Music Has The Right To Children
Boards of Canada
1998
Album Summary
Music Has the Right to Children is the debut studio album by Scottish electronic music duo Boards of Canada. It was released on 20 April 1998 in the UK by Warp and Skam Records and in the US by Matador. The album was produced at Hexagon Sun, the duo's personal recording studio in Pentland Hills, and continued their distinctive style of electronica, featuring vintage synthesisers, degraded analogue production, found sounds and samples, and hip hop-inspired rhythms that had been featured on their first two EPs Twoism (1995) and Hi Scores (1996).The album received critical acclaim upon its release, and has since been acknowledged as a landmark work in electronic music, going on to inspire a variety of subsequent artists. It has been included on various best-ever lists by publications such as Pitchfork and Mojo.
WikipediaIndeed, one of the best electronic albums of the Nineties and of all time. Favorites are Telephasic Workshop, Sixtyten, Turquoise Hexagon Sun, Roygbiv, Rue the Whirl, Aquarius & Happy Cycling.
"Music Has the Right To Children" by Boards of Canada (1998) Never heard of this album or this duo. First, about that title. The duo has stated that the titles of their works are significant, and that “‘Music Has the Right To Children’ is a statement of our intention to affect the audience using sound.” Well, as laudable as that may be as an artistic objective, the bluntly metaphysical claim that music has the “right” to “children” has a quaintly pompous and yet menacing tone (not to mention a certain lack of sensitivity to those frustrated in their desire for children or the pathology of those who reduce children to instrumentalities as an exercise of their “rights”). A musician may and should “intend” to affect the audience, but it’s hardly a “right”, especially when the artist expresses it toward human persons (the “children” to whom the musician has a “right”). Maybe I’m misunderstanding this, but please don’t object that I’m reading too much into it. This musical endeavor self-consciously begs to be ‘read into’. If you can’t stand the heat, get off my couch. Interesting cover art. Faceless Scots in bell bottoms. I’d be the guy on the far left. If you’re not allowed to have a face, turn away. It’s a fitting image for the Covid-19 pandemic era, although that was obviously not the intention. No lyrics here, so all the poetic clues are in the titles, most of which seem to be intentionally opaque and unevocative (like ‘inside jokes’—hardly a means of affecting a audience). Synth beats and sampling, it’s like Scottish hip hop. Mind boggling (or, as they say in Scotland, moind boag-lin’). Now about that sound: “Wildlife Analysis” - no structure, no categories, thus no analysis. And where’s the wildlife? Unless we’re the wildlife. Or you’re the wildlife. Or it’s actually “wild” “life”. About those beats—hey, we’ve got guys in America who can do all that stuff with nothing but tongues, teeth, and microphone. After listening to a few tracks, I think I finally get it. You gotta be stoned. I’m glad I listened to this before I die. 1/5
Will Wright would be furious considering whoever did spore's soundtrack just ripped this off lmfao
This has been one of my favorite albums for a long time and it was good to see it come up.
Halfway through and I think I've got the hang of this now. Palliative care music for former ravers. I don't need to listen to all eighteen tracks.
This one is hitting me at the right time. All these vintage synth sounds are right up my alley. Perfect workday listening. And just anytime you want something that can be listened to intently, or ignored. It's good either way. Definitely going to check more out from this band. Wish someone would have showed this record to me when I was REALLY into Radiohead's Kid A and Amnesiac-era records. Since this was out just before those were released.
The sound of robots learning how to emote. Atmospheric ambient and quite affecting for electronic music. Instantly enjoyable and feels like with repeated listens this could be brilliant. Rating: 3.5/5 Playlist track: Roygbiv Date listened: 29/09/22
Stuck this on whilst having a cup of tea and some breakfast this morning. I imagine that is how boards of canada intended it to be listened to. I struggle with this hipster end of the dance/electronic spectrum. I just don't get when you'd listen to it and what you'd get out of it. Souless, Joyless, outright boring music. On one fucking track some women just starts counting. edgy. 1/5
what a beautiful album, I’ve been a fan of BoC for a while now and this album always gives me goosebumps when I hear it it’s such a perfect mix between a loose, dreamy atmosphere and a raw, hard, tactile electronic experience I don’t know how else to put it, this album is really something special, everybody should listen to this 10/10
Okay okay, interessant, weiß nicht ob ich die Art von elektronischer Musik so sehr feiere. Gut im Hintergrund wird ihr glaube ich nicht gerecht, ist schon nicht schlecht, denke ich
Love the album cover and title! Maybe one of the best titles yet. I wasn't getting into it until Telephasic Workshop grabbed me. I'll explore this album in another state of mind in the future...even dropped TW into the Broccoli Alien Mix :)
Boards of Canada? More like Bored-s of Canada. 2/5 for the potential to be a decent album in different situations
02/02 - Yesterday I worked on developing door details for the Drum Storage Building as well as some professional development toward AXP. I had a good conversation with Jake on how to address questions that might come up during the week (work on creating a list and asking for someones time in advance to go through the list). He also helped me with breaking down Project Management hours. I thought this album was okay, definitely different then the types of beats I would listen to today. It seemed to be missing a lot of base but I thought it was very unique in style regardless.
