About

- A TAV Essential Listening Album -

Unlike other electronic music experimentalists on the Warp roster whose innovations in the genre sounded cold and futuristic, Boards of Canada’s inventiveness was warm and nostalgic. Beginning with their debut album Music has the Right to Children in 1998, the Scottish duo’s hallucinatory and hazy blend of downtempo, ambient, IDM, trip hop and psychedelia immediately evokes an expansive sense of emotionality and genuine optimism.  

Using detuned synths, drum machines and reel-to-reel tape recorders, Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin deftly combine analogue and electronic instrumentation to craft something that feels uncannily like a personal, pastoral memory. That effect of childhood innocence is further accentuated by the brothers’ use of vintage samples, including snippets from Sesame Street and sounds from nature documentaries. Elegiac and hauntological, Music has the Right to Children is the rare electronic album prefers to remember rather than presage. — The Analog Vault

Boards of Canada had released some singles and two EPs previous to this record's release, material which showed that they'd already developed their sound. But with Music Has the Right to Children, the duo set out to make a proper album, and approached the album from a rock perspective, carefully mixing and editing the track sequence, while drafting interludes and tightly restricting the palette. You aren't likely to hear more subtly effective layering of sounds on any electronic record in the last 10 years: Music Has the Right to Children is as unified and complete they come. Here, they set their sights on a small set of moods and characteristics-- innocence, apprehension, wonder, mystery-- and probed every possibility in minute detail.

What's it all about, then? "Childhood" is the usual answer, but that's not as easy a connection as it seems on the surface. The giggling voices of kids that crop up are a sure giveaway, as are the song titles ("Rue the Whirl", "Happy "Cycling"), but Music Has the Right to Children avoids the twinkling music box melodies that Múm has been coasting on for a while now. Boards managed to evoke childhood without seeming cute or twee. It's childhood not as it's lived but as we grown-ups remember it, at least those of us with less-than-fond recollections. The shades of darkness and undercurrents of tension (qualities which came further to the fore on 2002's Geogaddi) accurately reflect the confusion of a time that cannot be neatly summed up with any one feeling or emotion.

"Our titles are always cryptic references which the listener might understand or might not. Some of them are personal, so the listener is unlikely to know what it refers to. Music Has the Right to Children is a statement of our intention to affect the audience using sound. The Color Of The Fire was a reference to a friend's psychedelic experience. Kaini Industries is a company that was set up in Canada ( by coincidence in the month Mike was born), to create employment for a settlement of Cree Indians. Olson is the surname of a family we know, and Smokes Quantity is the nickname of a friend of ours." — via Pitchfork

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Label: Warp Records / Skam
Format: 2x Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue, Repress
Released: 1998
Genre: Electronic
Style: IDM, Ambient

File under: Leftfield
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