____twoism

BOC Maxima (cassette) / (99.82% CDDA): FLAC


Here's how this particular recording became available:

Boards of Canada gave this cassette to Autechre,

Autechre gave a CDR of a recording of the cassette to Richard Devine (Schematic),

Richard Devine gave a copy of the CDR to Alex Graham (Lexaunculpt),

Alex Graham gave a copy of the CDR to me,

I gave a copy of the CDR to Jonathan Canupp (Ten And Tracer),

Jon Cannupp gave a rip the CDR to the general public via followers of the old IDM ring.


This 16bit recording of a cassette is the best rip we have.

All lossy rips I've ever found are sourced from it.


We are not meant to have this music.

BoC has not given it to us.

We can only covet it.

It is not ours.


For years, I felt that I would pay extortion prices for a rip of the CD.

But I realized I could only accept it as a gift for it to become mine.

jlgui wrote:On funky souls forum, 4-yearoldNexus-6 wrote :

Fredd-E wrote:

jlgui wrote:On funky souls forum, 4-yearoldNexus-6 wrote :

direct link to this please?

harpoon dodger wrote:I think I've said this before, but I've always appreciated the homebrew remaster that Twoism forum member Esselfortium made way back in the dark ages lol..I don't know if anyone else on here ever approved of it/remembers, but it's stayed in my iTunes library for years. It is a fresher/different perspective than the familiar rips that we all know and love..sorry to get off topic, /end

harpoon dodger wrote:I think I've said this before, but I've always appreciated the homebrew remaster that Twoism forum member Esselfortium made way back in the dark ages lol..I don't know if anyone else on here ever approved of it/remembers, but it's stayed in my iTunes library for years. It is a fresher/different perspective than the familiar rips that we all know and love..sorry to get off topic, /end

^^I dont think there is a FLAC version, it would kind of be irrelevant though because I'm sure Essel used the original MP3's as his source to work off of. You can't get lossless starting from a lossy format, unfortunately

I've had the idea to do this for a while, since I love Maxima but so many of its tracks can be found in higher quality on other releases. Tonight I finally did it in Ableton Live, replacing tracks wherever possible and tediously getting them to crossfade as accurately as possible to the original Maxima. I also added the deep bass from MHTRTC's One Very Important Thought to Maxima's version, yielding a rather nice-sounding result.

I'm pretty pleased with the result, but I'm going to give it a listen or two to make sure I don't need to adjust the track volumes more.

Keep in mind, though, that the tracks that were only on Maxima (Whitewater, Red Moss, the Maxima version of Chinook, etc.) have not been modified in any way.

For Carcan, it seems there's no way I can avoid the added sounds from the A Few Old Tunes version. I was originally going to loop it to avoid that, but there's an extra melody that comes in and plays once towards the end (once Nlogax's beat has faded in), so...deal with it I guess.

By "remaster", I mean I'm replacing poor-quality Maxima tracks with higher-quality versions from other releases whenever there are better copies of the same tracks available, and mixing them to match the original Maxima.

I'm not taking random tracks from other releases. I'm taking tracks that are on both Maxima and other releases, and putting the higher-quality one in there. The track listing is identical to the original Maxima; the only differences I've noticed in any tracks are the added sounds in Carcan and the different panning at the beginning of Everything You Do Is A Balloon.

EQing and a bit of high-end reverb, set differently based on whether it's a Maxima recording or an Old Tunes one, and also based on the song itself, to a certain extent. On some of the Old Tunes tracks I added a bit of chorus.

For M9, I set up some auto-panning to imitate the auto-panning in the original Maxima version that doesn't exist on the Old Tunes one (basically, it pans from left to right and back at a set speed).

For Carcan, I was faced with the tedious task of figuring out the perfect loop points to get a seamless loop of the exact right length, so that it would sync up with Nlogax in the same way as the original, without the cut-up voices from the Old Tunes version coming in.

Curious about this supposedly lossless tape rip as well. I always thought the version in circulation came from a radio broadcast?

As mentioned before, BoC Maxima was a demo tape they were shopping around to different labels. I have one of the original cassettes (just a standard, handwritten cassette with homemade insert in colour). I purchased it quite some time ago.

The story that I've heard (and granted it's just a story until BoC themselves confirm it) is someone at SKAM leaked BoC Maxima by copying onto MD for a friend, who in turn decided (or people he gave copies to in turn) the internets was the best place for this music.

I have a theory that due to this, Hi Scores and MHTRTC were BoC's only SKAM output (besides the MASK tracks), and when Maxima leaked (which was around 1998-1999), BoC terminated their relationship with SKAM in favour of WARP. Mind you, that's just a theory I have - no basis for it at all.

I wish BoC would release an EP of all the unreleased tracks called BoC Minima (ha). I'd love to hear a remastered version of Whitewater, one of my fave BoC tracks and one of their best tracks ever, IMO.