Very 90s, minimal chilled electronic. Pretty easy to listen to but after first few tracks I'm not that bothered about it. Nothin particularly wrong with it but it just did nothing for me. 2/5
Good grief this album is boring. Slow, ambient, thoroughly unenjoyable. I can't find a single redeeming quality off this album.
This was just perfect today. Lofi tunes I can listen to in the background of whatever else I'm doing are a fantastic way to get me to play your album over and over. 5 stars, my friends!
Double dose nostalgia on this one. One for the Canadian documentaries that I grew up with, and another dose from listening to this album new. Great fun!
Fantastic - music from a parallel timeline. Fave track - "Turquoise Hexagon Sun"
I've very fond memories of this album, it opened me up to a world of leftfield electronic music that my young Britpop addled mind never even knew existed. And in later years it was my go-to to help nurse my "morning after" mind. It's aged really well too, which a lot of similar albums from the era definitely haven't.
So I stole part of a review on this album because because I CBF writing my own. Written by Maya Kalev for factmag.com, the article is called "One very important thought: Boards Of Canada’s Music Has The Right To Children at 15" I recommend it. The bit I stole goes like this: "Despite its name, Music… is about as grown-up as records get: an adult meditation on childhood, concerned with play, naïveté and nostalgia, all tinted with rosy pastoralism. But it’s also devilishly subtle, intricate and emotionally mature. That’s surprisingly rare in electronic music, most of which is concerned with the physicality of dance, intellectual weight, or the evocation of atmosphere rather than a holistic experience. By introducing themes of suppression, solitude and grief into Music…’s evocations of childhood, Boards of Canada created a record that was pretty but seldom precious, more faithful to experience than kitsch idealism. This ambiguity has endeared Music Has The Right To Children to its hordes of fans over time: as its listeners grew ever further away from the childhood it evoked, the album, bizarrely, became more relevant."
Who? What? How havn't I heard this before? Feels like the father of electronic, trip hop, electronic music rolled into one. Just awesome, like a downbeat, low key, non showoffy Mr Scruff.
The album is a bit sketchy and I prefer Geogaddi, which is much more coherent. But every time one's attention is fading they come up with some great music on this album as well like Telephasic Workshop. It is a shame that other electronic music which is of equal or higher quality (think Max Cooper or Dominik Eulberg) never shows up in lists like these.. What one can do with electronic sound is so much more than what you hear here.. nevertheless, highly influential album, so 5 stars.
Already one of my favorite electronic albums ever. It's truly one of a kind.
Excellent vibes using found-sound spectacularly, with maybe just a hair of bloat.
Moody, introspective, and thought-provoking. This is rare stuff right here. Perfectly captures a mood, and takes you on a journey from start to finish.
One of my favorite albums of all times, and one of the most listened to.
this album is really unique it's literally perfect the instrumentals on every song sounds very good the way that this album makes me feel it's incredible I have nothing to complain about this 10/10
Even when listening for the first time, Boards of Canada feels gauzy and nostalgic, as if half-remembered from childhood. Every song is a gem and this album is their masterpiece.
Really pretty awesome. Some amazing sounds in a full on immersive electronic experience. You can see the influence and impact that it had.
An unabashed 10/10, certainly worth listening to before you die. “Orange!”
