Boards of Canada - Everything You Do is a Balloon

JUL 01 1996 · 12:00

Boards of Canada - Everything You Do is a Balloon (1996) Era: Mid-90s IDM / Ambient Techno Underground (1996) - Skam Records-era experimental electronic; pre-Warp debut; found-footage music video culture emergent alongside early internet distribution of archival film High. This video is a rare documented example of found-footage music video practice from the mid-1990s UK IDM underground, directly associated with a track that has achieved canonical status in electronic music history. The use of One Got Fat (1963) as source material demonstrates BoC's foundational appropriation method and their engagement with mid-century American educational film as both aesthetic and emotional resource. The video's fast-cut assembly of surreal archival imagery against a melancholic IDM score makes it a significant object for the study of music/image relationships in pre-streaming electronic music culture. Tier 1.5 given confirmed track canonicity and documented found-footage provenance, with minor deduction for absence of an identified video director. Context: Released in December 1996 on Manchester's Skam Records, 'Everything You Do Is a Balloon' closes the Hi Scores EP, Boards of Canada's first widely available commercial release. The accompanying video repurposes One Got Fat (1963), a deeply uncanny American bicycle safety instructional short featuring children in monkey masks, directed by Dale Jennings. This act of appropriation is wholly consistent with BoC's stated creative philosophy: the Sandison brothers openly cited educational documentary films of the National Film Board of Canada (from which they take their name) and warm, scratchy 1970s television as core aesthetic sources. Pairing a mid-1990s IDM track with a thirty-year-old found film amplifies the duo's signature temporal displacement, a sense of memory not quite belonging to the present. The choice of such unsettling yet nostalgically coded material aligns with BoC's broader project of inducing manufactured childhood memory and ambient dread. The video circulated primarily online and via tape trading, consistent with the pre-streaming IDM underground distribution model of the era. Director notes: The music video for 'Everything You Do Is a Balloon' is constructed entirely from footage drawn from the 1963 American bicycle safety short film One Got Fat, directed by Dale Jennings and narrated by Edward Everett Horton. The bocpages.org fan wiki (the primary Boards of Canada reference archive) confirms the video features footage from this 1963 film. No credited music video director, production company, or commissioner has been identified in any publicly available source. The video is consistent with the found-footage/archival appropriation approach common in mid-1990s IDM and experimental electronic music contexts, where tracks were paired with public domain or low-circulation archival material rather than conventionally produced music videos. Whether assembled by the band, label (Skam Records), or a fan is unverified.