BOARDS OF CANADA - MUSIC HAS THE RIGHT TO CHILDREN @ 25

It was 25 years ago today when Boards of Canada released their debut full length album, Music Has the Right To Children, on April 20th, 1998. Blending muted downtempo hip-hop grooves with blurry ambient textures, the album created a whole new genre of chill-out music, evoking faded recollections of childhood nostalgia while simultaneously projecting itself into the future.

BoC began with brothers Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin experimenting on modified tape recorders and synths as early as 1981. Becoming involved with the Hexagon Sun artistic collective in Pentland Hills, Scotland, they began releasing limited cassette collections of recordings, which were self-distributed among friends and relatives. Eventually, the Scottish brothers came up with the the name "Boards of Canada" as a reference to time spent in Canada as children, an experience which left an indelible imprint on the duo. After releasing a trio of EPs between 1995 & 1996, which contained numerous early versions of tracks destined for their major label debut, they signed a deal with Warp Records to release their first proper album. Of their origins, Marcus Eoin has commented:

“We'd been recording in various forms of the band as teens through much of the '80s, and already had a big collection of our own old crappy recordings that we were really fond of. Then, around 1987 or 1988, we were beginning to experiment with collage tapes of demos we'd deliberately destroyed, to give the impression of chewed up library tapes that had been found in a field somewhere. That was the seed for the whole project. In those days, everyone used to have drawers full of unique cassettes with old snippets from radio and TV, it's kind of a lost thing now, sadly. To me, it's fascinating and precious to find some lost recordings in a cupboard, so part of it was an idea to create new music that really felt like an old familiar thing”

The album was recorded at their home studio in Pentland Hills, a facility which was described as a “bunker”, a characterization which the band claim was inaccurately exaggerated for publicity. Their recording facility included samplers, de-tuned synths, drum machines and a variety of analogue reel to reel and cassette tape recorders. Samples which were included in the album include bits of Sesame Street songs, CBC Canadian cultural promos and chance natural sounds like on Rue the Whirl, where the studio's window was left open and the sound of birds was accidentally recorded into the track. The results of their efforts were a mix of short transitional pieces and longer rhythmic meditations. The often muffled, degraded sound employed throughout the album contributed to the sense of experiencing faded memories, calling up recollections of youthful encounters and half remembered dreams. The titles for the songs and the albums were kept obtuse, offering as much murk as the sound of the music. The band have commented:

“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 (sic). Olson is the surname of a family we know, and Smokes Quantity is the nickname of a friend of ours."

The cover image for the album is a family photo taken at Banff Springs in Alberta, Canada. The photo has been processed to reflect the same blurred, indistinct quality as the music, again bringing to mind the imperfections of memory and the sense of melancholy. There’s a kind of sadness that lurks throughout the album on every level, as a recognition of the impermanence of existence. All the cues that trigger recollection also remind the listener that these moments are gone and on their way to being lost forever.

The album won near universal critical praise upon its release and set about defining a new sub-genre of electronica. The mixture of funky rhythms undercut by textured softness and ambience surrounding them stood out as stylistically distinct in the realms of both downtempo and ambient music. It bridged the two spheres while also creating a new aesthetic which celebrated the glorious decay and imperfection of analogue recording. Dropout, hiss, warble and other artifacts of the medium of tape became functional elements of style. Brian Eno identified the phenomenon perfectly in his famous quote:

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”