The Sandisons built Geogaddi in many of the same ways.

The Sandison brothers built that feeling from shards of sound that they’d warped and stitched together themselves. If Music Has The Right To Children is about anything, it’s about childhood and memory - about the blurry images and ideas that come from the time before we can rationally explain anything, the slight bits of information that always seems slightly out-of-reach. I remember there were a few of us in the studio that day, and we just ended up glued to the TV.” Geogaddi was a hugely anticipated album, and even though it shares plenty of sounds and ideas in common with Music Has The Right To Children, the tone is eerier and queasier - and when you’re dealing with formless and mostly lyric-free music, tone is the most important thing. Instead, they plunged straight into the darkness that they saw all around.īoards Of Canada don’t give many interviews, but in 2005, Michael Sandison told Playlouder, “ Geogaddi was kind of exorcising demons, and even after we’d set out to do a record like that, smack in the middle of working on it, 9/11 happened. With their second album, Boards Of Canada didn’t steer into the zeitgeist that they had helped to create. Still, in the time between Music Has The Right To Children and Geogaddi, music had changed. Tomorrow’s Harvest, their most recent LP, came out nearly nine years ago.

BOC’s sophomore album Geogaddi will turn 20 tomorrow, and in the two decades since its release the group has made a grand total of two albums. We now know that four years is absolutely nothing for Boards Of Canada. Then, for the better part of four years, Boards Of Canada were relatively quiet. Music Has The Right To Children bore precious little resemblance to the smooth, gleaming downtempo that would follow, though the album probably still helped shape that sound. The endless skies left a deep impression.) In 1998, Boards Of Canada released Music Has The Right To Children, a smeary and evocative debut album that riffed on nostalgia, reshaping all those modular-synth nature-film soundtracks into a sort of meditation on childhood memory itself. (They’d lived in Alberta for a little while because their father had a construction job there. The duo took their name from the National Film Board Of Canada, the entity responsible for many of the nature films that the brothers absorbed as kids. Those two brothers had been making music together since they were little kids, using tape decks to splice together experimental collages of whatever they heard around them. Boards Of Canada stood proudly outside of all that, and in their shaggy and mysterious strangeness, they stunted on everyone who made the music that twinkled indolently over H&M speakers.īoards Of Canada were, and presumably still are, the duo of Scottish brothers Michael and Marcus Eoin Sandison. In some ways, this little wave of music foreshadowed the whole world of anonymized “chill beats for studying” playlists. You’d hear this stuff while shopping or eating dinner or having sex, and it would ever-so-subtly color your atmosphere without ever drawing attention from whatever you were supposed to be doing. These artists weren’t all the same, and the quality of their music varied, but the utilitarian function of that music did not. More and more artists came out with urbane variations of downtempo, making music that was built to be stylishly ignored: Kruder & Dorfmeister, Lemon Jelly, Zero 7, Thievery Corporation, Groove Armada, Cinematic Orchestra. The man licensed every track from 1999’s Play to advertisers, and he pushed the album to double-platinum sales in the process. In the early ’00s, that newness was gone, and atmospheric downtempo electronic music had become, in some ways, the sound of commerce. The people who made that music during that era weren’t inventing a new form, but the idea of what they were doing - throwing away old pop-song ideas, conjuring feeling with hazy computer-constructed bleep-thumps - was charged with newness. In the late ’90s, the very idea of atmospheric downtempo electronic music felt new and exciting.

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