Boards of Canada - Music Has the Right to Children

Sometimes an album is so good and makes its case so flawlessly that it spawns a mini-genre of its own and becomes shorthand for a prescribed set of values. The Velvet Underground's third album, My Bloody Valentines's Loveless and Miles Davis' Bitches Brew spring to mind. It's not a long list, but somewhere on it belongs Boards of Canada's Music Has the Right to Children - the greatest psychedelic album of the ’90s.

You aren't likely to hear more subtly effective layering of sounds on any electronic record in the last 20 years: Music Has the Right to Children is as unified and complete they come. Here, Boards of Canada set their sights on a small set of moods and characteristics-- innocence, apprehension, wonder, mystery - and probed every possibility in minute detail.

BoC created a hazy sound of smeared digital synth-tones and analog-decayed production to give their music a wavering, mottled quality redolent of formats like film, vinyl, and magnetic tape that are susceptible to decay and distortion with the passage of time.

And all of this carried by patient, sleepwalking beats, and aching with nostalgia, with the front cover a faded photograph of a family of seven on vacation, their faces eerily bleached into featureless blanks.

As their discography unfolded over the ensuing 20 years, Sandison and Eoin first intensified their approach with In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country EP and Geogaddi, then inflected it with the shoegaze-tinged The Campfire Headphase, and finally simply reiterated it with Tomorrow’s Harvest.

But then the idea of Boards of Canada “progressing” or “evolving” goes against their very essence. Their intent with Music Has the Right to Children was to create a haunted haven outside the onward flow of Time. Why wouldn’t they want to live there forever? (Pitchfork)

2 x Vinyl, LP, Reissue, Repress

Tracklist:
A1 Wildlife Analysis 1:17
A2 An Eagle In Your Mind 6:23
A3 The Color Of The Fire 1:45
A4 Telephasic Workshop 6:35
A5 Triangles And Rhombuses 1:50
B1 Sixtyten 5:48
B2 Turquoise Hexagon Sun 5:07
B3 Kaini Industries 0:59
B4 Bocuma 1:35
B5 Roygbiv 2:31
C1 Rue The Whirl 6:39
C2 Aquarius 5:58
C3 Olson 1:31
D1 Pete Standing Alone 6:07
D2 Smokes Quantity 3:07
D3 Open The Light 4:25
D4 One Very Important Thought 1:14