American children’s magazine to a 1970s toy made from “microdium crystals”.
The works of unorthodox physics theorist Thomas E Bearden also come up a lot, as he used the term “magic windows” to describe “frequencies which are especially suited for coupling to and bringing energies from other dimensions”. Again, David Lynch would approve. But perhaps we needn’t dig quite this deep.
As in most forms of art, absence often has a critical role in stirring a reaction or emotion from a listener. It could be a bassline dropping out of a song, a left-out word in a chorus, or, in some cases, a period of total silence to reflect on what one just heard, what one might hear next, or what one hadn’t noticed they were already hearing in the world around them. Maybe the ‘Magic Window’ for BoC was just a pathway out of Geogaddi back into the listener’s regular existence, paired with the weird realisation that the two are only separated by a little less than two minutes.
