ADRIAN FLORIDO, HOST:
Earlier this spring, fans of the reclusive Scottish band Boards of Canada started getting VHS tapes in the mail.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Inaudible).
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FLORIDO: The fans pored over the short, distorted video for secret clues about what the band might be cooking. Yesterday, they found out when Boards of Canada released "Inferno," its first album in 13 years.
The band has always kept its fans captivated by dropping cryptic bread crumbs. NPR Music's Noah Caldwell brings us this story about a time 20 years ago, when an image the band posted on its website led its fans on a massive hunt is remembered as the Red Moon Incident.
NOAH CALDWELL, BYLINE: In early April 2006, an image appeared on the Boards of Canada website.
DOUGIE BYRUM: It was just a black screen. Center of the screen was an image of the moon washed in a sort of orangy red color.
CALDWELL: Dougie Byrum was living in Manchester at the time. He went by DJ Todos on the Boards of Canada internet forums, which, predictably, freaked out.
BYRUM: That's when the carrot first started to be dangled.
CALDWELL: Written across the Red Moon was a line of numbers - 100606 - and below that, a long string of numbers and letters, a code. The forums got to work. The first line looked like a date, 10 June 2006, and the red moon itself was a clue. The two members of the band, brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin, had once talked about gatherings they used to throw in the Scottish countryside under a blood moon. The longer code was trickier, but theories flew around, led by a few of the diehards.
BEN SATTERFIELD: I am Ben Satterfield, known on the forum as Lincolnshire Poacher.
CALDWELL: Satterfield was living in Southern California.
SATTERFIELD: Everyone's imagination, including mine, went really out of bounds (laughter).
CALDWELL: Then Satterfield put portions of the code into a British military mapping system and found a grid in the Pentland Hills outside of Edinburgh.
SATTERFIELD: Right, OK, like, we're on to something.
CALDWELL: There'd been a rumor that the brothers had a secret studio in the area. So now they had a date and a location, so it must be a live event. And at this point in 2006, Boards of Canada hadn't played a concert in five years. And then one final clue popped up on the map - an abandoned observatory.
SATTERFIELD: Like, oh, my gosh, a telescope. Come and see the Red Moon event here, you know? At that point, we were like, let's buy plane tickets.
BYRUM: We grabbed the car keys and a tent and drove up to Scotland.
(SOUNDBITE OF BOARDS OF CANADA SONG, "CHROMAKEY DREAMCOAT")
MARK RICHARDSON: Embedded in their music is this idea of secret transmissions and voices coming through the ether.
CALDWELL: Today, Mark Richardson is the rock and pop critic at the Wall Street Journal, but at the time, he covered Boards of Canada for Pitchfork and saw this cat-and-mouse dynamic up close.
RICHARDSON: That kind of invites the listener to say, like, hey, where does this come from, and what does it mean?
CALDWELL: Plus this was a certain generation of electronic music fans.
RICHARDSON: They did have a connection to rave music in the late '80s and '90s, and it is interesting to remember that a lot of those raves would happen in outdoor spaces. And so something about the Red Moon Incident that made me think of, in a way, returning their music to its roots.
CALDWELL: By the weekend of June 10, about a dozen people on the forums had committed to hunting down the Red Moon party. Ben Satterfield flew from California, and Dougie Byrum picked him up at the airport.
BYRUM: We all went in convoy down to the site, and we got there early afternoon.
SATTERFIELD: And we finally find the observatory, and at this point, other people start showing up.
BYRUM: Probably got to 6 o'clock, 7 o'clock, and you would have expected if something was going to happen, it probably would have happened by now.
SATTERFIELD: Are we wrong? Did we get this wrong? We said, at this time, if the - nobody shows up, we're putting the music on, and we're going to blast it.
(SOUNDBITE OF BOARDS OF CANADA'S "HEY SATURDAY SUN")
SATTERFIELD: And so it ends up just turning into a party. And then the campfire dies down, and it's - the sun's starting to come up. And we're just like, OK, I guess we either got it wrong, or maybe this was the real takeaway, that we got to hang out together. Like, it was good enough for us.
BYRUM: Whether they were over the hill with some binoculars laughing their heads off - I don't know. I'd like to think they were.
(SOUNDBITE OF BOARDS OF CANADA'S "HEY SATURDAY SUN")
CALDWELL: Twenty years later, Boards of Canada has never acknowledged the Red Moon Incident. We reached out to their label, Warp, but never heard back. Maybe it was a test. Seven years later, the band did lead fans to a listening party in the Mojave Desert through another secret code. Ben Satterfield made it to that one.
SATTERFIELD: But the mystery remains, right? I would love to get an answer.
CALDWELL: But he and Dougie Byrum also seem to have made peace with not knowing.
BYRUM: Wouldn't change a thing - the whole mystery about them, there's a bit of magic sort of interlaced with that.
SATTERFIELD: So much about art is the unknown, anyway. And if you have all the answers, maybe you don't long for whatever's next. I don't know.
CALDWELL: Noah Caldwell, NPR Music.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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