Boards of Canada

That strange and wonderful creature, unimaginatively dubbed IDM (an acronym for Intelligent Dance Music), enjoyed its golden age in the second half of the '90s. Countless musicians were swept up in the synthetic revival kickstarted by Aphex Twin and Autechre, with Michael Golding and Steve Rutter, aka B12, among the very first to lay out the genesis of what would become a cult genre of end-of-millennium electronic music, via the compilation "Artificial Intelligence", released of course on the ever-worthy Warp — the label that, more than any other, would go on to explore the phenomenon most thoroughly. It was an intellectualized, composed, and above all deliberate overhaul of so-called dance music, one that struck a chord with countless young listeners who were mostly introverted and hardly inclined to hit the dancefloor. Now, as glacial and clinical as IDM might initially seem, it played no small part in shaping a new relationship with the machines of the past — an exclusive bridge between the lessons set out by Brian Eno on the peerless "Another Green World" and the less frenetic side of dance music.

Among the genre's pioneers, the Scottish duo Boards Of Canada stand out for their elegance, intimacy and resourcefulness. Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin shared, right from the start, a passion for old Canadian Super 8 footage, paired with the icy sound of heavily processed synthesizers — an imagery at once futuristic and nostalgic. The music of Boards Of Canada indeed blends past and future in a truly one-of-a-kind embrace: a stream of sound that's sweet, evocative, hauntingly dreamlike, and anything but forceful.

The two Scots cooked up their first recipe on the 1994 EP "Hooper Bay", followed the next year by the twenty waves of "Boc Maxima", crowned by the melancholic "Everything You Do Is A Balloon". Having finally broken through and built up a solid reputation in London's club scene, Eoin and Sandison had to wait another two years before they could release (only on vinyl, in a limited edition of 100 copies) the EP "Twoism", featuring "just" eight self-produced tracks.

Meanwhile, the most demanding corners of the era's avant-garde electronic scene grew increasingly fond of their music, bristling with poignant synth passages, singular rhythms, and imperceptible shades framing the whole. The few samples featured — Vangelis, Earth, Wind & Fire, Ren Woods, even Ted Neeley — are broken up like pieces of a mosaic, chosen with painstaking care. It's no coincidence that Autechre and Panasonic (today Pan Sonic), bewitched by such wonders, invited Boards Of Canada on their respective tours in the summer of '96.

The release of the first anthology of their output, "Hi Scores", on Skam Records, soon marked the end of an apprenticeship as long as it was intense and rewarding. Adding to the two Scots' growing fame were also the homemade videos projected during their live shows: faded images of a distant past looping in time with the beat, giving rise to a stage presentation that would prove era-defining and would go on to inspire countless future video works. Their appearance on the bill of the prestigious 1997 Phoenix Festival, alongside the godlike Autechre, sealed their consecration and ascent toward the Olympus of world electronic music. It was the prelude to their debut on Warp, with the grandiose and deeply dreamlike "Music Has The Right To Children".

From the title alone, the album presents itself as a compendium of childhood reminiscences. A tribute to the happy memories of a childhood lived in harmony, calibrated with midtempo beats, psychedelic phrasing, timid forays into instrumental hip-hop, sudden flights into the arms of the cosmic couriers, and searing waves of warmth; all of it almost staging the soundtrack to a sci-fi short film. The two musicians' vision is, on the whole, free of easy comparisons, aside from an obvious structural debt to their friends Autechre. Warm, entrancing analog synthesizers — both men's so-called "secret weapons", like the polyphonic Yamaha CS-80 or the legendary Roland SH-101 — take on a central role in shaping a blend that is disorienting yet enveloping. This aforementioned stylistic cocktail makes them instantly recognizable from the very first bar.

The six minutes of "An Eagle In Your Mind", preceded by the seventy seconds of the opening "Wildlife Analysis", lay out a singular architecture, propped up by a beat that is more often than not "broken", irregular. It's like listening to the first half of a hip-hop track, but with no MC in sight. Instead, what emerges is a tale of desolation filtered through the gaze and memory of a childhood spent watching Canadian documentaries packed with images of a faraway nature, complete with field recordings lifted from those same films, while an off-screen voice describes personal, conflicting sensations: "Holts are nearly always close to the sea. Fallen boulders, old ruins, and cliffs. All at the top of a sand crevice. High above the sea: a safe place for cubs. We wait… tense. We're disappointed. She leaves her sprint loaded by others of us. The holts are evenly spaced, about 500 meters apart. Who passes by, or they advertise".

The anesthetic, cybernetic flow of "Telephasic Workshop" further confirms the album's otherworldly climax, before the minimal digression of "Triangles & Rhombuses" links the duo to the progressive electronic music of Suzanne Ciani and Ashra. But it's with "Roygbiv" that Boards Of Canada's music reaches its absolute fulfillment, in what would go down as one of their best-loved pieces in the years to follow. Warm beats, celestial melody, and a child's voice suddenly emerging intertwine unhurriedly, giving rise to what could be described as an intoxicating ascent toward an imaginative sky.

The more jagged "Rue The Whirl" in turn brings out the Scottish duo's shadier side, their innate knack for pulling looping flourishes out of the drawer with the sole intent of bewitching the listener, while the usual midtempo section stirs things up, without ever overwhelming the scene, through unpredictable shifts in rhythm.

Boards of Canada are largely driven by a concise vocation: crafting electronic music that is elusive yet caressing. Between one interlude and the next, tracks like "Pete Standing Alone" surface, feeding here and there a vague sense of perdition. Indeed, "Music Has To Right The Children" brings back the comfort and hope of an age not yet infected by disillusionment. The erased faces in the family photo on the cover point, not by chance, in that very direction.

In the closing stretch, the lulling "Open The Light" lights a spark in the listener's heart, before disorienting them with a sleepwalking gait. The sampled birds on the closing "Happy Cycling" seem, in turn, to herald the start of a new migration. A journey that, with "Geogaddi", would reveal an equally sublime destination, confirming just how epic a statement "Music Has The Right To Children" truly was. A trip that's unmatched in its own way, one that would go on to illuminate the path for future talents of the caliber of Clark and Keith Kenniff, aka Helios. But not only them.

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08/09/2019