It is all a bit vague, fuzzy around the edges, broadly happy like a long-remembered childhood summer from the ’70s, welcome to Boards Of Canada Music Has the Right To Children.
Formed by two Scottish brothers and named after the producer of educational films they watched when they spent a year of their childhood in Calgary, Boards Of Canada have such a unique, identifiable sound. When they dropped Music Has The Right To Children, their debut LP, in 1998 I, of course picked up on it straight away* honing in on their great name and interesting sound; I’m very prescient like that.
Music Has The Right To Children is rightly acclaimed as something new and ground-breaking in electronic/ambient/downtempo/choose-your-own-descriptor music. Nothing here is remotely built for dancing** but there are beats throughout, leading us on. Voice samples and field recordings are woven in and out of the, often very simple, melodies, rarely foregrounded and often hazily childlike, giving everything a very distinct aural texture.
The nearest comparison point I have for this LP is DJ Shadow Endtroducing … because whilst that LP is much more strident, major key and vocal in its sound, Music Has The Right To Children does subtly use certain hip-hop tropes in the way that the beats fit together and progress. It is definitely one of the things that make this LP sound so different to anything similar that was out there at the time, that blending of ambient and hip-hop.
More than any LP I own it is almost impossible to deal with Music Has the Right To Children in terms of individual tunes, although they are certainly there, it demands to be dealt with as a whole LP. There are no huge crescendos, no high drama just a perfectly curated feeling, everything adds to the whole. When it finishes you realise that an awful lot has just passed by, but very very slowly.
Deliberately positioned as an exercise in a certain kind of nostalgic tone and mood Boards of Canada utterly/ironically succeeded in making something very new here. Music Has the Right To Children avoids being twee as well, there are definite currents of unease^ hereabouts, like the memory of a painful sunburn in an otherwise idyllic summer.
I appreciate that this may all sound like so much cyber waffle on my part^* but this is music to stare through a rainy window to, music to transport you onto an imagined scenic veranda, music to spend time looking inside your own head with. No two listens to Music Has The Right To Children are the same, it does have a certain mirror-like quality to it in that way.
Certainly when it comes to the Boards Of Canada music has the right two children.
The cover photo is a modified family photo from Banff Springs and amongst the easily uneasy blank-faced children on the LP cover, hazy-fuzzy? or hazy-sinister? it is important to note the strip in the top right of the sleeve which has the band’s name in braille. Class.
1063 Down.
PS: Should Boards Of Canada ever release an LP about houses of ill repute I have already copyrighted the post title ‘Bawds Of Canada’.
PPS: Rather damn good fan-created video:
*because my friend Matt gave me a tape of it. ‘Stupid band name‘, I said and proceeded to give it half a listen before deciding it was boring and going back to whatever else I was doing in 1998. By the time I actually appreciated how good they were, 8 years later, the vinyl LPs were far too expensive to even think about buying, so mine came via a bunch of 2013 reissues.
**unlike me.
^not to be confused with my raisincore outfit, Currants Of Unease. Our 12″ EP Raisin d’Etre is a classic of the genre. True story.
^*not to be confused with my wafflecore band, Cider Waffle. Our 12″ EP The Waffle Truth is a classic of the genre. True story.