Interesting how the responses in most 2/5 and 1/5 reviews actually tell you this is an important album. Some people can't handle the "uncanny"--and *Music Has The Right To Children* is all about the latter: you don't know if you're in the future or the past; you don't know if you're an adult or a child; you don't know if you're in a dream or awake in the real world, and you don't know what it is exactly you're supposed to be feeling. You're floating in purgatory. You're "in limbo", to use the name of a Radiohead track from another album that probably owes a lot to Boards Of Canada... One *great* 4/5 review tells it better than I would ever write it myself. This is the sound of robots slowly learning how to "emote". In this day and age where AIs now create art and are having meaningful (yet slightly unnerving) conversations with you, *Music Has The Right To Children* is like a prophetic statement. That album cover could as well have been created by one of those AIs. There's the same twisted, slightly off-kilter logic in that artwork as the ones found in those utterly "artificial" creations seen online today. The fact that humans from the nineties actually created said artwork blurs the line between humanity and technology, about the animate and the "inanimate". Just look at this cover: it can trigger the same feeling of alienation and "displacement" in your human brains as those weird AI creations today. And the music does the same. So the album is not only about fictional robots, as great as that line from that 4/5 review was. It's about us humans and our relationship to time, technology, and "art in the age of mechanical reproduction" (say hello to Uncle W. Benjamin here). It's very "mundane", but that's the point, because nothing is sacred anymore in the digital age. Time is diluted, expanded. Lengthy dirges abound, and they can send you in one of those intermediate "states". Retro-futuristic sonic landscapes give you a sense of nostalgia for a future that hasn't happened *yet*. Objectively, a lot of those trip hop and chill-out club beats are clearly dated, but more than twenty years later, that "dated" thing ironically adds to the overall experience. This album aged extremely well partly because some of its components *have* aged. You can't write a sentence like that about a lot of albums. Which proves it is one-of-a-kind. To conclude, *Music Has The Right To Children* works like a Rorschach blot. It is a canvas with apparently "unclear" intents emotionally speaking, and where you can therefore project your own feelings, whether they're anxieties, dreams, pessimism, optimism, or even boredom with yourself. And this is exactly where those 1/5 and 2/5 reviews were so interesting to read. In a few lines, you can sense the sort of person who wrote how displeased they were about the experience, understandably so in some cases--you need to be in the right mindset to enjoy weird stuff like this anyway. And if you read between those lines, if you pick up certain words and turns of phrases, it becomes abundantly clear that the experience actually affected some of those reviewers in a somewhat positive way. They may not like *Music Has The Right To Children*, at least right now, but they took the time to try something different, admitted how nonplussed they're feeling about it, and then gave their own feelings the benefit of the doubt (and sometimes, they did the same thing with the music, in a somewhat fascinating mirror effect). In a world where algorithms "break down" and decide what you're *supposed* to enjoy or not as if we ourselves were a string of ones and zeros, such "undecided", ambivalent experience is a precious glitch in the machine. And the fact that such welcome subversion comes in the form of electronic music from another era is itself a very ambivalent, "undecided" plus. That's how "meta" that album can get. And if you're in the right state of mind, this will repeatedly slap you hard in the face. Until the point where you don't have one anymore, maybe. Number of albums left to review: 721 Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 140 Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 68 Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 76
One of my all time favourite electronica albums! This was so original when it came out and still sounds fresh to this day. Essential listening in my opinion.
Do you know the scene in Parks and Recreation where Tom Haverford falls in love with the painting and is like "It's beautiful. I've been looking at this for 5 hours now". That sensation for me is this album. I've no interest in this kind of music, I don't think I'm gonna listen to this again in my free time, but it really felt good. I can't point my finger on it, there are tracks that make relax completely and tracks that make me feel like in a dystopian nightmare trying to survive (I really felt like I was in the Danganronpa's world at certain point, which is a weird good thing to say). The amazing title and borderline disturbing cover of the album really blend well with the songs. Honestly, I really didn't expect to give this rating but here we are.
Classic of the IDM genre. Personally I'd put Geogaddi above it but they're both fantastic. This album is such a vibe.
I was listening to a lot of Blonde Redhead when this was released. This album opened up a new era in music for me, expanded my mind toward more electronic-laden chill music. I discovered Arovane around this time and started listening to other stuff that I had previously shied away from. Super chill, get shit done - or get nothing done music.
These electronic albums have consistently been some of the best so far, and this is no exception. I usually listen to my albums before school starts. This fits that for a mellow electronic mood; it could be ambient music if you didn’t want to pay attention to it. Overall, an amazing album.
Big fan of this duo. Though this isn't my number one fave album of theirs, it belongs on the list because it's such an amazing debut.
