![]() Which could get pretty corny and kitschy at times-just consider of the garish hyper-real colors and baroquely biomorphic shapes in the Future Sound of London’s artwork of the era. Drawing heavily from cyberpunk fiction, dystopian movies, and scientific terminology, the track titles, the artist names, the sampled soundbites, and the record designs relied almost uniformly on futuristic imagery. Each scene saw itself as a vanguard-dancing to these beats, you were in some sense already in the future. In the late ’90s, looking back was the last thing on the collective mind of electronic dance music. From drum ’n’ bass to trance, from gabba to minimal techno, the music promised the sound of tomorrow, today. It’s not so much that this persistence of the past inside the present is the subject of the record as that it’s the substance out of which Boards of Canada weave their music, its spectral warp-and-weft. “What I still like about is all about everything it doesn’t do, in the context of the world of music it came into,” says Sandison today. This time-out-of-joint quality is all the more fitting because Music Has the Right is about the uncanniness of memory, the way we are each haunted by ghosts from a private image-bank as well as from the collective unconscious of shared public culture. Michael Sandison and his differently-surnamed brother Marcus Eoin came up with something completely different: a hazy sound of smeared synth-tones and analog-decayed production, carried by patient, sleepwalking beats, and aching with nostalgia. But the Scottish duo quietly and firmly abstained from these norms and conventions. ![]() ![]() At that time, the reigning aesthetic in electronic music was crisply digital, frenetically hyper-rhythmic, and futuristic. That’s what Boards of Canada were going for when they recorded Music Has the Right to Children in the late 1990s. Once upon a time there was a London vintage clothing boutique that lured customers inside with the slogan, “Don’t follow fashion, buy something that’s already out-of-date!” Some musicians opt for a similar strategy: Avoiding the timely, they aim to achieve the timeless.
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