Hooper Bay | ||||
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EP by Boards of Canada | ||||
Released | 1994 | |||
Recorded | Unknown | |||
Genre | IDM, ambient | |||
Length | 22:11 | |||
Label | Music70 THS012 | |||
Producer | Boards of Canada | |||
Boards of Canada chronology | ||||
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Hooper Bay is purportedly an EP by Boards of Canada, issued in both vinyl and cassette formats. The title refers to the small city of that name in Alaska, and all track titles on the album share a similar Alaskan theme. Only 200 copies were said to have been produced and shared amongst the band's friends and family, and although none have publicly surfaced, an excerpt roughly 35 seconds long of the track "Circle" was held on a website hosting early material from the group. This sample showcases a melancholy kind of ambient electronica similar to that of the band's following release. The site has since gone down, though the sample has since been uploaded to YouTube.
Mislabeled MP3 files claiming to be copies of Hooper Bay are in wide circulation on peer to peer networks, but are understood to be fakes. As with other rare Boards of Canada releases, some of these fakes are mostly mislabeled tracks by other musicians and bands. For example, a track purported to be "Geiser" was revealed to actually be the experimental Icelandic group múm's "Smell Memory", and "Seward Leaf" was revealed to be "Slow Bicycle", another múm track.
Track 7 from the Live @ ATP performance is sometimes believed to be Noatak, due to a processed voice saying something sounding phonetically similar throughout the song, a latter half containing dark ambient sounds akin to that of "Circle", as well as a similar track length. This has yet to be confirmed by the band, however.