If you have been studiously following the journey through the music that I find most interesting, you have surely noticed that the last several posts may have been a wee bit hard to stomach - in fact, many would hesitate to call it music at all; so now I will be nice and present you with a classic album that promises to take you someplace pleasant... A little bit ambient, a little bit psychedelic, a little bit trip-hop.
Enjoy!
Here's what Pitchfork has to say:
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 and Miles Davis' Bitches Brew are two older records that spring to mind, and I'd toss in Spiderland as well. It's not a long list, but somewhere on it belongs Boards of Canada's Music Has the Right to Children.
Boards of Canada's sound is not wholly original. Seeds of it can be found in Eno, Aphex Twin (in a big way), The Orb, and all over the home listening electronic scene that sprang up in the wake of Warp's Artificial Intelligence compilation. Boards uses drum machines, samplers, and an unfathomable collection of analog and digital synths, like others in their sphere. Their chords are typically gauzy ambient, their beats head-nodding downtempo. Properly speaking, they invented nothing.
And yet, the parts have never come together quite like this. The first thing to note is that Music Has the Right revealed Boards of Canada to be geniuses with texture, where god is in the details. The incredibly simple melody of the short "Bocuma" becomes a lump-in-the-throat meditation on man's place in the universe through subtle pitchshifts and just the right mist of reverb. The slow fade-in on "An Eagle in Your Mind" is the lonesome sound of a gentle wind brushing the surface of Mars moments after the last rocket back to Earth has lifted off. The long history of the electric piano was nothing but a lead-in to the tone Boards used on "Turquoise Hexagon Sun", the perfect evocation of a happy walk through the woods in an altered state. Every IDM artist since has at least once labored over their modular unit to get a patch that sounds like one of the many brilliant sounds found here.
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, 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.
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 accurately reflect the confusion of a time that cannot be neatly summed up with any one feeling or emotion.
When you discover that Boards of Canada took their name came from an organization committed to educational film, the overriding idea of their project clicks immediately into place; tapes with narration and incidental music accompanying filmstrips that were always damaged from age and overuse on poorly maintained equipment. The warbly pitch and warped voices mirrored the anxiety that came with the "carefree" days of being a kid and living subjugated by others. Boards of Canada tapped into the collective unconscious of those who grew up in the English speaking West and were talented enough to transcribe the soundtrack. No need to get hung up on specifics; however we lived and whoever we were, Music Has the Right to Children reflected back the truth for a lot of us. You can't ask more of an album than that.
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