Boards of Canada - Music Has the Right To Children

This is in honor of the $.50 Boards of Canada t-shirt I found at the thrift store yesterday. Hate to think of some IDM kid getting fat or getting dead and having someone surrender his shirt to an everyday urban thrift. For the record, there was also a $.50 Aphex Twin t-shirt.

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Pitchfork (review excerpt): 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.

...Warp Records reissued Music Has the Right to Children worldwide, adding the bonus track "Happy Cycling" (which we Americans with our Matador-licensed copies have always known as the album closer) and redesigning the cover art as a foldout digipak. It's always a bit strange when an album is reissued when it has not, in any sense, ever gone away. How could we possibly have forgotten about Music Has the Right to Children when the sound Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin created here is still the predominant inspiration in IDM? And yet, here we are, new package and new marketing push. Even so, years after its original release is as good as any time to look into why Music Has the Right to Children has resonated so strongly.

Boards of Canada's sound was 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 used drum machines, samplers, and an unfathomable collection of analog and digital synths, like others in their sphere. Their chords were typically gauzy ambient, their beats head-nodding downtempo. Properly speaking, they invented nothing.

And yet, the parts had never come together quite like this.


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