Music Has the Right to Children by Boards of Canada (1998), № 99 in The Lead-In’s 100 greatest albums. Two Scottish brothers in their parents' house with a sampler and a love of educational films. The most affecting electronic record of the late 90s.
Seventeen tracks in sixty-five minutes. Recorded across approximately four years at Hexagon Sun studio in the Pentland Hills outside Edinburgh by brothers Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin (Boards of Canada). Released by Warp Records and Skam Records in April 1998 as a joint imprint release. The album that consolidated tape-warble nostalgia-electronic as a sustained commercial-pop form and inaugurated the home-listening ambient-techno vocabulary every subsequent twenty-first-century downtempo electronic LP has worked within.
Seventeen tracks in sixty-five minutes. Recorded across approximately four years at Hexagon Sun studio in the Pentland Hills outside Edinburgh by brothers Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin (Boards of Canada). Released by Warp Records and Skam Records in April 1998 as a joint imprint release. The album that consolidated tape-warble nostalgia-electronic as a sustained commercial-pop form and inaugurated the home-listening ambient-techno vocabulary every subsequent twenty-first-century downtempo electronic LP has worked within.
Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin (the Boards of Canada brothers, Eoin took the surname later) in mid-1994 were in their early-to-mid twenties, Edinburgh-raised, with substantial home-recorded electronic-music catalogue across the previous decade. The duo had been releasing material under various names through small Scottish underground labels since 1986. The Boards of Canada project crystallized around 1994 with the 'Twoism' EP; subsequent releases on Skam Records (Manchester) established the duo's underground reputation.
Sessions for Music Has the Right to Children extended approximately four years across 1994-1998 at the duo's Hexagon Sun studio in the Pentland Hills outside Edinburgh. The studio was a custom-built facility with substantial vintage-equipment focus: Roland TR-606 and TR-808 drum machines, multiple Roland Juno polysynths, a Roland D-50, vintage Yamaha DX7, and substantial tape-machine equipment for the 'tape-warble' aesthetic. The duo's central production decision was to process every electronic sound through tape, vintage cassette deck or reel-to-reel, to introduce the tape-warble pitch-and-tempo instability that defines the album's specific sonic texture.
Warp Records co-released the album with Skam Records in April 1998. The Warp / Skam joint imprint was unusual, Warp had launched its 'Artificial Intelligence' compilation in December 1992 and had developed the 'IDM' / home-listening-electronic category extensively; Skam was a small Manchester label with substantial cult underground reputation. The joint release positioned Boards of Canada as both Warp-affiliated (commercial-pop electronic-LP reception) and Skam-affiliated (underground experimental electronic-LP reception).
The album's central artistic decision was the deliberate nostalgia-aesthetic. Vintage National Film Board of Canada documentary samples, late-1970s children's-television show audio, mathematics-class instructional audio, vintage analog-synthesizer texture, the tape-warble pitch instability, all combine to produce what the duo has called 'the feeling of a hot childhood afternoon.' The nostalgia aesthetic is the album's specific commercial-cultural argument: that electronic music could function as a sustained meditation on memory rather than on the future-orientation that had dominated 1990s electronic-music aesthetics.
Critical reception was extraordinary and unanimous. Pitchfork's Brent Sirota gave the album 9.6/10; NME's Stevie Chick treated it as the canonical IDM LP of the late 1990s. The album did not chart on initial release but reached UK #145 on the 2014 Warp reissue. Streaming-era catalogue presence has been sustained; BPI Silver certification came in 2021 (twenty-three years after release).
Music Has the Right to Children belongs at number ninety-seven because it is the album that consolidated tape-warble nostalgia-electronic as a sustained commercial-pop form and inaugurated the home-listening ambient-techno vocabulary every subsequent twenty-first-century downtempo electronic LP has worked within. Every subsequent ambient-electronic LP that takes vintage-equipment processing as a deliberate aesthetic decision, Burial, Tycho, Caribou's earlier catalogue, Nicholas Jaar, Oneohtrix Point Never, every lo-fi study-music release, descends from the Boards of Canada precedent. The Rolling Stone 2020 #357 ranking ratifies the canonical-text status.
Original 1998 UK pressing, Warp/Skam WARPLP55, a double LP in a gatefold sleeve, with 'SKAM / WARPLP 55' in the runouts. The first press is prized for its sound. The parallel US issue was distributed by Matador (ole 299-1), typically with a Matador barcode sticker over the original. Confirm the WARPLP55 catalogue number and the original gatefold to separate a first press from the later reissues.
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