I have listened to this album more than any other EVER. It is my bedrock. Electronica full of sun dappled childhood memories. Melodies that ache with nostalgia. Dream on. FIVE
wow, nice beats [The Color of the Fire] wtf creepy [aquarius] hahahaha i like this count thing, somehow relaxing kaso andun pa rin yung creepy laughing children ive also saved a bunch of songs that got my attention: wildlife analysis (strong first song) and roygbiv
1/15 Dark, very well done Electronic album, it drags on at certain spots, but overall good shit. Standout Tracks: Telephasic Workshop, Aquarius, Pete Standing Alone, Smokes Quantity
Interesting album. Some boring tracks but overall you could see the influences on later EDM like Daft
I hear things that I feel would later go on to influence other bands and artists I like (Trent Reznor in his later years, Burial), so I'm digging this album. Breakbeat background sounds, fades a little too far into the background at points, but wonderful if you're paying attention. Don't think I've liked an electronic track on first listen as much as I vibed with "Turquoise Hexagon Sun". Favorite tracks: "Turquoise Hexagon Sun", "Telephasic Workshop"
Pretty good! Good builds on some songs, interesting synth sounds and noises on some. A few songs defy expectation and develop in surprising ways. Lots of filler tracks, and an electronic sound that is overall sort of dated. Good study music
This is some fine ambient/downtempo/electronica material. Guess I should've listened to it more, back in the day, but it's never too late!
Music has the right to children. SHACK also has the right to children.
Definitely turned the sound up on this album to dig deeper into the layered tracks. Really liked the album, very nice background music but had some great hooks to keep me interested. Could do without the scratch tracks though.
It was good mild psychedelic, might revisit when I'm high but not for everyday listening
After the painful drone of my bloody valentine, Boards of Canada was pure nostalgia. Perusing the titles Roygbiv made me smile. Richard of York gained battle in vain. A way for kids to remember the colours of the rainbow. Sonically interesting ambience if nothing else.
// Favs: Kaini Industries / Aquarius / One Very Important Thought Score: Decent 4
Love some good electronica. Takes me back to 2000/01 when I was crawling the networks in college and finding all kinds of good stuff. A much needed balm to the rushed end of the week.
Atmospheric electronica. Sometimes it sounds like the stuff of dreams, other times it sounds like the stuff of nightmares. It's a soundtrack to a sci-fi-horror-coming of age movie you didn't know you wanted to see. Best Tracks: Sixtyten; Roygbiv; Aquarius
The first thing to note about MHTRTC is how gorgeous its soundworld is, and we're talking about a fucking synth album. Somehow, through sonic manipulation, Scottish wizards Marcus Eion and Michael Sandison have managed to make machine music sound warm and human. The sounds seem distressed and decayed, an echo of a distant, dimly remembered past--these guys are synth poets. They complete their presentation with treated samples, rudimentary hip-hop beats, and light scratching. For me, the beats are a little too upfront in the mix, considering they are hardly the point. They kind of function as an entry point for listeners who are too impatient for pure ambient. Well, that's not entirely true. The beats and the loops of samples draw the listener in and induce a trance state that serves as a medium for Board of Canada's synth ruminations. I didn't love MHTRTC quite as much as I remembered--the overly literal, thudding beats prevent full immersion in Board of Canada's soundworld at times, but it's still pretty damned good.
Love this Board of Canada record, I have listened to GeoGaddi before this and this record does better on many aspects. Not giving it a 5 because there are still some small issues with jt, but loved the execution of ambiant-esque tracks with some vocal layering.
Ovo je baš odličan album, trebalo mi je par puta da si pustim do kraja, ali kliknuo je jedne hladne zimske noći. Od tada je na mojoj cold nighttime plejlisti.
Odlicni, apstraktni i elektronski, vrijeme otkivanja sto sve komp sa sintićem moze producirat, a da dobro zvuci. Slusao sam ih prije i dragi su mi 💪
Some brilliant tracks on this album, but also some weaker ones that did not work as well for me, especially in the second half. Overall very good electronic music.
Ya know, it was creepy in spots, sometimes a song went on too long - but it was enjoyable. Added to my collection.
I wish this album would actually end on One Very Important Thought, but alas.
I have no idea what I'm getting into here. The song titles are amazing though, very nostalgic to early education. This is a really interesting lo-fi/ambient electronic album. I feel like the sampling may come out of those old-school education VHS videos you'd see in elementary school. It was good music to have on in the background and work to, the tracks did seem to loop for a very long time in some cases without much variation (or I just don't have an ear for it) but it was pleasant overall.
Interesting but obtuse. Probably not something that I would listen to exclusively, but maybe an album to return to when studying. Definitely earns its place on the list though.