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.”
