Capturing The Look of Board of Canada's "Tomorrow's Harvest"

“It shook a lot of people up, it's just exciting. I had a small thrill in my living room experiencing it all.” Music video director Neil Krug is talking about the release of Tomorrow's Harvest, the much anticipated album by Boards of Canada. Krug directed the two video releases, "Cosecha Signal One" and "Reach For The Dead," which were aired via a coded game of cat and mouse with fans on social media prior to the launch.

“It's been like a top secret operation,” says Krug. “I don't know any other way to describe it other than unorthodox, in a very good way.”

For Krug, Boards of Canada were, unwittingly, the catalyst for a career in music videos. The now successful Los Angeles-based music video director marks the output of Warp Records at the start of the last decade as hugely influential on his decision to pursue the creative form. “Not to sound too fanboy, but when I was in my early twenties, it was some of the first music that made me really appreciate the marriage of visuals with sound. If you marry them well, something unique comes out of that."

Krug first worked officially with Warp Records in 2012, on a mini album track by Gonjasufi entitled "The Blame."Unofficially, Krug produced a fan video for "In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country," which was originally released by Boards of Canada as an EP in 2000. He decided to create a video for it in 2006 after finding a load of Super 8 film that had been thrown away in his neighbourhood of Old West Lawrence, Kansas.

“It was my first foray into music video-making and using real film,” he explains. “I found this footage of a birthday party from the 1970s and it was beyond creepy because the film was deteriorated beyond belief. I thought, 'Well, where is the rest of it?' And then I thought, what if I just made the rest of it up myself? So I bought some Super 8 gear, got the cameras, bought some film and filmed the rest of it as I saw fit. That was the first time I'd tried anything like that and after I finished it, I sent it off to Warp to ask if I could use the music. They forwarded it on to the band and several years later, here I am."

The unusual approach to the release of Tomorrow's Harvest certainly piqued lots of interest. Krug's been fending off inquiries from friends and fellow fans trying to gain some insight into the project. “People want to know, 'What does it all mean? What is it trying to mean?' I think that's sort of answered by, in a way, 'Whatever it means to you,'" laughs Krug. “In proper Boards of Canada fashion, almost everything has two meanings. You don't want to make anything that can be dissected in one night, it has to have some sort of life to it, some sort of longevity.”

According to Krug, there doesn't appear to have been any creative pressure from the band or the label to film things a certain way, but atmosphere was discussed plenty. Krug notes that one of the things they were going for was an air of paranoia and bleak sci-fi dystopia that was probably inspired by films from the mid-70s.

Various locations were used in the Californian desert on both shoots. “I didn't want it to look like anyone else’s video,” he explains, “For the most part in Los Angeles, if you've directed music videos, there are probably a dozen spots that people frequent, you recognize the locations and I really wanted to avoid that. We went way off the beaten path, places that I sort of know about but had never been. For me, to make it successful, I don't want anyone to know where any of this stuff is. It's about creating something otherworldly."