UPDATE : I was hoaxed. The track lengths were right on, but I was the victim of wishful thinking. On another listen, the tracks of this album are faded out in order to conform to the time length signatures for Hooper Bay songs (still very much obscure). I’ll keep the text below in this archive of blog posts as a record of my credulity!

I’ll reveal a secret to all y’alls. The best place to get your filez on is on USENET . That’s where I just collected Hooper Bay, Boards Of Canada’s ultrarare 1994 mini-cassette/12″ extremely limited release. I’ve been burned before with non-BOC tracks tagged as BOC before (badly tagged, and mis-tagged Old Tunes mp3s are ubiquitous on soulseek), so I checked on over at Frederik Claes’ BOC fan site for the authoritative track listing and song length duration. Sure enough, it is really Hooper Bay. This sort of file sharing is exactly what USENET and the file sharing networks are good for. Grabbing files of out-of-print and intolerably rare limited pressings. I have no idea why Warp hasn’t re-released this material to the BOC craving (and crazed) masses. Until then, I will have to make do with my low-fi 128kpbs encoded, usenet downloaded, mp3s of Hooper Bay. This short album really is lovely.

About Aharon N. Varady

Aharon's Omphalos is the hobbit hole of Aharon Varady, founding director of the Open Siddur Project. He is a community planner and environmental educator working to improve stewardship of the Public Domain, be it the physical and natural commons of urban park systems or the creative and cultural commons of libraries and museums. His advocacy for open-source strategies in the Jewish community has been written about in the Atlantic Magazine, the Yiddish Forverts, Tablet, and Haaretz. He is particularly interested in pedagogies for advancing ecological wisdom, developing creative and emotional intelligence, and realizing effective theurgical praxes. He welcomes your comments, personal messages, and kind words. If you find his work helpful to your own or you'd simply like to support him, please consider donating via his Patreon account.

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“Hooper Bay” is shared by Aharon N. Varady with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.