Objects of Obsession
It started with a video tape that sparked a social media inferno. Boards of Canada are the masters of the mysterious, drawing a veil around themselves and letting the imaginations of others do the work. Within a couple of months of those VHS tapes – marked simply with a hexagon logo – being sent out at random across the globe to the lucky few, Inferno arrived, was met with admiration, whilst at the same time probably dividing opinion. It got people talking.
The whole campaign was brilliant in its simplicity and reminded me of The Object, that being the name given to the black obelisk pictured in various scenarios on the cover of Led Zeppelin’s seventh album, ‘Presence’. Or rather it wasn’t pictured at all, just the spaces where the object should be. It was a typical piece of conceptual work by Hipgnosis; blending the mundane with the surreal to create something incongruous and open to interpretation; something to fire the imagination. When asked to explain exactly what The Object was at the time, Hipgnosis co-founder Storm Thorgerson said that it represented the force and power of Led Zeppelin as a band; that they are so powerful they don’t need to be there at all. As is the case with all great cover art, it took on a life of its own, beyond the music on the album itself. In fact you could say that the artwork was more in keeping with the ethereal, retro-futuristic sounds of Boards of Canada than it was of the music of Led Zeppelin. But again, it got people talking, and served to take the focus away from what many perceived to be a sub-par set of Zeppelin tracks, whilst still keeping attention on the album.
According to a Record Collector magazine article published in 2007 and written by David Lewis, the original idea had been for Led Zeppelin’s label Swan Song to have 1000 models of The Object manufactured and placed outside iconic buildings across the world, such as The White House, The Houses Of Parliament and 10 Downing Street. But thanks to a leak of the cover art design, that idea was abandoned in favour of distributing the models to selected music journalists. Both strategies are reminiscent of a Boards of Canada marketing ploy, but the former also recalls Portishead’s campaign for the promotion of their debut album Dummy, for which blue painted mannequins were placed randomly across London (one of which, or at least part of one of which, is now in our back garden, but that’s a story for another time).
The Object fascinated people. It’s presence, or lack of it, was a complete mystery. What exactly was this thing? In the excellent book ‘Walk Away Rene: the work of Hipgnosis’, Thorgerson posits the theory that the Object was the result of “an experiment conducted back in the 40’s by either alien visitors or political suppressors of some secret society.” He then goes on to explain that Hipgnosis had found the photographs seen on the cover by chance, and that they were proof of this alien visitation. Typically imaginative, he was clearly having fun with the idea, but then of course this is how, in time, myths begin and eventually become a version of truth: if you can imagine something then it is real, on some level at least.
As reported in the Record Collector article, following the release of Presence Earth News American Radio got in on the fun with a spoof broadcast in the US;
‘The Object may not be welcome everywhere – it appeared recently in the home of John Bonham who told us this story. “While I was away my wife received one of these objects in the post and put it on the table. There was tape machine running, recording the children singing, and when they played it back, there was another sound on the tape altogether, so there’s something to think about. In fact, Pat put it outside the house. We won’t have it in the house at all.”
Weekly music magazine Sounds even ran a competition at the time inviting people to come up with the best explanation as to exactly what The Object was. Among the responses given were that it was;
- a window which we can either look at or through thus creating a totally illusory image floating in a material world – Xenopus Toad, Wolverhampton
- a Telepathic Wave Receiver and Transmitter created in the year 2108, with some being projected back to the mid-20th century as an experiment in four dimensional communication – Steve Colley, Leeds
- a familiar artefact in Middle-Of_Road locales, hence it’s nickname, the MORphy, which induces trancelike (MORphine) automatism in its faithful adherents – Jack Hart, paisley, Renfrewshire
But despite those highly imaginative and complex theories, I read somewhere that the winning answer was that The Object was a “dildo for a randy robot”. If that’s true, I’m not sure what it says about the Sounds editorial team, the respondent, or society in general in the mid-70s. 50 years on from the release of Presence, people are still discussing The Object. In a Reddit thread from 2023 theories ranged from it being “an X-74 brain wave modulator that can detect and modulate electrochemical impulses in the human brain” to “a pepper grinder”.
I go along with Robert Plant, and to paraphrase what he supposedly said at the time, that it’s whatever you want it to be.
Of course, the Presence obelisk was originally inspired by the mysterious monolith at the centre of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Which brings us full circle with the picture below, a parody of the famous ‘Ape meets monolith’ opening scene from the original 1968 movie, posted by Jimllpaintit on Instagram in April, and starring the Boards of Canada video tape in place of the monolith. Meanwhile, discussions about the meaning of The Object and Boards of Canada will rumble on, probably until 2108, when everything will be projected back to 1976 to start all over again.
